1. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

2. Culture – the concept more or less synonymous with civilization (opposed to “barbarism”); classical conception of culture (art, literature, manners and social institutions) This definition challenged by modern authors

3. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE “Langue de culture” (Fr.), “Kultursprache” (Ger.) – language of culture (difference between culturally more advanced and less advanced languages) Another definition of culture (Herder’s view): every society has its own culture;

4. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE Different subgroups may have their own distinctive subculture Culture does not relate to any human progress from barbarism to civilisation, and it is not connected to any aesthetic or intellectual quality of a particular society’s art, literature, institutions

5. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE Culture may be described as socially acquired knowledge, i. e. the knowledge that someone has by virtue of his being a member of a particular society

6. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE Herder also emphasized the interdependence of language and thought; he saw nation’s language and culture as manifestations of national spirit The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf They formulated hypothesis that combines linguistic determinism with linguistic relativity

7. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE Language determines thought and there is no limit to the structural diversity of languages People tend to notice things that are codable in their language (things with words and expressions already available in their language)

8. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE The famous research of Eskimo vocabulary – no single word for snow, but many different words for different kinds of snow Australian Aborigines – the word sand

9. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE Psychologists made experiments with colours: monolingual speakers of Zuni (an American-Indian language) do not recognize many colours, could not encode the difference between orange and yellow; Zuni speakers who also knew English could encode this difference (they were able to perceive the difference between colours, but could not encode that in their own language)

10. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE All experiments proved a weaker version of this hypothesis – the structure of one’s language influences perception and thought Whorf claimed that the Hopi Indians, whose language lacks the grammatical category of tense, operate with a radically different concept of time (no clear evidence)

11. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE The absence of numerals in Australian languages (higher value than four) – problem of these speakers with the concept of number (the Aborigines who learnt English did not have that problem)

12. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE Existence of different world views (Sapir- Whorf hypothesis) – not proved Some linguistic concepts vary from culture to culture (“honesty”, “sin”, “honour”) Productivity of language systems – spread of vocabulary Borrowing and loan-translations (calques)

13. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE Boas (1911), Handbook of American Indian Languages – Boas emphasized both lexical and grammatical differences of structure It proves the weaker version of the thesis of linguistic relativity Colour terms: languages differ in the number of basic colour terms that they have (no word in French that exactly covers what “brown” covers in English)

14. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE No single word in Russian, Spanish or Italian that corresponds to “blue”; no word in Hungarian that corresponds to “red” My favourite colour is blue cannot be translated into Russian (in the ordinary sense of the term “translation”) Arbitrary divisions within the continuum of colours among speakers of different languages

15. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE Berlin-Kay hypothesis (1969) about colours: the existence of non-universal superstructure, culture-dependence, what holds for colour-terms is also true of the vocabulary in general The notions of cultural overlap, cultural diffusion (higher degree of overlap) and translatibility (function of the degree of cultural overlap)

16. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE Similarities of two societies and languages; pronouns od address, social superiority, age, kinship, sex