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Re: Thoughts - Conlangs and culture

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Friday, October 4, 2002, 4:47
On Fri, 4 Oct 2002 01:21:17 +0200, Harald Stoiber <hstoiber@...>
wrote:

>I am convinced that language can never entirely leave the space of culture. >Thus, culture-independent or culturally neutral languages actually don't >exist. All they do is creating a new cultural space that wraps up, combines >and somehow harmonizes all the cultures from which the language should be >independent.
I was going to say that a culture needs people (real or imagined), while a language might only require a specific philosophy or way of categorizing experience, that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with culture. But it occurred to me that a philosophy of that sort might be formally the same thing as a culture, just one without any participants. If a language can be a language without speakers, then a culture without people is at least imaginable. That's not what the word "culture" usually brings to mind, but it makes a certain degree of sense. It really is hard to come up with more than vague definitions of basic words like "man", "woman", and "child" without making arbitrary choices, and these are the sorts of words that often have cultural importance. Where is the boundary line when a "child" becomes a "man" or a "woman"? -- every culture has its own answer to that question, and the event of "coming of age" is often a central event in a person's life strongly associated with cultural practices. Then you get into things like kinship terms. Even basic ones like "mother" and "father" -- which can be used in varying ways to refer to family members who fill a certain culturally relevant role, even though they might not be the literal genetic parents. So any language that has a clear definition of words like these implies a certain culture to go along with it, even if the culture doesn't really exist as such. -- languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>--- hmiller (Herman Miller) "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any @io.com email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body, \ "Subject: teamouse" / there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin

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Roberto Suarez Soto <ask4it@...>