Basement archaeology

This clearly has nothing to do with linguistic anthropology, or any of the terms in Duranti’s book. It does, however, combine a lot of things I love and I think it’s interesting, and it’s my blog, so my rules!

Just before I left home to return to Toronto for school after the Christmas break, I was searching for my tack cleaning supplies in the basement, when in my random sampling of boxes of stuff, I came across a bunch of my old riding gear. Tiny helmets and pint sized breeches, my first pair of leather field boots with the calfs taken in to accomodate my scrawny 12 year old awkwardness, an assortment of neon polo wraps and whips with hand-shaped poppers on the end I’d won at schooling shows; all stuff my mom had failed to get rid of at the latest garage sale. As soon as I opened the box, I abandoned my quest for Lexol leather cleaner, sat down on the unfinished concrete floor and pulled everything out.

Poring over it for about half an hour, I thought to myself- what would someone else think if they came across this stuff. To me, it brought back memories of my childhood, of spending hours at the piano perfecting my scales so that I could earn the opportunity to compete in the horse show that weekend with a flawless lesson; of long nights at the barn braiding horses and cleaning tack, of pulling each others boots off in the trailer tack room when we all forgot our boot jacks at the barn. To my mom, they might represent the years we fought over whether or not I’d get to ride, or the hours spent driving me out to the barn, or aimlessly in the country in search of horses.

Relativity

Linguistic relativity was born out of the observation
that languages provide different ways of describing the world.
- Alessandro Durani

It has been posited that each language establishes a system of meanings that is slightly off-kilter with other systems. On that assumption, the hypothesis was made that speakers, depending on their language, may see the world differently and pay attention to different aspects of reality. Linguistic diversity thus became a way of predicting and explaining at least some aspects of cognitive and cultural diversity. Take for starters, the classic example of the word Snow. English speakers describe changes in this phenomena by attaching adjectives in most cases, but the Inuit have something like 50+ words that describe various types of what we call snow. For us, fluffy snow, slanty snow, wet snow, snow on a sunny day…. it’s all snow! Imagine if we used a separate word for each condition?!

Benjamin Whorf formulated a “linguistic relativity principle” from these observations, according to which different grammars direct their users toward different types of observations and different evaluations of what could otherwise be seen as similar circumstances. This principle, and the research of many other social scientists like Martin Heidegger forces us to think about the power our words have on our ability to understand, act in, and affect our psychological and social worlds.