A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

140 A BASIC COURSE IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS
OBJECTm FIELD SPEAKER HEARER HANDLING OF TOPIC,
(SENDER) (RECEIVER) RUNNING OF THIRD PERSON
SITUATION 1 a
SITUATION lb
OBJECTIVE FIELD BLANK
DEVOID OF RUNNING h!J
SITUATION 2
SITUATION
SITUATION 4
OBJECTIVE FIELD BLANK
SITUATION 5
OBJECTIVE FIELD BLANK
ENGLISH ... ”HE IS RUNNING”
HOPI ... “WARI.” (RUNNING,
STATEMENT OF FACT)
ENGLISH ... ‘HE RAN“
HOPI ... ’WARI.” (RUNNING,
STATEMENT OF FACT)
ENGLISH ... ”HE IS RUNNING‘
HOPI ... “WARI.” (RUNNING,
STATEMENT OF FACT)
ENGLISH ... “HE RAN”
HOPI ... ”EWIWARI.‘ (RUNNING,
STATEMENT OF FACT
FROM MEMORY)
ENGLISH ... ‘HE WILL RUN‘
HOPI ... “WARIKNI.’ (RUNNING,
STATEMENT OF
EXPECTATION)
ENGLISH ... ‘HE RUNS” (E.G. ON
THE TRACK TEAM)
HOPI ... ‘WARIKNGWE.’ (RUNNING
STATEMENT OF LAW)
The WH has been a topic of fierce debate among linguists, ever since
Whorf articulated it in the 1940s. Those opposed to the WH allege that it leads
to the conclusion that we are prisoners of the languages we speak. But the WH
makes no such strong claim. It simply states that language and cognition
interact. And it certainly does not claim that the realities of others cannot be
learned. This happens every time someone learns a foreign language, as a
recent study of Navajo children shows (Kramsch 1998: 13-14). Navajo
children speak a language that encodes the actions of “piclung up a round
object,” such as a ball, and “picking up a long, thin flexible object,” such as a
rope, as obligatory categories. When presented with a blue rope, a yellow
rope, and a blue stick, and asked to choose which object goes best with blue
rope, Navajo children tend to choose the yellow rope, associating the objects
on the basis of their shapes, whereas English-speaking children almost always
choose the blue stick, associating the objects on the basis of color, even though
both groups of children are perfectly able to distinguish colors and shapes.
The experiment shows that speakers tend to sort out and distinguish things
according to the categories provided by their languages. However, Navajo
children who had studied English chose the blue stick and yellow rope in a
fairly equal way.
SPECIALIZED VOCABULARIES
Speciahzed vocabularies lend themselves particularly well as litmus tests of
the WH. Take, for instance, lunship terms. In English, the primary kinship