languageandculture

languageandculture
Language and Culture
Since culture is defined succinctly as ―the totality of beliefs and practices of a society,‖ nothing is of greater strategic importance than the language through which its beliefs are expressed and transmitted and by which most interaction of its members takes place.
The relation between language and culture would not constitute such serious difficulties for cross-cultural understanding if it were not for the numerous misconceptions about language and its function within a society. Perhaps the most serious misconception is the idea that each language more or less controls the way people think, sometimes expressed as ―We think the way we think because we talk the way we talk.‖ It is true that the particular structures of a language (sounds, lexemes, syntax, and discourse patterns) may reflect to a certain degree the way people think and they may be said to form ―the ruts or paths for thinking,‖ but th ey do not determine what or how people must think. Languages are too open-ended and human imagination is too creative to ever be rigidly ruled by the regulations of syntax or of any other feature of language.
Some theologians and philosophers used to speak about the intuitive and particularizing mentality of the ―Hebrew mind‖ as portrayed in th e Old Testament, and they contrasted this with the logical and generalizing mentality of the Greeks of classical times as revealed in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. But the revived Hebrew language of today is certainly
no impediment to scientific thinking on the part of Israelis, and Greek was no obstacle to the inductive reasoning of the pre-
Socratic philosophers nor did it later prevent Neoplatonists from usin g Greek to promote their philosophical ―flights of fantasy.‖Some people have thought that each language is so distinct that there is no valid way in which the discourses of one language can be translated into another. But at least ninety percent of the fundamental structures of all language are quite similar, and language universals far outweigh the divergencies. All languages employ figurative expressions, have poetry, use language in singing, and have a great number of literary forms or genres –from genealogies to prayers. One language-culture may emphasize the development and use of particular genres, e.g. epic poetry or animal folktales, which another language culture may seldom employ and may even strongly reject. But the people of any language-culture have sufficient imagination and experience to understand how the people of another language-culture may rightly differ in their behavior and values, since the behavioral differences within a single culture are usually greater than those which exist between cultures.
The idea that some languages are far superior to other languages and that accordingly some cultures are far superior to other cultures is also a noted deterrent to understanding the relation between language and culture. When people speak about language superiority, they are usually
talking about the literature which has been produced in such a language, or they evaluate the lexical and syntactic structures in terms of the ways these have been exploited by creative writers. The oral and written literatures of different languages can differ considerably in quality, but this is not the result of the formal structures of the language in question but of the ways in which the people of the society have invested creative talent in using
the language as a medium for the production of valuable literary works. All languages have the potential for outstanding aesthetic expression. It is simply one of the ―accidents‖ of history which determines the emergence of literary genius.
Some people, however, believe that some languages are fundamentally ugly, while others are intrinsically beautiful. In fact, most people insist that their own language belongs to the class of beautiful languages, even though it may have glottalized implosives, clicks that seem to pop and sputter, bilabial trills, and harsh guttural sounds. Phonological beauty is obviously in the ears of the hearer. Arabic, for example, is often cited as an acoustically unpleasant language in view of its various guttural consonants, but a number of Arab poets have succeeded in producing exquisite poems with rich sound patterns as acoustically sensuous and pleasing as occur in any language.
A language does reflect in certain aspects the culture of a society, but primarily in its optional features, i.e. in certain of its hierarchies of
vocabulary and in the priorities given to various discourse patterns. It does not, however, reflect the culture in its phonology or syntax, which are largely fixed and arbitrary and must be such in order to function more or less automatically. Speakers are often conscious of the processes involved in the choice of words, and they are frequently well aware of the manner in which they organize a discourse, but they are almost totally unaware of the phonological system or the syntactic patterns which they employ.
The hierarchies of vocabulary, that is, the ways in which terms representing classes of entities, activities, and characteristics are built up into taxonomies (both popular and scientific), reflect in large measure the manner in which people understand and
classify the world in which they live. Some form of the ―Twenty Questions Game‖ can be played in all languages, since people tend to divide up experience into classes or domains represented by sets of contrastive names, e.g. animate / inanimate, animal / vegetable / mineral, vertebrates / invertebrates, mammals / birds / fish / amphibians, canines / felines / bovines, shepherds / pointers / hounds / boxers.
The formal features of lexemes are usually not as important as the taxonomic systems to which the lexemes belong. For example, the phrases morning star or evening star do not represent ―stars‖ but a planet (usually Venus), but in English we continue to use the terms although
most people are fully aware that the phrases are anomalies. Similarly, we speak of the sun as rising or setting, while in reality it is the earth which is moving. But there are cases in which a false classification has persisted for centuries with serious damage to proper understanding of a phenomenon. For example, the ancient Greeks placed pur―fire‖ in the class of substances rather than in the class of events, and this evidently encouraged a number of false ideas in alchemy about turning lead into gold by adding fire.
The fact that a language may have a proportionately high number of terms in particular domains is an important index to the focus of a culture. For example, most languages of Western Europe have an exceptionally high percentage of technical terms, the Anuaks of the Sudan have hundreds of terms for different kinds and features of cattle, and the Quechuas of the Altiplano of Peru have scores of words for different kinds and forms of potatoes. The knowledge of certain terms is often an index to competence in a particular field of endeavor, and the
disappearance of terms from the vocabulary of a large segment of a society may indicate a significant change in the concerns of a culture. For example, it is increasingly difficult to find persons in the United States who are familiar with such terms as double-tree, hands high, to single-foot, jack, jenny, to gooseneck, withers, fetlock and fresno.
Changes in culture often give rise to new types of discourse, e.g.
technical prose, financial reports, and news resumes. Telegraphic style is giving way to the fuller statements employed in faxing, and commercial codes for cabling instructions to overseas agents are being dropped in favor of telephonic transfer of computer messages by means of modems.
The popularity of certain types of discourse may also reflect cultural concerns. For example, lyric poetry is far more popular in Latin America than in the United States. And in general, epic poetry seems to have suffered a severe loss of popularity except in certain isolated regions, e.g. among the Nilotics of the Sudan and the speakers of some of the Dravidian languages of southern India.
All of these interesting indices of the relation between language and culture are primarily matters of how language is used and are not matters of language structure. Since all languages are open systems, they have the potentiality for growth, change, and decline. In the hands of literary geniuses they can be the medium for brilliant aesthetic expression, and they can be seriously misused by persons who have little or no sensitivity for clarity or elegance.
语言与文化——翻译中的语境（Eugene A. Nida）。