Verbal-Communication-1

One example of the hypothesis:
If my language has only one term--- brother-inlaw---that is applied to my sister’s husband, my husband’s brother, and my husband’s sisters’ husbands, I am led by my language to perceive all of these relatives in a similar way. Vocabulary, through what it groups together under one label and what it differentiates with different labels, is one way in which language shapes our perception of the world.
In Roget’s Thesaurus there are 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, such as blot(污点), grim(冷酷) , devil(恶魔) and foul(污秽) . And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity(贞洁) and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is the “black sheep”(败 类,害群之马). Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language has to be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise(鄙视) himself, and thereby perpetuate(延续) his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and therebt perpetuate his false sense of superiority. ---Martin Luther King, Where do we go from here
If a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man. ---G.K.Chesterton(British auther, 1874-1936)
Do you agree with this hypothesis? You may have read the Chinese classic The Red Chamber Dream. How did Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu relate to Grandma Jia? Did the old lady love both of them? Did she treat them as if they were equally important to her? Can you find the English equivalents for 孙 and 外孙？
No one when he uses a word has in mind exactly the same thing that another has, and the difference, however tiny, sends its tremors throughout language. --- K. J. Irving, 1986
Language
and
Culture
Communication, Language and Culture
Language is both a means of communication and a channel of culture.
Language and Thought
When an old English lady hears some foreign words (meaning water) for the first time, she feels that foreign languages are odd and quite unreasonable. She says this is just plain water, but how strange that the Chinese call it shui, the French call it de l’eau. Only we English give it the right name water, because it is nothing else but water.
Байду номын сангаасVerbal Communication
Understanding Language
Language is a set of symbols and the rules for combining those symbols that are used and understood by a large community of people.
Two Japanese who knew some Chinese were one day at a Beijing subway station. They saw a warning sign which read: 小心地 滑！They were very much surprised to see that nobody around them was skating, though the floor was flat and somewhat slippery.
Language and context co-constitute one another: languge contextualizes and is contextualized, such that language does not just function “in” context, language also forms and provides context.
Functions of Language:
To communicate To give meaning to random experience; To enable us to reason, to draw logical conclusions from the evidence of our senses, to generalize from one event to another, and to predict, create and understand.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis(SWH)
Whorf proposed first that all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language. Or put it more bluntly, language determines thought, hence the strong notion of linguistic determinism. Because languages differ in many ways, Whorf also believed that speakers of different languages perceive and experience the world differently, that is, relative to their linguistic background, hence the notion of linguistic relativism. 沃尔夫首先提出，所有高层次的思维都倚赖于语言。说 得更明白一些，就是语言决定思维，这就是语言决定论这一 强假设。由于语言在很多方面都有不同，沃尔夫还认为，使 用不同语言的人对世界的感受和体验也不同，也就是说与他 们的语言背景有关，这就是语言相对论。