HL CHAPTER 2 Having It Both Ways?

CHAPTER 2 Having It Both Ways?
Note:2@@@@@@@@@@@IL LESSICO RINVIA ALLA CULTURA DI CHI PARLA MA LA STRUTTURA NO...QUELLA È UNIVERSALE E LE DIFFERENZE MERA CASUALITÀ

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We could reasonably assume that the mechanics and nuances of the Burmese language correspond to being Burmese
Note:CI VIENE NATIRALE

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it isn’t that culture never affects how language works. One could start with the Pirahã’s innumeracy, meaning they don’t have numbers,
Note:SIA CHIARO

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“Couldn’t it work both ways?”
Note:LA DOMANDA NATURALW...SE LA CULTURA INFLUENZA IL LINGUAGGIO MAGARI ANCHE IL LUNGUAGGIO INDLUENZA VLA CULTURA

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it will seem compelling to many that languages evolve to support the cultures of those who speak them.
Note:QUELLO CHE È CERTO

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Words versus Whorfianism
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Languages evolve according to the needs of their speakers: what could seem more unassailable?
Note:TEORIA INDIGESTA...XCHÈ?

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Who is impressed that a language has words for things, including churning out new ones as new objects emerge within the culture? Benjamin Lee Whorf certainly wasn’t
Note:NN BANALIZZIAMO

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He was supposing that the very essence of how that people’s language works, its constructions, overall grammatical patterns, what would be challenging in trying to learn how to form sentences in it, is profoundly consonant with what it is to be them, rather than anyone else.
Note:W...IL LINGUAGGIO COME SCELTA....COME IDENTITÀ PIÙ CHE COME STRUMENTO

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“Do languages develop words for things their speakers often talk about?”
Note:CERTAMENTE SÌ

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“Do languages evolve according to ways of thinking?”
Note:DOMANDA PIÙ COMPLESSA

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it is worth investigating whether among the Guugu Yimithirr the language also “reinforces” their sense of direction
Note:MISSIONE

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The appeal of this “holistic” sense of language and thought would be in acknowledging that language does not create a “worldview” by itself while still preserving a sense that languages are like their speakers, and thus symptoms of diversity in the same way that cultures are.
Note:OLISMO

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Try to link what people are like to certain words and expressions

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COMPITO FACILE

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But try to link what people are like to how their languages work
Note:COMPITO DIFFICILE

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The variety among the world’s languages in terms of how they work is unrelated to the variety among the world’s peoples,
Note:W NN SI SALVA

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Rules of the Rain Forest?
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Evidential Markers
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language of the Amazon called Tuyuca.

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to make a normal statement you have to include how you know that it’s true,
Note:IN QS LINGUA

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Linguists call these evidential markers.
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We might resist the idea that having evidential markers makes people magically sensitive to where information came from.
Note:RESISTERE

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Korean children, although having learned the evidential markers in Korean, are no better than English-speaking children at thinking about sources of information.
Note:ESEMPIO

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Evidential markers are rare in Europe, for example, which is much of why they seem so exotic to us. However, who among us is prepared to say that the Ancient Greeks, who produced some of the world’s first philosophical treatises scrupulously examining all propositions
Note:STRANO CHE MANCHI AI GRECI

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if you know any Greeks today, would you process them as not especially skeptical?
Note:SCETTICI MA SENZA MARCA

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if the Tuyuca have evidential markers because their culture requires them, then why in the world is the only European language that has anything like them Bulgarian?
Note:MISTERI

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Move eastward and another language with evidential marking is Turkish. Again, why them in particular, if evidential marking has anything to do with culture?
Note:ALTRO FATTO INSPIEGABILE

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In fact, if anything, it is Persian culture that is known explicitly as particularly skeptical.
Note:I PERSIANI NN HANNO ALCUNA MARCA

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We gifted the Tuyuca with intelligence but must deny it to Africans and Polynesians.
Note:SE LA MARCA È SEGNO DI SCETTICISMO...E LO SCETTICISMO SEGNO DI INTELLIGENZA

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we might open up to supposing that evidential markers are less linked to culture than it might seem
Note:LA CONCLUSIONE PIÙ PLAUSIBILE

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If evidential markers emerge according to the “needs” of languages’ speakers, then why are they common in the Native American languages of western North America but not the ones in the east? Is
Note:RIFORMULAZIONE DEL MISTERO

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evidential markers are not distributed according to what cultures are like.
Note:EVIDENTE A TUTTI

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The explanation is, quite simply, chance.
Note:SOLUZIONE

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The Irrelevance of Necessity
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The evidence suggests that evidential markers also tend to spread from one language to another as a kind of grammatical meme carried by bilinguals,
Note:CAUSA COLLATERALE

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Pity the ethnographer charged to determine why Finns have no “need” to distinguish the and a whereas the Dutch do.
Note:ALTRO COMPITO PROIBITIVO....ARTICOLI DET E INDET

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Worldwide, chance is, itself, the only real pattern evident in the link between languages and what their speakers are like.
Note:E ALLORA RIPETIAMOLO

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In New Guinea, for instance, it is quite common for a language to have one word that covers both eat and drink (and sometimes also smoke). Yet what “need” does this address?
Note:SENZA UN BISOGNO

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Navajo takes things to the opposite extreme: how you say eat depends on whether you are just eating in general or whether what you are eating is hard, soft, stringy, round, a bunch of little things, or meat.
Note:CASO OPPOSTO

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The truth about how languages are different is that largely they differ in the degree to which they do the same things. Some take a trait further than others, not because their speakers “needed” it to, but because a bubble happened to pop up somewhere in the soup. In
Note:NOISE

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Nothing makes that clearer than the fact that many of the things we think of as absolutely fundamental to getting our thoughts across are, in grand view, more bubbles.
Note:ESSENZIALI X CASO

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There are languages, for example, where you do not have to mark tense at all—no past, no future. Context takes care of everything,
Note:ESEMPIO

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there are languages where there are simply first-, second-, and third-person pronouns, but no difference between singular and plural among any of them.
Note:ALTRO ESEMPIO

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Once we understand this, it is no longer surprising that languages seem almost willful in how little their makeup has to do with what its speakers are like. It’s all about the bubbles.
Note:IT S ALL ABOUT BUBBLES....LA BOLLA È IL LUOGO DOVE EMERGE UNA NECESSITÀ...MA PUÒ GONFIARSI OVUNQUE...SPECIE NEL CONTESTO

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Why would a language have something its speakers don’t need?
Note:BELKA DOMANDA

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most of a language’s workings are not due to need, but happenstance.
Note:LEGGI DELL EVOLUZIONE LINGUISTICA

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Whorf’s idea about “intricate systematizations” was that to learn a language’s grammar was to learn how its speakers think, how they are:
Note:W DIMMI COME PARLI E TI DIRÒ CHI SEI

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Tuyuca speakers no more “need” evidential markers than Western European and Central African persons “need” words for the and a. Traits like this in a language do not emerge because of the way its speakers think,
Note:PROVA CONTRO

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Not Those Things?
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why doesn’t a single word for eat, drink, and smoke mean that people in New Guinea process ingestion differently than other people?
Note:IN NUOVA GUINEA SONO FORSE FOGNE CHE INGHIOTTONO TUTTO?

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We dismiss that easily—but upon what grounds would people’s languages correspond to their cultures only in attractive ways?
Note:LA CULTURA CONTA SOLO SE È PIACEVOLE PARLARNE

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“No Word for X”: Caveat Lector
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The French person might wonder whether there were people who don’t have a word for the kind of person who always seems to be a little cold like their word frilleux.
Note:MANCANZE INSIGNIFICANTI

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Yet few would propose that this is because the French are more sensitive to breezes than others.
Note:Cccccccccccc

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that the French have a word frilleux and we don’t is just a jolly little accident,
Note:INCIDENTE

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wipe.
Note:MANCA AGLI SVEDESI....MANIACI DELLA POLIZIA

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African language Mende has no word for may.
Note:O BIANCO O NERO...SEGNO DI INGENUITÀ?

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It is safe to say that no language lacks ways of conveying degrees of confidence in truth,
Note:INVECE...

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no words for win or lose.
Note:ALTRO ESEMPIO...BERBERI

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Are the Berber really alien to children engaging in scrappy competitions in which one person comes out the victor and one doesn’t?
Note:DUBBIO

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And then, a dictionary of precisely the Shilha’s dialect of Berber reveals words for win and lose. Perhaps they do not use the words just as we do, indeed—especially since the dictionary is in French and gagner and perdre themselves overlap only partially with English’s win and lose. However, the same dictionary also had words for conquer and fail.
Note:MISTERO SVELATO

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Who Thinks Otherwise?
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a robust strain in modern academia is quite committed to the idea that languages represent cultural thought patterns. For example, Swarthmore’s K. David Harrison has posited that depicting language diversity as marvelously random, as I have, is “stunningly obtuse.”
Note:ORIENTAMENTI DIVERSI

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if we had records of the language Stonehenge’s builders spoke, its structure could tell us nothing about what they were like,
Note:RIPETIAMO LA TESI

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Both languages, of course, had words for things important in their cultures.
Note:DAL LESSICO CAPIAMO MOLTO DEL POPOLO...MA NN DALLA SINTASSI....E IN OGNI CASO LA GENERAZIONE VA DALKE COSE ALLE PAROLE E NN VICEVERSA

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languages are not like paintings. They do not develop via people applying their ingenuity or being creative. Languages develop via step-by-step driftings that operate below the level of consciousness,
Note:L EVOLUZIONE DELLA LINGUA

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When a language works so differently from ours, a natural gut-level impression is that it is a departure from normality, and even that this departure must have been deliberately effected,
Note:IL BIAS DEL PIANIFICATO....EVOLUZIONE SOTTO LA PRESSIONE DI UN PENSIERO

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The magnificence of how a language is built is not its correspondence with folkways, cosmology, and thought patterns, but in its protean, fecund independence from these things,
STRUTTURA DI BASE....STESSE FUNZIONI REALIZZATE IN MODO DIFFERENTE