Re: Thoughts - Conlangs and culture

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.

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