Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!garnet.berkeley.edu!sp202-ad
From: sp202-ad@garnet.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
Message-ID: <6953@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 11 Feb 88 10:28:37 GMT
References: <1671@russell.STANFORD.EDU> <7390004@hpfclp.HP.COM>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: sp202-ad@garnet.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Celso Alvarez)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 43
Summary: cultural relativity

In article <7390004@hpfclp.HP.COM> fritz@hpfclp.HP.COM (Gary Fritz) writes:

>.... Italian, Spanish, and Swedish.  None of these languages
>(to my knowledge) contain the same subtleties of expression of MOOD, and
>vaguess of expression of CONTENT, that I have observed in Japanese ...
>
>Japanese is VERY different from any Western language I am familiar with.
>This is to be expected, since it does not have the common roots in Greek
>and Latin found in most Western European languages.  It also evolved in
>a vastly different society than Western languages.  Perhaps it isn't
>"special", but it is very definitely *different*, and I stand by my
>previous claims.

I have had no training in Japanese, but from what I have gathered throughout
this discussion the issue raised here is that of cultural relativity.  The
fact that Japanese evolved in a different society than Western languages
does not *necessarily* explain structural differences between it and, say,
Romance and Germanic languages.  Both Basque and Spanish, to give a
counterexample, are now spoken in the same bilingual society (the Basque
Country, Spain), and yet their structural differences are immense.  Material
culture and social structures *do* have an effect in language development,
but similar nuances *can* be expressed in highly differentiated languages
through disimilar procedures.  Otherwise, effective translation would not
exist.  What the participants in this discussion are probably talking about
is the question of *codification* of cultural notions in a
language's syntax or lexicon.  The following early article by
Fishman might be useful for anyone interested in the topic:

Fishman, Joshua A.  1960.  "A systematization of the Whorfian hypothesis."
	_Behavioral_Science_ vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 323-339.

Perhaps we should look, not at the effect of alleged macro-social factors
such as a hunting society" vs. "a peasant society" in language development,
but, rather, at the opposite process -- the ways in which language use
in verbal interaction *signals* social meanings or reflects certain
aspects of social organization.  The issue of politeness strategies is one
fascinating dimension of linguistic pragmatics.  But, are we to conclude
from comparing linguistic structures and rhetorical strategies from
languages A and B that society A is "more polite" than society B
-- according, not to a fix, predetermined set of values, but to
*each society's* own values?

Celso Alvarez (sp202-ad@garnet.berkeley.edu.UUCP)