Language and Culture (was Re: Proverbs)

[Koontz John E]

I thought maybe this might be a good separate thread.

On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Justin McBride wrote:
>     Either way, this topic is fairly at least of some interest to
> linguists--as is apparent from the volume of nodes in the thread.   I wonder
> if this is symptomatic of the program of linguistics as a course of study or
> tracable perhaps more to the fact that a linguist is necessarily a student
> of culture.  Proving once again, you can't take the primary cultural feature
> out of  the culturally persistent item inventory and expect to analyze it in
> a vacuum. (If I hear this sentence once, I hear it twenty or thirty times a
> day--it's probably on deck to be a proverb itself).

The Omahas recommended when I was in Macy that I go to the three funerals
being held that first week.  I know it was partly just to keep me out of
their hair while they went to the funerals themselves, but they argued
that it it would help me understand them better, and "you can't understand
our language if you don't understand us."

As a linguist I make an article of faith that to some extent I can
construct a grammar in a vacuum, but it's always easier to deal with a
sentence when you know what it means, and some things like deixis or
vocabulary systems definitely require some contextual or cultural
knowledge.  That may be why some people want to exclude them as matters of
linguistic interest.  Apart from that, as a practical matter you can't
actually construct useful sentences (for a teaching grammar or even
elicitation) without a good cultural grounding. And trying to make sense
above the level of a sentence of a text like the Omaha one about the fight
with the Dakotas in 1847 has proved impossible for me so far in the
absence of a knowledge of the geography and of such factors as the
likelihood of the narrator structuring a text in terms of alternative or
repeated descriptions of the same events.  Even if it might not matter
"linguistically" that I can't reconstruct a chronology or itinerary, it
does bother me that I can't understand why a given motion verb would be
used, or predict the topology of the geography from the ones that are
used.