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Language represents the culture

luckyj17
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Posted 07/14/08 - 04:58 AM: Subject: Language represents the culture	#1
I am student taking introduction to philosophy of language. We watched a film about language and culture. Now, the film focuses on extermination of some languages in a short period of time. This is due to the domination of some languages and evolution of languages. Language as I understand it is a window to our thoughts. Language offers us the ability to understand certain culture. There are questions that entered my mind: 1. If a certain language came to its extinction do we loose a chance of seeing the world in a certain perspective? Although that language is closely related to some language. 2. Does the evolution entails progress? 3. Why does the younger generation of certain tribes choose not to inherit their language? In a larger scope their traditions?

Cuthbert
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Posted 07/14/08 - 06:37 AM:	#2
David Crystal has written accessibly about this. e.g. http://dannyreviews.com/h/Language_Death.html Why should we care about language death? Crystal presents five arguments: from the general value of diversity, from the value of languages as expressions of identity, as repositories of history, as part of the sum of human knowledge, and as interesting subjects in their own right. None of these are likely to convince either aggressive monolingualists or the apathetic... Elsewhere Crystal argues that language change is inevitable as an adaptation to changing needs and often it should be embraced rather than resisted. It could be argued that the same pressures that lead to change can also lead to death. As with species, so with languages. A language has to be fit for its purpose and cannot be kept artificially alive. Evolution may not entail progress, but it may be that survival depends upon evolution in response to a changing environment. Languages that do not have the capacity to respond simply die, having outlived their purpose and their niche in the world. The people who no longer speak as their parents did are not bereft of language. They are speaking languages that are more useful to them and that represent their contemporary culture. They simply did not need the old language and abandoned it in favour of a new one, just as any outdated technology is abandoned. Languages die, but they are also born, e.g. the huge variety of Englishes developed during the 20th Century. Starting as dialects or fusion languages many have become languages in their own right. This process can be neither encouraged nor resisted effectively. People will use whatever means are most adapted to their conditions in order to communicate. On the other hand, a Darwinian analogy may only amount an excuse for the linguistically and culturally dominant to impose their will unjustly on weaker minority. There are examples of languages hounded out of existence by political imperatives, e.g. school children punished for speaking their mother tongue instead of an official language. Language is not merely a tool for survival and communication. It is also an expression of our personal identity and our spiritual bonds to each other. As members of a linguistic community we share a common metaphysic - a way of seeing the world - and nobody has the right to force their own world-view on us.

luckyj17
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Posted 08/08/08 - 07:14 AM:	#3
Cuthbert thanks for the help.

shenyue
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Posted 08/22/08 - 01:32 AM:	#4
Hi Lucky, Let me respond to 1st of your 3 questions. If u like let me know and I'll take a stab at the other two. Could we be losing a particular form of understanding reality when a language is forcibly made extinct due to something like genocide? I believe the answer is yes. You use the word window to reality in describing language. For me it is more like our eyes or our very senses. It is the very form upon which we not only 'see' reality but the type of reality we experience. I don't mean the creation of new words within the basic framework of a language. The word 'dude' did not exist probably 200 yrs ago in the English language but its birth and development does not fundamentally alter the form of English. If i understand you, you may be referring to creation of new words or pronunciations of words changing. To get at your question, I believe one must focus on the form of languages, their structure, their skeleton and nervous system if u will. For example an extinction of a language that de-emphsizes the use of pronouns like i or you in describing an action (i.e. Mary hugged a little lamb versus hugging a lamb) hints at not only a difference in emphasis of the subject vis a vis the object but may say something about the way the universe relates to the subject for that culture. I'll stop there. I wish you luck.
Take some workable combination of Lao Zi, Gibran, Plato, and Benjamin, and one might actually grasp toward a unified theory.

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