Re: A question and introduction

Andy Canivet wrote:

>> 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.
>
I don't think there is such a massive effect. Just this:

a) words for concepts very important to a culture should be amongst the
shorter words in the language generally
b) vocabulary should exist to support what your culture is supposed to
do. For instance, if your culture is based around the sea and fishing
you need technical vocab suitable to boats and names for different kinds
of fish etc

I honestly don't think anything like poetic modification would happen in
real life because you do not get whole populations of poetic people like
that.

Chris.