Chap. 5 EE
Raymond Hames
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08/19/2017
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Chapter 5 from Ember and Ember "Introduction to Anthropology"
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- [00:00:00.259]Now I'm gonna take you through some
- [00:00:01.802]of the contents of Chapter Five,
- [00:00:03.524]which is entitled, Communication and Language,
- [00:00:06.191]or, as we sometimes say, linguistic anthropology.
- [00:00:10.440]So begin with language, and,
- [00:00:12.690]or excuse me, begin with communication,
- [00:00:14.837]and language is just a form of communication,
- [00:00:17.695]although it is the most complex form
- [00:00:19.802]of communication we know of.
- [00:00:21.734]Also, the fact that we don't use only language
- [00:00:25.276]to communicate, we actually use facial expressions
- [00:00:28.008]with motions and other sorts of bodily gestures.
- [00:00:31.715]Then we'll turn to the origins of language,
- [00:00:34.155]very difficult topic,
- [00:00:35.911]we have very little information on this issue.
- [00:00:38.970]And then to, excuse me, descriptive linguistics,
- [00:00:42.796]which will deal with phonology, morphology, and grammar.
- [00:00:48.531]The next topic will be historical linguistics,
- [00:00:51.051]which will talk about language change over time.
- [00:00:55.310]And then we'll turn to the process of linguistic divergence,
- [00:00:59.494]which has to do with things like isolation
- [00:01:02.797]and geographic spread.
- [00:01:04.835]And then we turn to the relationship between
- [00:01:07.300]language and culture, that is, how language may affect
- [00:01:11.448]how we conceptualize the world such that it's perhaps
- [00:01:15.803]possible that people speaking different languages
- [00:01:19.003]see the world a little bit differently.
- [00:01:21.704]And then we'll turn to the ethnography of speaking,
- [00:01:24.769]which is sometimes called sociolinguistics,
- [00:01:27.264]sometimes psycholinguistics, and the focus is on
- [00:01:29.864]how language is used in everyday life.
- [00:01:32.156]And finally, we'll end up with the writing and literacy.
- [00:01:36.496]Writing probably only began about 6,000 years ago,
- [00:01:40.478]and it did not become widespread in any population
- [00:01:44.743]until relatively recently in human history.
- [00:01:49.681]Communication, the word communication comes from
- [00:01:52.232]the Latin verb communicare, to impart,
- [00:01:55.235]to share, to make common.
- [00:01:57.274]And many species communicate,
- [00:02:01.162]and humans not only communicate verbally,
- [00:02:03.951]but they also communicate nonverbally.
- [00:02:06.723]And we'll give you some examples of that.
- [00:02:09.035]And we'll also briefly talk about nonhuman communication.
- [00:02:15.746]Here we have some photographs taken by Paul Eckman,
- [00:02:18.274]that's E-C-K-M-A-N,
- [00:02:21.340]and it's giving examples of facial expressions of emotion.
- [00:02:25.437]What he did was to go to Highland, New Guinea,
- [00:02:28.848]and study a people there, the Fore, F-O-R-E,
- [00:02:32.983]who at the time of his study, and you can see them
- [00:02:36.301]in the right-hand side of the set of photographs,
- [00:02:39.856]had no contact with the western world.
- [00:02:43.476]What he did was to take photos of them
- [00:02:47.170]expressing various emotions,
- [00:02:52.251]and we can see the universal set here,
- [00:02:53.965]anger, fear, surprise, happiness, disgust, sadness,
- [00:02:57.523]and then he had people from the Bay Area
- [00:03:02.347]take a look at those photographs and classify
- [00:03:05.402]the kinds of emotions being expressed.
- [00:03:07.892]And then he took pictures of people in the Bay Area,
- [00:03:11.259]on the left-hand side there and across the bottom,
- [00:03:13.870]again expressing emotions through their face.
- [00:03:17.489]And what he discovered was that each group,
- [00:03:20.668]the Fore and the Bay Area residents of California,
- [00:03:25.274]could accurately interpret the emotions being expressed,
- [00:03:28.846]which suggests that and provides quite a bit of evidence for
- [00:03:32.897]the fact that facial expressions of emotion
- [00:03:36.182]are a universal language
- [00:03:38.700]and essentially characteristic of all humans.
- [00:03:43.068]One thing I like to add about the previous slide is that
- [00:03:47.233]even children who are born congenitally blind
- [00:03:50.705]have the same ability
- [00:03:52.259]to express those facial expressions of emotion,
- [00:03:55.357]even though they've never seen a face,
- [00:03:58.027]which means that this form of communication is inborn.
- [00:04:01.747]Now we're gonna turn to the origins of language.
- [00:04:05.042]And basically, the origins of spoken language are unknown.
- [00:04:08.623]We try to get a feel about the origins of language
- [00:04:12.278]by looking at Creole languages.
- [00:04:14.759]This is a situation where cultures come in contact,
- [00:04:18.923]children grow up speaking both languages
- [00:04:22.148]and they end up speaking in Creole,
- [00:04:24.929]or a mixture of the two languages,
- [00:04:27.630]and Creoles, interestingly,
- [00:04:29.565]have a set of characteristics in common
- [00:04:33.787]and could be regarded as a kind of
- [00:04:37.005]basic or primitive language, if we're looking at
- [00:04:39.475]the kind of formation or evolution of language.
- [00:04:43.254]What's interesting about
- [00:04:44.476]the children's acquisition of speech is
- [00:04:46.222]no matter what language a child is beginning to learn,
- [00:04:50.350]they pass through the same sorts of phases
- [00:04:54.264]of linguistic competence at about the same ages.
- [00:04:58.213]And so the way in which children's learn language
- [00:05:00.659]seems to be universal.
- [00:05:02.439]There is like a specific universal child's grammar,
- [00:05:06.163]sometimes called pivot grammar,
- [00:05:08.511]that is common to all children.
- [00:05:10.828]And so through the study of Creole languages
- [00:05:13.317]and children's acquisition of language,
- [00:05:15.374]we're getting a better feel for the kind of psychological
- [00:05:19.465]and biological underpinnings of language.
- [00:05:23.930]The textbook spends a good amount of time
- [00:05:26.617]on the descriptive languages,
- [00:05:28.487]and the field of linguistics
- [00:05:30.006]is divided into three main areas,
- [00:05:32.531]phonology, morphology, and syntax.
- [00:05:34.993]One crude way of trying to understand these different levels
- [00:05:37.877]of analogy is to think of phonology as dealing with letters,
- [00:05:43.306]morphology dealing with words,
- [00:05:46.464]and syntax dealing with the relationship between words.
- [00:05:50.569]Sometimes we use the word, grammar to refer to syntax.
- [00:05:54.574]But linguists don't use this kind of characterization.
- [00:05:59.257]But phonology has to do with
- [00:06:01.293]the kind of individual sound units
- [00:06:03.348]that go into a particular language.
- [00:06:07.025]Morphology has to do with how these individual sound units
- [00:06:10.265]are combined into, with one another,
- [00:06:13.537]to create words that are understood.
- [00:06:16.428]And syntax has to do with the relationship
- [00:06:20.148]of words one to the other.
- [00:06:21.861]In English, we tend to think of syntax as word order
- [00:06:25.814]because we have a kind of grammar
- [00:06:28.568]where word order is very important.
- [00:06:31.099]But there's some languages, for example,
- [00:06:33.183]we call highly inflected, I-N-F-L-E-C-T-E-D,
- [00:06:38.275]languages, such as Latin,
- [00:06:40.326]where word order is not as critical.
- [00:06:43.598]Word endings kind of let you know whether a particular word
- [00:06:47.626]is a subject, an object, an indirect object, et cetera.
- [00:06:52.605]And so these are the three fields
- [00:06:55.318]of descriptive linguistics,
- [00:06:58.567]phonology, morphology, and syntax.
- [00:07:01.439]We're now gonna deal with historical languages,
- [00:07:03.602]or how languages change over time,
- [00:07:05.688]and we'll talk a bit about language families
- [00:07:07.856]and culture history to give you an idea
- [00:07:10.469]of what sorts of things that historical linguists study.
- [00:07:15.507]Here we have a schematic of, or a Historical Reconstruction
- [00:07:19.580]of Indo-European Languages, and we see across the top,
- [00:07:23.399]major linguistic groups.
- [00:07:25.779]And what we demonstrate here is that at one point in time,
- [00:07:30.237]there was a language that existed
- [00:07:33.256]about maybe 7,000 years ago, called Proto-Indo-European.
- [00:07:39.573]It originated
- [00:07:42.365]in West Asia, we think,
- [00:07:44.916]and then as people moved out of that area
- [00:07:47.779]and spread to different parts of the world,
- [00:07:49.989]they began to separate and as a consequence,
- [00:07:53.386]the languages they spoke began to vary independently
- [00:07:58.273]and further spreading over greater time
- [00:08:00.838]led to a greater and greater number of languages
- [00:08:04.488]that we see across the, on the bottom of these charts.
- [00:08:08.545]And so a lot of languages in the world,
- [00:08:11.732]whether they originate in Africa or Asia,
- [00:08:14.660]can be placed in charts like this
- [00:08:17.029]that show how the various languages
- [00:08:19.909]are related to one another
- [00:08:21.999]in terms of a kind of phylogenetic or evolutionary tree.
- [00:08:27.984]There are a variety of factors
- [00:08:29.524]that lead to linguistic divergence,
- [00:08:32.078]and we can talk about how language,
- [00:08:34.155]how a particular language in a particular place
- [00:08:36.690]changes through time.
- [00:08:37.870]If we look at Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,
- [00:08:40.666]which were written around 1380,
- [00:08:43.073]and we looked at the left-hand side of the original,
- [00:08:45.995]you can only make out perhaps every other word,
- [00:08:49.848]compared to the modern translation.
- [00:08:52.661]And so, this is a example of divergence through time,
- [00:08:56.662]and if you were back in the 1380s,
- [00:08:59.927]we'd take you some time to get used to the expressions
- [00:09:04.101]and the words and things of that nature.
- [00:09:06.604]And so this is a good example of how quickly,
- [00:09:10.375]you know, here we're only talking
- [00:09:12.155]about maybe 700 years or so,
- [00:09:15.226]language can change in the same place,
- [00:09:18.697]just simply through time.
- [00:09:21.728]In the process of linguistic divergence,
- [00:09:24.884]isolation is a factor that brings about divergence.
- [00:09:29.719]And so when people speaking a common language
- [00:09:32.566]move to different parts of an area,
- [00:09:36.455]they speak less between groups and more within,
- [00:09:40.337]and so changes in one group really
- [00:09:42.336]aren't communicated to other groups.
- [00:09:44.888]Think of it as a gene pool,
- [00:09:47.364]where a population initially was established,
- [00:09:50.179]they separated, they didn't exchange much
- [00:09:52.614]in the way of genetic material,
- [00:09:54.444]and you get the development of new species,
- [00:09:56.270]and likewise, we get the development
- [00:09:58.380]of dialectory variance in various places.
- [00:10:02.403]Again, when contact occurs,
- [00:10:05.504]then resemblance becomes stronger and stronger.
- [00:10:08.956]And so isolation and contact are important factors
- [00:10:13.537]that determine whether a language will continue
- [00:10:16.488]to diverge or will re-merge into a more common language.
- [00:10:20.598]Now we're gonna turn to
- [00:10:21.877]the relationship between language and culture,
- [00:10:24.001]and so focus on cultural influences on language
- [00:10:27.880]as described in your text,
- [00:10:29.214]and also linguistic influences on culture.
- [00:10:34.260]Now we're gonna turn to the relationship between
- [00:10:36.480]language and culture described in your text.
- [00:10:38.794]And so we wanna begin with cultural influences on language.
- [00:10:43.429]And we know that things that become culturally significant
- [00:10:46.696]tend to find their way into a language.
- [00:10:49.937]So our basic words for colors, plants and animals.
- [00:10:53.843]What's interesting in this kind of area studies,
- [00:10:56.047]especially in terms of how people
- [00:10:58.534]classified plants and animals,
- [00:11:00.705]it turns out that in many, many cultures
- [00:11:03.844]they have a kind of hierarchical mode
- [00:11:06.130]of living thing classifications,
- [00:11:09.175]that we use the terms like trees and shrubs
- [00:11:12.240]and things of that nature to characterize
- [00:11:15.571]the natural world of plants into bigger and smaller species
- [00:11:21.451]and we also find this in other languages.
- [00:11:24.787]Another way in which culture can influence language
- [00:11:27.537]is grammar, for example, if you take Spanish or French,
- [00:11:33.104]because of the importance of recognizing status,
- [00:11:36.294]we find we have familiar versus formal forms
- [00:11:39.945]of the verb you, whereas this doesn't exist in English,
- [00:11:46.409]but since denoting relative status and rank is important
- [00:11:49.637]in these cultures, we find that's reflected
- [00:11:52.275]in particular grammatical forms of the pronoun you
- [00:11:57.089]that are used in those languages.
- [00:11:59.487]So it's a good example of how culture can influence
- [00:12:03.536]the very grammar of a language.
- [00:12:05.886]The next section of the text takes you
- [00:12:07.381]to the relationship between language and culture
- [00:12:09.511]in terms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
- [00:12:13.534]and that is the position that language is a force
- [00:12:16.752]in its own right and it affects how individuals
- [00:12:19.579]in a society perceive and conceive reality.
- [00:12:22.899]So in terms of our way
- [00:12:26.946]in which we cognitively perceive the world,
- [00:12:29.986]the argument here is that language presents
- [00:12:33.281]a kind of template, or a way of seeing the world.
- [00:12:37.330]Quite a bit of research has been done on this topic.
- [00:12:40.560]It is a bit controversial, but there is clear evidence
- [00:12:45.286]that the language you use, to some extent,
- [00:12:49.547]how much is unclear, affects how we perceive reality.
- [00:12:54.655]The next section of the text
- [00:12:56.078]deals with the ethnography of speaking.
- [00:13:00.946]And the specific field there is sociolinguistics,
- [00:13:04.021]which is concerned with the ethnography of speaking
- [00:13:06.316]or cultural and subcultural patterns of speech variation
- [00:13:09.922]in different social contexts.
- [00:13:12.139]What this means is that we alter our speech
- [00:13:14.862]depending on who we're talking to.
- [00:13:17.594]We talk to a child in one way,
- [00:13:19.455]we talk to someone who is older
- [00:13:22.048]and perhaps has higher status
- [00:13:24.011]or in a position of authority over us in another manner,
- [00:13:28.143]and we talk to our friends still yet in another manner.
- [00:13:32.104]So it has to do with the kinds of what we call sometimes
- [00:13:35.583]codeswitching that goes on when we speak
- [00:13:39.413]and how our patterns of speech
- [00:13:42.780]indicate particular kinds of social relationships
- [00:13:46.374]that we have with individuals.
- [00:13:50.738]And again, on the ethnography of speaking,
- [00:13:53.518]the terms social status and speech,
- [00:13:56.405]gender differences in speech, multilingualism
- [00:13:59.621]and codeswitching all deal with
- [00:14:02.575]how we dynamically employ language and vary language
- [00:14:06.616]depending on the social context, depending on who we are,
- [00:14:10.326]depending who we're talking to, and things of that nature.
- [00:14:14.818]As I mentioned in the first slide,
- [00:14:16.869]the next section of the text
- [00:14:18.992]deals with writing and literacy.
- [00:14:21.626]Written language dates back only about 6,000 years ago.
- [00:14:26.308]And writing and written records have become
- [00:14:28.109]increasingly important through time, as you all know,
- [00:14:31.230]and literacy is a major goal of most countries.
- [00:14:34.207]And so, the textbook deals with
- [00:14:38.307]the kind of development of written languages,
- [00:14:40.306]which was largely handled by the elite in-states
- [00:14:44.764]used to records things such as the collection of taxes
- [00:14:49.097]and then later on,
- [00:14:51.558]religious texts are among the first texts to develop
- [00:14:56.478]and then language slowly
- [00:14:59.039]began to spread to the masses
- [00:15:02.495]until today, where literacy
- [00:15:05.039]is a critical factor in the development of any nation
- [00:15:08.965]or for the advancement of the individual in any nation.
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