Re: Uglossia and Utopia

Boudewijn Rempt wrote:

> On Thu, 23 Sep 1999, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
> > It's a sad fact that hundreds of natural languages are in their death
> > throes, and that that loss of diversity is truly a loss of immense
> > proportions.
>
> You've got the numbers wrong - it's thousands of languages, and maybe
> hundreds that won't live until the next century. But, then, variety is
> losing against conformity all over the world.
>
> > Language encodes so many ways of viewing the world, and with a
> > language's death so dies a culture, all too often.  It's usually
difficult
> > to graft those cultural artifacts onto another language; e.g., Quechua's
> > evidentiality is only barely manifested in the Spanish of the region.
>
> From reading Lakoff I get the impression that it would even be impossible
> to keep the uniqueness of a language if the culture behind the language
> gets lost. If Quechua would have been a prestige language, but the culture
> would have become spanified (is that a word?), the evidentiality would
> have disappeared from the language, too.

Hooray!  You're reading WF&DT! :)

I think that "culture" perhaps carries too much baggage to describe
what you're talking about; perhaps "worldview"?  "Inventory of
idealized cognitive models and connections between them"?



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Boxcars are pulling an Ed of sorts out of town.
             edheil@postmark.net
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