24.1786, Qs: Resources on Lexicon and Culture

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-1786. Tue Apr 23 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.1786, Qs: Resources on Lexicon and Culture

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Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:24:20
From: Richard Durkan [rdurkan at hotmail.com]
Subject: Resources on Lexicon and Culture

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I am interested in the interplay between lexicon and culture. In a paper
entitled Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans available online, the late
Calvert Watkins makes interesting observations about Indo-European society on
the basis of the lexicon the Indo-Europeans have left behind under such
headings as Nature and Physical Environment, People and Society, Economic Life
and Technology and Ideology.

Prof John Iliffe in The Africans attempted something similar, albeit in much
less detail and on a smaller scale: ''The ancestral Bantu language had words
for yam and oil-palm, but not for cereals. Linguistic evidence suggests that
speakers of this language began to divide some 5,000 years ago... [Groups]
evolved in or near the Grassfields of modern Cameroon, developing a language
with terms for cultivation, axe, goat, and cattle, together with a fishing and
boating vocabulary... Most modern Bantu languages of eastern and southern
Africa are not derived from the western Bantu groups but from those who had
penetrated eastwards to the Great Lakes...[which] became possible only when
these Bantu groups added cultivation to their previous forest agriculture.
Linguistic evidence of borrowed words suggests that they learned to grow
cereals (chiefly sorghum) in the Great Lakes region from Nilo-Saharan speakers
who had brought the skill southwards from the Nile valley. The Bantu probably
also learned cattle-keeping from Nilo-Saharans and possible from Cushitic
speakers...''

The Encyclopedia Britannica emphasises that, unlike for sounds and grammatical
categories, ''it is relatively easy for an individual word to disappear or
shift meaning in so many daughter languages that its existence or meaning in
the parent language cannot be confidently inferred. Hence, from the linguistic
evidence alone, scholars can never say that Proto-Indo-European lacked a word
for any particular concept; they can only state the probability that certain
items did exist and from these items make inferences about the culture and
location in time and space of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European.
Thus is it supposed that the Proto-Indo-European community knew and talked
about dogs (*kwón-), horses (*H1ékwo-), sheep (*H3éwi-), and almost certainly
cows (*gwów-) and pigs (*súH-). Probably all these animals were domesticated.
At least one cereal grain was known (*yéwo-), and at least one metal
(*H2éyos). There were vehicles (*wógho-) with wheels (*kwékwlo-), pulled by
teams joined by yokes (*yugó-). Honey was known, and it probably formed the
basis of an alcoholic drink (*mélit-, *médhu) related to the English mead.
Numerals up through 100 (*kmtóm) were in use. All this suggests a people with
a well-developed Neolithic (characterized by simple agriculture and polished
stone tools) or even Chalcolithic (copper- or bronze-using) technology''.
 
Have similar studies of cultures and societies based on lexicon been done with
other ancestral languages eg proto- Sino-Tibetan, proto-Austronesian, proto-
Austroasiatic, proto-Ural-Altaic, proto-Quechuan, proto-Uto-Aztecan,
proto-Mayan etc and is it an approach which enjoys broad academic acceptance?
 

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Sociolinguistics






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