Re: A question and introduction

>I'm sort of the opposite opinion.  I have seen too many langs that depend
>too heavily on some "concept," which is said to flow from the culture, and
>which permeates the language in totally absurd ways. "This culture
>worships cows, so they only use the letters c-o-w, and all words have
>three syllables to match the number of letters in the word COW, and there
>are 348 individual roots for different kinds of cows, plus a whole set of
>cow-forming affixes, and poetry based on the noises that cows make, etc,
>etc, ad nauseum." This "deep, internal consistency" quickly turns into
>banality.
>
>Concultures are needed to make religious, familial, food vocabulary, etc.,
>but I'm deeply suspicious of the langs that have cultural aspects to their
>grammar or morphology. It's Sapir-Whorf in reverse.
>
Too true :)  It would be ridiculous to carry it very far (eek - cows?) - but
culture surely does have an effect on language and vice versa, even if the
relationship is subtle and hard to trace.  Any influence that a culture has
on its language should be abstract and minimal, but I do think that there is
room for it at the very least.

Consider, for example, the effect that keyboards and spellcheckers are
having on English orthography these days... and its easy to see how a
culture that was deeply into poetry might influence their language over time
to be more lyrical - call it aesthetic selection pressure (in the
evolutionary sense) that gradually molds the language.  Obviously, the
grammar would be one of the slower things to change, but...  I think, like
anything, a little goes a long way with this sort of thing.


Andy




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