Language, Culture and Thought

A.      Introduction

1.   Language

Language is more than just a means of communication. It influences our culture and even our thought processes. During the first four decades of the 20th century, language was viewed by American linguists and anthropologists as being more important than it actually is in shaping our perception of reality.  This was mostly due to Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf who said that language predetermines what we see in the world around us.  In other words, language acts like a polarizing lens on a camera in filtering reality--we see the real world only in the categories of our language.

Language is a social-cultural-geographical phenomenon. There is a deep relationship between language, culture and society. It is in society that man acquires and uses language. When we study a language, we have to study its dialects, sociolects, idiolects, etc.

2.   Culture

The phenomenon of language does not have natural divisions between ‘varieties’ of language, which we could call ‘languages’, ‘dialects’, or ‘register’, though there may be natural internal divisions within it on the basis of ‘levels’ of language, such as vocabulary, syntax, morphology and phonology. We now turn to the externsl relations of language, to ask wheter there are natural boundaries between the phenomena covered by the term ‘language’ and other kinds of phenomena, notably those called ‘culture’ and ‘thought’.

Culture is taken in the sense in which it is used by cultural antropologists, according to whom culture is something that everybody has, in contrast with the culture which is found only cultured circles-in opera houses,universities and the like.The term is used differently by different anthropologists, but always refers to some property of a community, especially those which might distinguish it from other communities.

Before leaving the question of culture, we should note that the knowledge included in a culture need not be factually or objectively correct in order to count. On the other hand, the specialist knowledge of scientist or scholar is also a part of culture, and one of the most interesting quetions in the study of culture about the relations between common sense and specialist knowledge, since it is clear that influence goes in both directions.

3.   Thought

The term ‘thought’ covers a number of different types of mental activity, and lies in the province of cognitive psychologists. The terms should be self-explanatory,if propositions are thought of as roughly equivalent to statements and concepts as general categories in terms of which propositions are formulated and experience is processed. One of the most interesting things about cultural knowledge is the extent to which people can interpret each other’s behaviour and arrive at more or less the same concepts or proposiotions. If people did not share such detailed knowledge, the behaviour in concerts could not be as predictable as it in fact is, especially since the conventions are somewhat arbitrary.

On other hand, it does not follow that non-cultural knowledge must differ from person to person, sine different people can arrive at similar conclusions on the basis of similar experiences of the universe or similar genetic predispositions.

Thus we find that there are three kinds of knowledge:

a.      Cultural knowledge – which is learned from other people

b.      Shared non-cultural knowledge – which is shared by people within the same community or the world over, but is not learned from each other

c.      Non-shared non-cultural knowledge – which is unique to the individual. It is not difficult to find a place for language in this schema.

B.       Language, Culture and Thought

The problem of the relationship between language, culture and thought bothered many linguists and philosophers since ancient time. To think about this problem, we need to begin with the definition of language and culture. Language is generally accepted as a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. And there is a most widely accepted definition of culture: culture is the total accumulation of beliefs, customs, values, behaviors, institutions and communication patterns that are shared, learned and passed down through the generation in an identifiable group of people.

The main purpose of the two previous sections was to clarify the terminology relating to culture and thought, and the relations between them. We have said little about language as such, so we can now try to fit language into the picture described so far.

As we have seen, culture may be defined as the kind of knowledge which we learn from other people, either by direct instruction or by watching their behaviour. However, we distinguished two other kinds of knowledge, ‘shared non-cultural knowledge’ and ‘non-shared non-cultural knowledge’. Of these, the shared kind is relevant to language, although it is not learned, but the non-shared kind can now be ignored since language always relates to concepts which are shared.

All three kinds of knowledge (as the term is used here) fall under the heading of ‘memory’ rather than ‘inference’, though of course one could extend the term to include things worked out for oneself on a particular occasion. All three konds of knowledge may also involve concepts on their own, or related to each other in propositions; and both concepts and propositions are involved in inference as well as in memory.

There are four points at which language makes contact with knowledge, which will be introduced in this section, and discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

1.        Linguistic items are concepts. In whichever way we understand the notion ‘linguistic items’. Each lexical item represents a combination of phonological, syntactic and semantic properties in just the same way that concept ‘fruit’ represent a combination of properties to do with when the object is eaten, where it grows and wheter it is sweet or savoury; similarly, a syntactic construction is defined by a complex configuration of properties in much the same way as the concept ‘table’ is defined by a particular arrangement of vertical and horizontal pieces moreover, it is increasingly clear that many (if not all) linguistic items are defined in terms are defined in terms of prototypes, jut like non-linguistic concepts, which is way it is often impossible to draw a hard and fast distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sentences.

2.        Meanings are concepts. There considerable controversy over definition of ‘meaning’. But there is widespread agreement that the meaning of a linguistic item is its sense, that is, what is permanent about its relation to the world, rather than its referents, the objects or events to which it refers on particular occasions.

3.        Linguistically relevant social categories are concepts. We may assume that people categorise speakers and circumstances in terms of concepts based, as usual, on prototypes. In the previous chapter we argued that speakers locate themselves in a multi-dimensional space in relation to the rest of their society, and locate each speaking in a multi-dimensional space relative to the rest of their social lives.

4.        Sentence-meanings are propositions. To the extent that there is a distinction between concepts and propositions, we may say that most linguistic items which are stored in memory have concepts as their meanings, but the sentences formed by combining them express propositions.

As for relation between language and culture, most of language is contained within culture, so it would not be far from the truth to say that a society’s language is an aspect of its culture, and the relation of language to culture is that of part to whole.

C.       Evidence on the dialectical relationship between language and culture

There is plenty of linguistic evidence of culture difference. We take relationship issue for example to explain the cultural difference between Chinese people and English speakers. In Chinese ,there are more precise terms for describing relationships than in English. Chinese people distinguish relatives on mother’s side from those on father’s side. We have the word ‘biao’ to call the brothers and sisters on mother’s side and the word ‘tang’ for the father’s side. Also, the uncles and aunts are addressed differently on each side. On the contrary, in English, there are limited words to describe relationships. This difference indicates that relationships play an important role in Chinese culture. In a narrow sense, relatives are always vital elements in Chinese people’s life. In a broad sense, the relationships among people around is generally considered important for Chinese people. The precise terms for describing family and other relationships reflect the Chinese culture, and the language may in turn influence the Chinese way of thinking. Therefore, relationships are paid great attention in China. The Chinese ‘ relationship net’ is hard to explain, but it do works in China. Talking about relationships, in English, we have the phrase ‘-in law’ to address a certain kind of relatives, this may indicates that compared to relationships, law plays a more important role in the western culture.

Another example can be found between English and French. English borrows a lot of words from French, and a large part of them are the names of food. Pork, veal, mutton are all French words. Even the word ‘cuisine’ is from French. Judging from the language, we can tell that French cuisine must be more famous than English food, and the catering culture is more important in France than in English speaking countries.

There is one thing should be pointed out that although different languages reflect and influence different culture, there are many concepts that are universal. Also, take the relationship issue for example, people from the English speaking countries can distinguish relatives on mother’s side from those on father’s side, although they do not do so, the concepts are there. People from different cultures can understand each other although they speak different languages and have different worldviews, because many of the basic concepts are universal.

CONCLUSION

In language teaching, on one hand, teachers and learners should pay attention to the culture difference since different languages reflect the different value system and worldviews of its speaker. By knowing the culture difference, one can avoid some mistake in communicating. On the other hand, the same concepts of the two cultures should not be neglected. By sharing the same concept, language learning may become easier and happier. More importantly, since languages have influence on thought, when learning a second language, the L2 learners should at the same time strengthen their mother tongue. Therefore, the native culture is protected.

There are a number of important aspects of relativity which have not been discussed in the preceding sections, in particular the question of relativity in those areas of meaning that are reflected in syntax or mporphology rather than vocabulary. We have concentrated on the letter, however, because our intuitive expectation is that we will find syntax, than in the concepts defined vocabulary.Similarly, there are vast differences between languages in the concepts which morphology reflects, varying from those where there is no morphology at all to languages where it is incredibly rich and expressive.

We have found that the position called ‘extreme relativism’ is untenable, since there are clear restrictions on the nature and extent of differences between people in the concepts that their languages express. Some of these restrictions are because different people, from widely different societies, may use the same concepts in defining the meanings of words.