LING 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Cultural Relativism, Snowdrift, Grammatical Gender
3 Apr 2016
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Language and culture: plato believed that arbitrariness of sign didn"t exist. He thought that sounds communicated meaning in the original language. He believed greek was a good" language in this regard: early view of indigenous languages as uncivilized and primiive. Answer: small indigenous languages tend have more complex morphology. Because these cultures do not take over large regions and force the inhabitants to learn their language. Larger languages end up less complex because lots of non-naive speakers had to learn them: france boas-founder of modern anthropology. Father of cultural relaivism : we can"t talk about a culture as beter/worse than another culture: edward sapir-former student of boas. Worked with ishi, the last speaker of yana. Ishi fell sick with tuberculosis, so sapir documented the language. Gave rise to the sapir-whorf hypothesis": sapir-whorf hypothesis: language shapes thought. Weakest form: language is part of culture.
