15. Relationship between language and culture. The specific feature of vocabulary and grammar as manifestations of world view

Language does not exist apart from culture that is from the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our life.

A group of languages needs not in the least correspond to a racial group or a culture area (English in the USA). But this does not mean that the three are not correlated. The most frequently asked question is how language and culture are related?

Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought. It’s difficult to see what relations may be expected to subsist between a selected inventory of experience (culture) and the particular manner in which the society expresses all experience.

It goes without saying that the mere content of language is intimately related to culture. A society that has no knowledge of theosophy need have no name for it. Aborigines that had never seen or heard of a horse were compelled to invent or borrow a word for the animal when they made acquaintance with it. So the vocabulary of a language more or less faithfully reflects the culture. But we should not identify a language with its dictionary.

At the same time the complete vocabulary of a language may be looked upon as a complex inventory of all the ideas, interests and occupations that take up the attention of the community. Objects and forces in the physical environment become labeled in language only if they have cultural significance.

The relationship of vocabulary and cultural value is multidirectional. Speakers give names (words) to important entities and events in the physical and social worlds, and, once named, those entities and events become culturally and individually noticed and experienced. Through these interdependent processes unique cultural models are created and reinforced. “The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”

Sapir gives the following example. In the language of Paiute people living in semi-desert areas of Arizona, Utah and Nevada, among the geographic terms translated by Sapir are the following: semicircular valley; circular valley or hollow, spot of level ground in mountains surrounded by ridges; plain valley surrounded by mountains; plain; desert; knoll (a small round hill); plateau; canyon without water; canyon with creek; slope of mountain or canyon wall receiving sunlight; shaded slope of mountain or canyon wall; etc. the English language is able to express these numeral topographical features in a descriptive way, as shown by Sapir’s translations, but it lacks separate words unique to each. The Paiute language labels each feature with a separate name and thereby gives it distinctive value.

Benjamin Whorf, who had been a student of Sapir, investigated whether grammatical structures provide framework for orienting speaker’s thoughts and behavior. He believed that the influence of language can be both through vocabulary and through more complex grammatical relations. Whorf wrote expensive analysis of the language spoken by Hopi people in Arizona focusing on its underlying grammatical categories. E.g. in the following English sentences Hopi people would use a different word for “that”.

1. I see that it is red.

2. I see that it is new.

3. a. I hear that it is red.

b. I hear that it is new.

In the first sentence, a speaker makes deductions based on direct sensory awareness. In the second sentence, a speaker makes inferences about newness based evaluation of data. In sentences 3a and 3b a speaker repeats or reports a fact provided by someone else, not directly experienced by the speaker himself. Thus, Hopi people are directed by grammatical requirements of their language to notice underlying causes of their knowledge of things: through direct senses, through inferences, through reported facts. Speakers of English need not pay attention to such differences (it does not mean that they are never aware of these differences).

Whorf also concluded that Hopi and English have different ways of conceptualizing time, number and duration. He felt that these concepts are fundamental in creating the culture’s view of the universe. For example, English uses nouns to refer to phrases in a cycle of time, such as “summer” or “morning”. Hopi treats phases as continuing events. Words like “morning” are translated into Hopi as kinds of adverbs such as “while morning phase is occurring”. English tenses divide time into three distinct units: present, past future, whereas Hopi verbs do not indicate the time of an event as such, but rather focus on the manner or duration of an event.