Finds like this list make me want to run back into the waiting, open arms of linguistics.
The list is from a book titled They Have a Word for It (via rebecca). While I haven't read the book, the list illustrates an issue that is close to the heart of a central question in my life's work: how do people communicate when concepts are so idiosyncratic?
Even with other speakers of English, I can never know for certain that someone else is hearing what I intend to say... or that I'm saying what I intend to say (a fact that has been proven on my blog and elsewhere). The problem only worsens across dialects, cultures, or languages, no matter how you choose to define those terms.
I wish that I could better explain why I get all riled up about this, because I think there are important questions -- career questions, whether in IS or linguistics -- in it. It's not that I believe a culture is wholly defined by its words. While I think that the Japanese word wabi ("flawed detail that makes elegant whole") reveals something about Japanese aesthetic sense, the Indonesian words for "mutual cooperation" (rojong) and "socially and politically conscious" (insaf) haven't done much to prevent or ease civil strife in that country. And it's not that I think Russian is a better language because they can describe feelings for an ex-lover as simply razbliuto. And it's not that it should be my -- or anyone's -- job to go save Kiriwina so humans can keep the word mokita ("truth nobody speaks of").
Maybe it's this. Maybe the point of literature, the thing that makes people want to tell and hear stories, is seeing the world through new eyes. Great literature takes familiar themes and makes them fresh, or it takes unfamiliar ones and makes them personally relevant. Foreign languages do the same thing. It's not the individual book or language that's the key, it's the diversity of perspective.
Once, in an interview on similar topics, an aggressive snarky old professor asked me, "Why? Why is that diversity important? Why should we care about whether we study or remember a language that has a word for violently oppressing women, and builds cultural values around it?"
I still don't know. I feel it is, but I still don't know.
Why is that diversity important? For the same reason that ecological diversity is? Is there a tipping point past which society as we know it will implode, if we continue to devour our linguistic resources? Maybe, but probably not. So what? What am I really trying to find out here?
Anyway. This got all thinky. Go enjoy the list of words. My favorite, I think, is again from Kiriwina: biritilulu. Comparing yams to settle a dispute.
Posted on February 17, 2002 at 04:45 PM
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