[Lingtyp] Traditional view of language and grammar in indigenous societies

[Adam Singerman]

Dear Randy,

Thanks for providing this very interesting description of your experience
working with the non-literate elderly Qiang historian. Did the (presumably
younger) Qiang speakers you worked with later also insist on talking about
the content of narratives/histories rather than the code? From what you
described, it sounds like there was a mismatch between what you wanted to
learn about (the language) and what the historian wanted to teach you (the
history of his people). If he felt that his pedagogical goal was to teach
you the histories themselves, then it's not surprising that he rejected the
hypothetical sentences you constructed.

What I'm less comfortable with is the suggestion that this individual
teacher's preference for the content of the histories rather than the
linguistic code itself tells us anything deep about the distinction between
oral and literate cultures. (But I am open to being persuaded that I am
wrong about this.)

My experience working with the speakers of Tupari, a Tupian language spoken
in the Brazilian state of Rondonia, has taught me that even non-literate
speakers can have quite impressive metalinguistic awareness about the
structure of their language. The Tupari pronominal inventory doesn't encode
a formal-informal distinction, but the language has lots of
number-sensitive verbal suppletion and agreement; and traditional speakers
always make sure to talk to/about their in-laws as duals rather than
singulars, with many morphological consequences seen in the suppletive
verbal roots and in the agreement suffixes. The reason I mention this is
because many speakers I have worked with, including speakers who aren't
literate in Tupari or in Portuguese, know how to talk about this aspect of
their language: they explain that one must speak about one's in-laws as if
each individual in-law were two people, not just one. There's even a
specific term for this kind of respectful speech (kiarowak ara). I'm not
claiming that non-literate Tupari speakers have metalinguistic awareness
about all of their language's grammatical properties, but in this area at
least they can and do talk about structure.

I would like to bring up one other potential counterexample to the idea
that a society without writing is automatically going to be one in which
"speakers are not familiar with the concept of analyzing it as a thing in
the world separate from its daily use" (quoting Chris Donley). Didn't
Panini (https://w.wiki/EP5f) compose and teach his treatises on Sanskrit
grammar orally, centuries before the language came to be written down?
Perhaps the important distinction isn't oral versus literate cultures but
rather the question of whether there are schools or educational
institutions in which language is taught as a subject in its own right.
We're used to schools emphasizing written language, but as the case of
Panini shows, language can be taught without writing, too.

If I'm wrong about Panini, Sanskrit, etc, please let me know — I'm just
regurgitating what I'd read in the literature on non-Western grammatical
traditions.

All the best from Syracuse,
Adam
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