An_Essay_on_Linguistic

An Essay On Language & Culture An Essay on Language and Culture Culture is a wider system that completely includes language as a subsystem. In a broad sense, it means the total way of a people, including the patterns of belief, customs, objects, institutions, techniques, and language that characterizes the life of the human community. In a narrow sense, culture may refer to local or specific practice, beliefs or customs, which can be mostly found in folk culture, enterprise culture or food culture etc. This thesis discusses the relationship between the culture and the linguistics, especially in a language way. 1) Firstly, Language both expresses and embodies cultural reality. A language not only expresses facts, ideas, or events which represent similar world knowledge by its people, but also reflects the people’s attitudes, beliefs, world outlooks etc., Moreover Language plays a major role in perpetuating culture (or consolidating it over time), esp. in print form. Take this reality as an illustration. USA, advanced computer technology, Microsoft, pop songs, the Hollywood movies; however, incomplete without the Declaration of Independence and other historic event. Further more, culture affects language. In Hopi, there is something very special about its grammar. One of the features that separate it from other languages is that it does not use the same means to express time, and hence is called as a “timeless language”(没有时间的语言). Do not recognize time as a linear dimension. Two American scholars conducted a large cross-linguistic investigation of basic color vocabulary. The finding is that color word systems in different languages are not like what has been assumed by the Sapir and Whorf hypothesis, being culturally determined and hence absolutely different from one another. Different languages might well undergo a universal evolutionary process of development which made the basic color system in one language different from that in another only in terms of the stages of their evolution. This evolutionary theory finds a good example in the second example of the Irian language, a language which has become well known for its very restricted system of basic color words. There are only two basic color words in this language: modla for light, bright, hence, white, and mili for dark, dull, hence, black. What will native Irian language speaker do if he/she wants to designate colors other than black and white' Or do white and black always mean white and black cross-linguistically' The investigation revealed that native speakers of this culture use this White versus Black contrast to convey more messages about their color perception. They use modla as a general color term to include all warm colors such as red and yellow and use mili as another umbrella color word to cover all the cold colors. Therefore, the contrast between modla and mili in fact is a contrast between “whitewarmness” versus “blackcoldness”. According to this evolutionary theory, English has all the eleven basic color words so it reaches the last stage of evolution. This theory correctly captures a kind of generalization in color words cross-culturally. So, that is to say, Culture universals and biological universals lead to linguistic universals. On the one hand, language as an integral part of human being, permeates his thinking and way of viewing the world, language both expresses and embodies cultural reality. On the other hand, language, as a product of culture, helps perpetuate the culture, and the changes in language uses reflect the cultural changes in return. Benjamin Lee Whorf [1897-1941], studied linguistics at Yale University – studied Hopi under the supervision of Edward Sapir. Benjamin Lee Whorf studied at Yale University under Edward Sapir and became interested in Sapir's ideas. He was influenced by the work of 18th-century German philosophers John Gottfried von Herder and Wilhelm von Humbolt, who theorized, based on their study of European languages, that language had a bearing on how people viewed the world. In his opinion, our language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express speakers’ unique ways of understanding the world. He said, American use only a handful of terms to describe snow, including the actual word snow, sleet, freezing rain, and a few others. Eskimos, on the other hand, have many words to describe snow (Hayes et al. 96). Snow that is falling, snow on the ground, snow in blocks, and snow that makes wavy patterns each are explained through the use of separate words. English has three words for "insect", "aeroplane", and "aviator". But Hopi has only one word for all three: "masajtaka" because these things do not matter that much to them. 2) Linguistic evidence of cultural differences The Chinese seem to have a preference for the inductive because of their reluctance to impose. Westerners tend to think we Chinese like to communicate in an indirect way. The deductive pattern: from the general to the specific. The inductive pattern: from the specific to the general. The most obvious trend of style in this century has been towards the informal and the colloquial. At all levels from the 'highbrow' novel to the advertisement, writing has moved nearer to casual speech. Few writers today aim at dignity or elegance. We distrust those who get up on stilts to express their thoughts. One does not need to be very observant to find that certain linguistic phenomena cannot be accounted for unless they are placed in the general context of society. In other words, social factors cannot be excluded from our description of language and language use. While language is principally used to communicate meaning, it is also used to establish and maintain social relationships. This social function of language is embodied in the use of such utterances as "Good morning!", "Hi!", "How's your family'", "Nice day today, isn't it'". Users of the same language in a sense all speak differently. The kind of language each of them chooses to use is in part determined by his social background. And language, in its turn, reveals information about its speaker. When we speak, we cannot avoid giving clues to our listeners about ourselves. To some extent, language, especially the structure of its lexicon, reflects both the physical and the social environments of a society. For example while there is only one word in English for "snow", there are several in Eskimo. This is a reflection of the need for the Eskimos to make distinctions between various kinds of snow in their snowy living environment. A society's kinship system is generally reflected in its kinship vocabulary. As a social phenomenon language is closely related to the structure of the society in which it is used, and the evaluation of a linguistic form is entirely social. To a linguist, all language forms and accents are equally good as far as they call fulfill the communicative functions they are expected to fulfill. Linguistic repertoire is defined as the totality of linguistic varieties used in different social contexts by a particular community of speakers. It refers to the set of distinguishable code varieties from which the speakers of certain speech community can choose to be used, in certain social context of speaking. Linguists analyze language data gathered as evidence in law courts. The joint work by sociolinguists and legislators in the preparation of some legal documents is proven to be helpful to increase the readability of this text and thus appreciated. 3) All in all, investigations of language use in a law court background also reveal some interesting results which, in turn, greatly enrich our understanding of the relationship between the concept of power and language in use.