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

LANGUAGE AND REALITY 153
it enters human life, taking on an independent conceptual existence in the real
world, suggesting ways to bring about changes in and to the world. Even the
nature of experimentation can be seen in this light. Experimentation is a search
for connections, linkages, associations of some sort or other. As Rom Harr6
(198 1 : 23) has pointed out, most experiments involve “the attempt to relate the
structure of things, discovered in an exploratory study, to the organization this
imposes on the processes going on in that structure.” The physicist K. C. Cole
(1984: 156) similarly puts it as follows:
The words we use are metaphors; they are models fashioned
from familiar ingredients and nurtured with the help of fertile
imaginations. “When a physicist says an electron is hke a particle,”
writes physics professor Douglas Giancoli, “he is making a
metaphorical comparison like the poet who says “love is like a
rose.” In both images a concrete object, a rose or a particle, is
used to illuminate an abstract idea, love or electron.
WRITING
The relation between language, reality, and culture can also be sought in the
nature and function of writing systems. Before the advent of alphabets, people
communicated and passed on their knowledge through the spoken word. But
even in early “oral cultures,” tools had been invented for recording and preserving
ideas in pictographic form. So “instinctive” is pictography that it comes as
little surprise to find that it has not disappeared from our own modern world,
even though most of our written communication is based on the alphabet. The
figures designating mule and female on washrooms and the no-smoking signs
found in public buildings, to mention but two common examples, are modern-
day pictographs.
The earliest pictographs so far discovered were unearthed in western Asia
from the Neolithic era. They are elemental shapes on clay tokens that were
probably used as image-making forms or moulds (Schmandt-Besserat 1978,
1992). One of the first civilizations to institutionalize pictographic writing as a
means of recording ideas, keeping track of business transactions, and
transmitting knowledge was the ancient Chinese one. According to some
archeological estimates, Chinese pictography may date as far as back the fifteenth
century BC. Here are some examples of early Chinese pictographs: