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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
An interesting piece that challenges Chomskyan ideas of transformative grammar:"The Piraha are intelligent, highly skilled hunters and fishers who speak a language remarkable for the complexity of its verb and sound systems. Yet, the Piraha language and culture has several features that not known to exist in any other in the world and lacks features that have been assumed to be found in all human groups. The language does not have color words or grammatical devices for putting phrases inside other phrases. They do not have fiction or creation myths, and they have a lack of numbers and counting. Despite 200 years of contact, they have steadfastly refused to learn Portuguese or any other outside language. The unifying feature behind all of these characteristics is a cultural restriction against talking about things that extend beyond personal experience. This restriction counters claims of linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, that grammar is genetically driven system with universal features. "
I suspect that this certainly challenges many of the evolutionary psychology accounts of language, though I'm a little less persauded that it reinforces the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The most that can probably be said is that it shows marked cultural and social variations manifested in language, rather than that the language necessarily formed a basis for those cultural concepts. As ever with Sapir-Whorf, it remains rather difficult to tell whether language or culture came first.Labels: Language
posted by Richard 1:34 pm
