Over at The Conversation, Charles Kemp, Temuulen Khishigsuren, Ekaterina Vylomova, and Terry Regier discuss a much-discussed topic: Do Inuit languages really have many words for snow? The most interesting finds from our study of 616 languages:
Languages are windows into the worlds of the people who speak them – reflecting what they value and experience daily. So perhaps it’s no surprise different languages highlight different areas of vocabulary. Scholars have noted that Mongolian has many horse-related words, that Maori has many words for ferns, and Japanese has many words related to taste.
Some links are unsurprising, such as German having many words related to beer, or Fijian having many words for fish. The linguist Paul Zinsli wrote an entire book on Swiss-German words related to mountains. In our recently-published study we took a broad approach towards understanding the links between different languages and concepts. Using computational methods, we identified areas of vocabulary that are characteristic of specific languages, to provide insight into linguistic and cultural variation. […]
We tested 163 links between languages and concepts, drawn from the literature. We compiled a digital dataset of 1574 bilingual dictionaries that translate between English and 616 different languages. Since many of these dictionaries were still under copyright, we only had access to counts of how often a particular word appeared in each dictionary.
One example of a concept we looked at was “horse”, for which the top-scoring languages included French, German, Kazakh and Mongolian. […]
We were especially interested in testing the idea that Inuit languages have many words for snow. This notorious claim has long been distorted and exaggerated. It has even been dismissed as the “great Eskimo vocabulary hoax”, with some experts saying it simply isn’t true. But our results suggest the Inuit snow vocabulary is indeed exceptional. Out of 616 languages, the language with the top score for “snow” was Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. The other two Inuit languages in our data set (Western Canadian Inuktitut and North Alaskan Inupiatun) also achieved high scores for “snow”.
The Eastern Canadian Inuktitut dictionary in our dataset includes terms such as kikalukpok, which means “noisy walking on hard snow”, and apingaut, which means “first snow fall”. The top 20 languages for “snow” included several other languages of Alaska, such as Ahtena, Dena’ina and Central Alaskan Yupik, as well as Japanese and Scots. Scots includes terms such as doon-lay, meaning “a heavy fall of snow”, feughter meaning “a sudden, slight fall of snow”, and fuddum, meaning “snow drifting at intervals”.
(We did Eskimo words for snow back in 2004.) They discuss words for “rain” and “smell” (“Prior to our research, the smell terms of the Pacific Islands had received little attention”) and end with some caveats (“Although our analysis reveals many interesting links between languages and concepts, the results aren’t always reliable – and should be checked against original dictionaries where possible”). On your mark, get set, attack — and thanks, Bathrobe!
Well, running the induction in the other direction, Kusaal has no word for “snow” …
The Eskimo thing is a bit of a cheat, as so many of the words are derivatives of a relatively few base stems. It’s like counting English “melted snow” as a distinct “word.”
It doesn’t seem unlikely on first principles that a language might have a lot of synchronically unrelated “words” (whatever that might mean, itself no straightforward question) dividing up an area of particular significance for the people who speak it.
But these counts seem to rely on how often the English word in question turns up in the definitions of lexemes in the language-X/English dictionary. That’s really not a great method. It’s interesting, but it can’t actually tell you “how many words” a language has for anything. The paper is not, in fact, addressing the “Eskimo words for snow” issue at all, and it’s misleading on their part to suggest that it is.
Kusaal has, for example (off the top of my head) daam “millet beer”, sa’ab “millet porridge”, mɔn “grind millet.” Now, millet really is the staple Kusaasi food, and the language actually does have two quite unrelated everyday words for “millet”: ki “ordinary cultivar of millet” and naada “a rapidly growing millet variety”; but it seems to me that their method would actually make this “five words for millet.” Which is absyrd.
Good point.
In fact, given the Oti-Volta love of making noun compounds, it would be easy enough to add substantially to the total of “Kusaal words for millet.”
One that actually does merit a lexical entry is sa’akʋt “yesterday’s millet porridge reheated for breakfast.” But Naden’s dictionary actually lists half a dozen or more compounds of sa’ab “millet porridge” as separate lexical entries, including things like “hot porridge” and “porridge ladle.” Under kief “single grain of millet”, he lists kisuma “good millet”, kipɔɔg “millet farm” kibielim “millet seed”, and even kiin, glossed “in the grain”, which is actually just ki “millet” with the locative enclitic particle -n added to it.
Eskimo words for snow, nothing.
But far and away the most popular first element in Kusaal noun compounds is nin- “person.” Thus ningiŋ “short person”, ninwɔk “tall person”, ninsabilig “black person”, ninpielig “white person”, ninkʋʋr “murder” (“person-killing”) .. ninkaŋa “this person”, ninsɔ’ “some person”, ningiŋkaŋa “this short person” ….
The language thus has literally hundreds (if not thousands) of “words for ‘person.'” One can only conclude that people must be unusually important in Kusaasi culture. (True, but I feel that there are problems with the methodology here …)
The paper is paywalled, but see preprint here.
The first author is also first author of this brief but interesting cross-linguistic survey of metonymy. She is, btw, a doctoral student from Mongolia, studying in Australia.
Whether a language has lots of synonyms – in general, or for particular words – is a different question from whether a language has a lot of words connected to a particular topic. I think this is really the second, and they’ve just got distracted by the words for snow question.
So if (e.g.) Kuusal has a lot of words for different ways of preparing millet and Scots has a lot of words for different ways of preparing oats, that’s not really surprising, but it is interesting in a way. Searching for whatever the ‘core’ word is thought to be in whatever language the dictionary definitions are in is a rather rough and ready way of counting, but I’m not sure it’s inherently absurd.
The dates of the dictionaries might matter, though – Dwelly’s full of words for traditional equipment and techniques and so on that presumably wouldn’t have been collected a hundred years later. Or maybe a modern dictionary would just add modern words and keep the old ones. But to what extent are words that aren’t used for things that aren’t done part of the language?
The first author is also first author of this brief but interesting cross-linguistic survey of metonymy
Figure 1’s caption is pretty silly; “The presence of metonymy in world’s languages.” She means “location of the languages featured in this study.” (I could fill in a few blanks in that big white space in the middle of Africa for her …)
Now what would be interesting is a plausible account of real natural human language without metonymy. Piraha, nothing.
(I can’t actually even imagine how a language that might work. Which is why it would be interesting. Not to say, revolutionary …)
Well, that looks like just a quick and dirty summary of a conference presentation. The part I found non-trivial is the table of the distribution of metonymy types. The typology of semantic change is about where that of sound change was 150–200 years ago, and every new bit is welcome.
… that said, many of the items listed are not what I would call metonyms, e.g. nominalized verbs &vv.
Whether a language has lots of synonyms – in general, or for particular words – is a different question from whether a language has a lot of words connected to a particular topic.
Very good point.
I think there are at least three independent factors involved in all this:
(a) how many lexeme definitions in this X-to-English dictionary include our English probe word?
(b) is a “word” of this language often the equivalent of a multi-word English phrase? (Yes, in both Inuit and Kusaal, though via very different mechanisms)
(c) do lexemes in this language often have a very different semantic range from their English “core equivalents”? (Yes, in both directions in Kusaal: one Kusaal word often covers quite a range of English meanings, like iank “jump; fly”, which are, however, disambiguated perfectly well by context; on the other hand, Kusaal also routinely makes distinctions absent in English, like the two varieties of millet I mentioned.) Languages also vary considerably in the typical semantic range of their lexemes: how much of the fine-grained distinction work is encoded directly in the lexicon, versus how much is delegated to syntax and idiom or just plain context. Classical Greek versus Latin is a famous example of this: Lucretius bewails his patrii sermonis egestas but actually manages fine with expressing abstruse Greek philosophical concepts in Latin (with only minimal cheating.)
The only thing that they seem to be set up to count is (a). In the absence of information about (b) and (c), I don’t think this is going to reveal a lot. “Hey, millet comes up often in this Kusaal dictionary!” Yes. Yes, it does …
I suspect that what is going in here is “Hey: we’ve worked hard and set up a cool database we can do some basic counts and stats on very easily. How many papers can we get out of it?” I don’t blame them, if so, but I doubt whether any deep insights about Language are likely to emerge from the process. (Same with PHOIBLE and the rest.)
I dimly recall reading somewhere that, in fact, the Alaskan Athabaskan languages often have more “words for snow” that the Eskimo languages, on account of the fact that the Yupit and Inuit mostly live near the coasts, and don’t actually experience snow-related excitements to the extent that some of their more inland neighbours do. (Surprisingly much of Alaska is in fact technically a desert, with very little precipitation of any kind.)
A lot of this just boils down to «people who specialize in things develop specialized vocabulary to describe that area of their lives in more detail. ». The English of English speakers who sail have a lot of words for wind that my native dialect of English lacks.
German may have a lot of words for « horse » in the dictionary but the average native German speaker in Berlin in the 21st century has probably never heard most of them. So German either has a lot of words for horse if it is the German spoken by someone from the social class that participates in equestrian events or maybe just «pferd » if you analyze the native language of a soccer player from Dortmund. A native New Hampshirite when I was growing up had more words for snow than an Inuit speaker raised in Florida would acquire.
“We tested 163 links between languages and concepts, drawn from the literature.”
Wow. I mean, tell me “gather from literature 163 links between languages and concepts” and I’ll say “I know where to buy strawberries in winter (in the shop, it is the 21st century…), but I have no idea how to collect 163 links betweeen languages and concepts”. Or are there books and articles where those are piled up? I think yes: this article is an example. Then… this is a field I know nothing about:(
I’m pleased to find a Mongolian name.
I don’t know why, not because of Bathrobe’s work:/
(Anyway, you don’t come across Mongolian names all the time:) Mongolia is big, but the density of people is lower only in the Western Sahara)
to what extent are words that aren’t used for things that aren’t done part of the language?
(and echoing Vanya and DE as well)
refoyl’s yiddish dictionary has about 60 words whose definitions include “horse” – some are labeled as ganovem-loshn [thieves cant], others as balegole-loshn [teamsters cant]; if you look for balegole-loshn, you’ll find another handful of horse-words that don’t include the word in their definitions. weinreich’s dictionary doesn’t, i believe, include most of these words. (sensitive dependence on initial dictionary?)
and/but despite agricultural haulage being a very heavily yiddish jewish trade for a long period of time over a pretty vast territory (if i remember right, a key source for balegole-loshn is specifically about the alsatian version; refoyl almost certainly has not included any of that vocabulary) – up to about a century ago – it would be rather odd to take this lexical density as indicating that horses are particularly central to yiddish jewish culture overall. and i go back to my own (hobby)horse: language is social; it’s about relation and communication, not its listable elements! and lects even more so!
“horse”
If you take Arabic speakers, of course the result will depend on whether you’re talking to
(a) Bedouin horseman*
(b) a girl from the city in a region without nomads.
So which Arabic?
And we run into problems with the notion of “[Jewish, Arabic] culuture overall“. Is it a thing?
IDEAL “Mongols” of course ride horses.
Ideal “Bedouin” also ride camels.
“Arabs”, as we use this word ride many things (we don’t use this word in the sense “Bedouin”).
As for less than IDEAL Mongols, I don’t know.
How large was the urban element of Mongol culture? (I only heard about priests and monks).
And now, when I said it… Hey, in around 1800 only a few percents of Russians were not serfs. Nevertheless Pushkin (and other landlords), books and urban vernaculars – people and langauges that were exceptions in terms of numbers – contributed enormously in the Russian langauge.
So even working with IDEALs is hard.
* by now, I think, have developed Toyota vocabulary as well…
Or in brief:
cultures are not langauges
Sure. Language is only part of culture. However, all of language is part of culture.
(This, though true, actually borders on the vacuous: I once spent a frustrating time with an anthropologist trying to get him to tell me of something that wasn’t potentially part of his professional domain. Irritating though he was, he did have a point.)
The serfs did not participate in the same culture as Pushkin. Their languages coincided only where the cultures coincided.
Case of what I mean:
Kusaal has three basic words for “sibling” (none of them equivalent to “brother” or “sister”):
bier “elder sibling of the same sex”
pitʋ “younger sibling of the same sex”
taʋn “sibling of opposite sex” (seniority irrelevant)
Seniority among same-sex siblings is indeed culturally important, but it seems pointless to ask how far this is language reflecting culture and how far the fact that you have to mention seniority in referring to a same-sex sibling reinforces or even determines cultural attitudes. They’re just two aspects of the same thing. Chicken and egg …
Incidentally, although this three-way system is common in Oti-Volta, and probably reflects the original proto-Oti-Volta setup, the only one of the three Kusaal terms that is reconstructable to POV is “opposite-sex sibling.” The actual words for same-sex siblings can differ even between closely related languages. It’s quite different from Indo-European or Semitic, where such words are highly conserved. (Welsh = Persian.)
The bier etymon is confined to Western Oti-Volta; it looks for all the world like a loan from Songhay. Which is … weird. Such words are not supposed to be borrowed …
You can imagine a Kusaasi linguist, inspired by this paper, going through an English-Kusaal dictionary and noting that English lacks any “words” for bier, pitʋ or taʋn, and concluding that nuclear family relationships are of no importance to Brits and Americans, except for parent-child. No wonder they’re such odd people …
@DE
Maybe it’s a trivial question of Culture vs culture but it seems v clear to me that Pushkin and the serfs DID participate in the same culture(?s). But then I think economics is part of culture … along with (il)literacy, numeracy, cooking oils, sanitary practices yadda yadda Tout se tient as somebody says…
The culture of Pushkin has largely survived as a foundational part of modern Russian culture. The culture(s) of 19th century Russian century serfs are largely extinct. Elements of pre revolutionary peasant Russia that did survive into modern Russian culture can be gleaned from contemporary reports and descriptions passed down from the land owning class and foreign visitors, but those traces are sometimes hard to distinguish reliably from other later influences.
it seems v clear to me that Pushkin and the serfs DID participate in the same culture(?s).
Why would you think that? Pushkin was part of an infinitesimally small aristocratic cohort that was comfortable in French, read European literature, and by and large took religion and tsarist authority with a grain of salt if they believed in them at all; serfs were illiterate, knew nothing about Europe, were devoted in their way to the tsar (source of all authority and guarantor of their rights) and the Orthodox religion (which for them was a matter of icons, prayers, rituals, and church attendance, not belief), and would have despised pretty much everything Pushkin & Co. did, said, and stood for. (A later generation of bien-pensant radicals discovered this when they “went to the people” to encourage them to revolt in the 1870s and were either ignored or turned over to the authorities.) I’m not sure what sense of “culture” you think would encompass both.
just to continue the pile-on… and it all gets even more subtle and complex than even that kind of deep class-based line indicates (about which: i don’t know whether either of those cultures makes sense to talk about as entirely “russian” in a linguistic sense, what with the pervasive place of french in the aristocracy and the range of languages spoken by serfs and emancipees).
to stick with the yiddish jewish realm, balegole-loshn was a particular lect spoken by specific groups of professional teamsters/haulers. but they weren’t by any stretch the only yiddish jews who made a living in one way or another from horses – even sholem-aleykhem’s tevye was “der milkhiker”, not “der balegole”*. even without adding in much of the geographic spread of yiddish lects, the horsey lexicon is going to look very different in the mouth of (say) a rural volhynian milk-hauler, a horse-thief from odessa, a grain merchant from uman, a bukovinan shtetl blacksmith, and a tavern-keeper in podolia.
.
* though the humor of his voice is based, i think, almost entirely on the contrast between balegoles’ stereotyped position as poor, uneducated, and crass and tevye’s efforts to present himself as learned in toyre and talmud.
At some point in the late 1920’s or perhaps early 1930’s, there was somewhere in France some grimy brutal industrial plant where a lot of the workers were Russian refugees who had fled the Bolsheviks and were not all necessarily from the Pushkin-adulating strata of pre-1917 Russian society. Saint Maria Skobtsova, who in those pre-Nazi days was confining her saintly attentions to the Russian diaspora in France, rolled into town and announced that she was concerned that the workers were losing their connection with Glorious Exalted Russian Literary Culture so she was going to helpfully offer them a series of uplifting lectures about the literary merits of Pushkin.
This offer was, you may be surprised to hear, received somewhat poorly by these factory workers. They suggested instead, in Russian that may not have been elevated in register, that they didn’t need a women to tell them about Pushkin, they needed a woman to darn their socks and iron their shirts. Perhaps they also thought they needed a woman for various other functions that the hagiographers have discreetly omitted from the historical record.
Being an actual saint, St. Maria reacted to this rebuff with humility by accepting that the workers actually had a point, in terms of what was not yet called a Maslovian hierarchy of needs. So she spent some time (days, maybe weeks) darning socks and ironing shirts etc. etc. without asking anything in return until, eventually, some of the workers rather shyly asked her to tell them about this Pushkin fellow. (It might have been better if she’d told them their salvation was not in Pushkin but in the Church but I think this was before she became a nun and perhaps even before her second divorce?)
I can think of three words for horse in Bulgarian at the top of my head: кон(ь) конь in my dialect, жребец and кобила. I will probably recognize three times as much passively.
Technically Bulgarian also has a word for “first snow” in this analysis — “първи сняг”. It would ordinarily be “пръв сняг”.
it seems v clear to me that Pushkin and the serfs DID participate in the same culture(?s).
? I wasn’t intending to be contentious and tried to distinguish culture from Culture. I think of children, nannies, servants, things I saw and learned (\eg gender) as a kid.
The more recent Sinitic word for “elder brother” is supposed to be borrowed from somewhere around Mongolic; the older Sinitic word is still extant in some languages (and is written with a very simple character, which tends to correlate with antiquity).
…This is how I learn that darn is an actual word with a meaning of its own instead of just taboo deformation.
And it turns out to be cognate with German tarn- “camouflage”.
I wasn’t intending to be contentious
Of course not, but you were misunderstanding the situation. Russia is not like other countries, and even less so back then. I’d be surprised if you could name a single element of culture (or Culture, whatever you intend by that differentiation) that would encompass both Petersburg aristos and serfs in the boonies.
@David M.: Not only “darn” but the more taboo-sounding “dam” turn out to be non-taboo English words with practical workaday meanings: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dam#English
Not enough phonotactically-permissible monosyllables available to have reserved enough for the taboo words?
darn … cognate with German tarn- “camouflage”
Cf Mooré lìblì “hide, deceive, patch, mend.”
I spent a while trying to work out what exactly the Kusaal cognate libil “hide, cover” was doing in the Kusaal WP page on Black Star Square in Accra:
https://kus.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Star_Square
I recognised that the Kusaal page was for the most part a distinctly overliteral translation of the English page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Star_Square
Eventually I realised that libil was being used in the sense of English “cover the facts” (quite a different thing from “cover up the facts.”) I doubt whether the translator intended us to think that the Black Star Square monuments are meant to conceal the liberation struggles …
But who knows? Maybe it’s an actual established calque now …
… a single element of culture … that would encompass both Petersburg aristos and serfs in the boonies…
perhaps the notion that society is hierarchical, that it is divine will …
Not enough phonotactically-permissible monosyllables available to have reserved enough for the taboo words?
I read a paper years ago (unfortunately, I can’t recall title or author) about the replacement of a fair number of Mandarin monosyllabic words driven by the fact that historical sound changes had made them homophonous with Bad Words.
The Bad Words always seemed to prevail in the contest. A sort of Gresham’s Law, i suppose. (On the other hand, that may just have been the impression given by the paper’s methodology.)
perhaps the notion that society is hierarchical, that it is divine will …
In the near-tautologous sense I was attributing to “culture” before, I suppose you could say that this stark cultural division was then .. part of “Russian culture.”
[Mandarin] historical sound changes had made them homophonous with Bad Words.
Homophones with the names of Emperors also become taboo and have to be changed. The Emperor absolutely prevails. Must play hell with trying to follow historical sound changes.
Could be worse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech#Africa
First question a sensible woman needs to ask a suitor in these cultures: “What are your parents’ names?”
Sad but unsurprising that it’s women who seem to end up with the speech taboos. Don’t tell the Republican Party – they’ll think it’s a grand idea. Weak men fear women’s speech.
I did know about dam; German Damm, from Dutch (judging from Jean-Claude Van Damme).
-> perhaps the notion that society is hierarchical, that it is divine will …
In the near-tautologous sense I was attributing to “culture” before, I suppose you could say that this stark cultural division was then .. part of “Russian culture.”
-> I think it is claimed that it was not part of \eg Algonquian culture… CF Hockett’s “Man’s Place in Nature’ has a list of features common to all human societies; it’s a good honest book though perhaps out of date; unfortunately our copy has been lost to decluttering.
I don’t think I’d ever use “dam” for the dammed water, as opposed to the damming structure itself, but it does seem to be an accepted usage, especially among yer Colonials.
I was previously caught out by the fact that Ghanaians quite often render Kusaal mu’ar “big river, lake” as “dam”, before I found out that in Ghanaian English, too, “dam” refers to the water itself rather than the mu’ar zaŋguom “reservoir wall.” (The only way to even get a lake in those parts is to build a dam.) The cognates all seem just to mean “lake, big river.”
@jack morava:
Hierarchy is definitely not a part of traditional Kusaasi culture, either: no chiefs, until they were imposed by the Mamprussi kingdom, and the Kusaasi have never exactly taken to the idea (to put it mildly.)
Seniority within kinship groups is pretty important though. Kpɛɛm “elder” has a lot of “leadership” overtones on top of its literal “age” sense.
walked over their github in search of word lists for concepts, couldn’t find it. How did they come up with “screw”, “birch” or “brandy” being the most represented concepts in Russian?
Introspection on the part of Ekaterina Vylomova?
(Ah, youth!)
I don’t think I’d ever use “dam” for the dammed water,
Yeah, the more sensible word for the broader sense/infrastructure supported by a dam would be ‘dam(m)age’; but I guess that’s kinda taken.
P.S. Is anybody else experiencing this? (It’s happening to me intermittently.) I went to wiktionary for senses of ‘dam’. It gave me the wikipedia entry for ‘dam’. Which is all fine and dandy, but not dictionary definitions in their broader variety. And of course Wikipedia’s ‘dam’ (disambiguation) is nothing to do with it. Eventually I can click through to wikti
That’s what I was looking for. (Sense 4. also applies in NZ, BTW.)
perhaps the notion that society is hierarchical, that it is divine will …
Then all of Europe shared the same culture. If that’s what you’re after, go for it!
I was just reading something relating to West Africa which contrasted (IIRC) “semi-feudal autocracy” (as with the Mamprussi kingdom) with “democratic gerontocracy” (as with the Kusaasi originally), but I’ve forgotten where.
(Googling is no use: it just turns up references to the US …)
a single element of culture … that would encompass both Petersburg aristos and serfs in the boonies [and wasn’t shared with the rest of Europe]
Patronymic middle names? Vodka?
Versts? Vocabulary for nightingale songs?
Pushkin is of course at an extreme end. Did Nathanael Hawthorne and a plantation slave in Virginia in 1820
share the same culture? Not really. But the plantation owner and the enslaved men generally did to some extent. Russia also didn’t have the racial divide. As one moved down the social ladder there was more shared culture. A small landowner might share more culturally and linguistically with a muzhyk than a French speaking Petersburg aristocrat.
Orthodox religion and rites, icons, holiday customs would be another cultural element Russian Aristos would have shared with their serfs, but not with their French or German counterparts. And then there are probably elements of folk culture Russian elites would have been familiar with, even if they disdained them, while those would have utterly baffled foreigners (often, sharing a culture just means that you have a position on something, even if it deviates from that of the other members of the same culture, while people not belonging to the culture aren’t even aware that the thing exists, or that you are supposed to have a position in regard to it.)
Cultures are nested.
…huh. I had no idea.
I did know about watershed for area whose water that has been shed from other water, though.
what Hans said.
“Language is only part of culture.”
@DE, if a culturologist defines cultures Α, Β, Γ… and a linguists defines langauges α, β, γ…, you’ll find that some John speaks α and Mary speaks β and both belong to Γ.
Or John and Mary speak α, but John belongs to Β and Mary to Γ.
You will then pull cultures and languages together by changing your criteria. And yes, what you will come up with will even be real in some ways. But they ride horses is a bad criterion for this:-)
“a Kusaasi linguist … going through an English-Kusaal dictionary”: Émile Benveniste.
Yes, Indo-European is crazy. Even English (!): the meaning of “daughter” is guessable from many languages:/
I’m another one who can’t recall ever hearing/reading “dam” used to refer to the body of water held in place by a dam. But googling revealed a few such uses that are not only American but from places reasonably close to where I live now and/or grew up and/or my mom grew up, so it’s Out There, and not just in some region of the U.S. so remote it might as well be New Zealand.
But the plantation owner and the enslaved men generally did to some extent. Russia also didn’t have the racial divide. As one moved down the social ladder there was more shared culture. A small landowner might share more culturally and linguistically with a muzhyk than a French speaking Petersburg aristocrat.
permit me to be – at a bare minimum – extremely skeptical.
/mild rant
to my ear, the part about the antebellum u.s. south depends on swallowing whole the fantasy that the middle passage erased all culture from the millions who survived it, which i thought went out of circulation with the arrival of books by hurston and herskovits, or at least with robert farris thompson. these are groups of people whose most basic patterns of everyday life, from foodways to ritual practices, were wildly different and oriented towards almost entirely separate reference points*.
the “shared southern culture” that gets talked about a fair amount these days comes in two flavors: warmedover Lost Cause mythology about the One Happy Family of Masters and Chattel; and generally pretty solid work about the absorbtion of specifically african-rooted cultural elements by white southerners – overwhelmingly by poor white folks, and largely after the civil war. plantation owners and their descendants were/are the last people to be part of that process of transmission, having been (and remaining for a very long time) nearly as hostile to the cultural practices of their white “inferiors” as to those of the people they tried to own. it would make a lot more sense to talk about the shared culture of u.s., martiniquais, and cuban planters, despite the linguistic differences.
being part of the same economic system can, sometimes, mean being part of the same culture, but more often different positions within an economic structure mark very clear cultural divides (especially since the entwined emergence of capitalist production, colonialism, and race-as-we-know-it) – as in these examples, and in (say) my ties to the semi-indentured Pegatron workers whose livelihood came from manufacturing the computer that i use to make a living, which are clear and structural, but in no way cultural.
and i’m fascinated by the idea that being ruled by a romanov (whether russophone or francophone, or even german-speaking, like sophie yclept catherine) somehow transformed polish-speaking** catholic landowners and ukrainian- or romanian-speaking orthodox peasants (or lithuanian-speaking catholic ones) into linguistic and cultural uniformity. and beyond the newer territories of the empire, within the strictly “russian” sphere it seems to me that the breadth and depth of the Old Believers’ schism (and its longlasting entwinement with peasant revolts, but not with aristocratic coup plots) indicates a pretty deep cultural divide between owners and owned.
/end rant
.
* most visible where there is a shared element that gets processed through those very different systems of reference: the christian mythos, for example.
** and after a certain point, often sarmatian-identified, partly to avoid the implication of having a shared culture with non-aristocratic polish-speakers.
How did they come up with “screw”, “birch” or “brandy” being the most represented concepts in Russian?
Well, nu. Everyone knows that the most Russian thing in the world is “завинтить березового коньяку”.
being part of the same economic system can, sometimes, mean being part of the same culture
Forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers in Africa often have very active economic links with neighbouring farmers, and usually speak closely related languages to theirs too, despite profound lifestyle differences. There’s some suggestion that the forest-dwellers originally had their “own” languages, related to those of other forest people and unrelated to the farmers’ languages, but the evidence I’ve seen looks pretty shaky. I suspect it’s overinterpreted because of the ever-popular obsession with trying to make language relatedness coincide with human genetics.
Now you could say that the forest-dwellers and farmers are thus all part of the “same” culture. It would be a big deviation from normal ethnographic usage, but I think that is because ethnographers typically study smaller groups: they are zoomed in. But in a context when you were discussing the “culture” of an entire mixed-ecology region, it could be reasonable to use the word in a zoomed-out way like that.
People talk about “British working-class culture” without feeling that they can’t also talk about just “British culture.” (Admittedly, such people tend to be demagogues rather than genuine students of culture, but that doesn’t affect my point.)
[This is all really just a more profix version of DM’s “Cultures are nested.”]
Although not merely or neatly nested. There may be a less zoomed-in higher-abstraction “culture” that encompasses both A & B, and another that encompasses both B & C, but not one that encompasses A & C. Russian elites that shared some things with contemporaneous French elites and other things with contemporaneous Russian serfs might be an example of such a “B.”
These are further manifestations of the fact that drawing clean dividing lines between clusters (especially clusters of things as multifaceted as people or cultures) is just not a task than can always be done in a satisfactory way.
what rozele said.
I think it is pretty absurd to think about cultures as separated uniform silos. We can talk about Russian (or whatever) culture in relation to similar cultures (say, Western European) in a more detailed way. For example, classical (i.e. 19c.) Russian culture was very much literature-centric with arts, theater, music and the like being much less of a deal. Also, for obvious reasons, Russia almost completely lacked institutionalized ways for political or social discourse, which in turn was to some degree assumed by imaginative literature. This has nothing to do with the obvious case that overwhelming majority of peasants were illiterate and not interested in any type of (what would be later termed) high brow “kultur-multur”.
Another example. One can reasonably talk about American (meaning US) business culture as different from, for example, Japanese. It would be strange to request from each person doing so to show that a billionaire investors from each country differ more from each other than from a shopkeeper in their own country.
There might be social structures so different that any parallels between them are not possible. But in that case the very difference of social structures can be viewed as difference in “culture”.
@DE: absolutely! the symbiotic economic/resource-distribution relationships between groups that do more fixed-location growing and groups that do more mobile collecting can and do map onto any number of kinds of cultural relationship (and divergences or convergences of lects). but the scale of the whole economic and cultural system is only good for pretty limited kinds of analysis, whether it’s being applied to more-or-less-non-state forest and farm communities in west africa, or mobile and stationary empires in inland east asia.
to my reading, however, part of the point e.p. thompson was trying to make was that “british culture” didn’t/doesn’t – and possibly can’t – make much sense as a category, while there is a fairly coherent system that can be talked about, and analyzed both syn- and diachronically as “traditional british working-class culture” (and another basically distinct one, i’d think, that we can perhaps follow nancy mitford (following alan ross) and call “U culture”).
Yes, while of course one can make a case for national cultures — or any other kind of cultures — if one has a mind to, since one can make a case for any damn thing, to me the important thing is to push back against the lazy assumption that since everyone in X country is part of the same jurisdiction, they must ipso facto have the same “culture.” I say hooha to that.
As Lily Allen (not her) said — stop right now. You’re saying a profound thing now. And fuck them very much.
“push back against the lazy assumption that since everyone in X country is part of the same jurisdiction, they must ipso facto have the same “culture.””
I’m frustrated because we seem to be talking past each other while ultimately agreeing. Cultural anthropologists (IIUC) often interpret `cultures’ as interlocking symbolic systems (\eg languages, castes, laws, diets, sanitary taboos) often enormously complex. Slaves and aristos may have their own cultures but they are certainly part of the same economic culture whose rules they osmose with their mothers’ milk, bound to the wheel together. I think of the whole English Raj literature as about children learning from amahs…
Also BTW this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
seems to be evidence of a culture; is it Noachian?
Also BTW this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
seems to be evidence of a culture; is it Noachian?
I don’t understand that. Weren’t the Noachide* Laws almost unknown among non-Jews till a time within living memory, and aren’t they still quite little-known? I don’t see what they can be evidence of other than Jewish ideas of ethics outside the 613 commandments to the Jews.
*Or the spelling of your choice.
jack morava: “I’m frustrated because we seem to be talking past each other while ultimately agreeing.”
But we need to STOP RIGHT NOW. Thank you very much. The history of the Raj is horrible and all, but it’s still Indian-and-Britain-centric. The world does not revolve around around your trauma. That’s a thing between Britain and India.
I don’t think jack morava was in any way claiming that it did.
I agree with him: the trouble comes from the fact that “culture”, though a useful concept, is extremely fuzzy without further specification of just whose culture and just which aspects of it you have in mind. In such circumstances, it’s entirely possible to end up talking past one another despite mutual goodwill and fundamental agreement on essentials.
Reductio: dunno about Noah, but I think there are non-trivial senses in which all human beings are part of one great megaculture, On the other hand, nobody else shares absolutely every aspect of my own worldview and folkways: I am the sole bearer of the David Eddyshaw Culture.
What Hat is saying (I think) is that modern ethnonationalist states are acting immorally in trying to enforce a monoculture on all those within their political domain. This is true.
I think jack morava was talking to me, not you. And don’t tell people to stop talking; that’s what we do around here.
permit me to be – at a bare minimum – extremely skeptical.
Skeptical about what? You basically elucidated my original point at greater length and with better examples.
Rozele, I pretty much agree with every point of your „rant“. The problem is that „culture“ has fuzzy boundaries. I still would say that a Southern tobacco plantation owner in 1830 had more shared reference points with the people he enslaved than a contemporary New England writer or whaler would. You can argue so what, it doesn’t mean the plantation owner and the enslaved had a shared culture in any meaningful sense, and I generally agree.
Back to cultures being nested: Divisive institutions such as slavery, and caste, and nobility, and societal taboos, are entirely cultural. Groups insulated from eachother by cultural restrictions still share (even if by force or necessity) the overall culture of restrictions (or suppression) and the concepts and moral and limitations on individual opportunity that they entail.
I’m one of the authors of the paper mentioned in the original post — hope it’s OK to speak up. Our method definitely has limitations, and we did our best to acknowledge those in the academic paper, but the evidence we provide about snow-related terms in Inuit languages can’t be dismissed on the basis that those languages are polysynthetic. Our method considers proportions — e.g. counts for “snow” relative to the total number of terms in a dictionary. Those proportions can be used to compare languages regardless of their morphological structure.
To get some sense for this, consider snow-related terms and fire-related terms in Inuktitut. Many snow-related terms can be listed, and many of them correspond to phrases in English. But the same applies to fire-related terms , so polysynthesis alone does not explain why there are more snow-related terms than fire-related terms listed in the dictionary.
I’d encourage anyone with strong opinions about this to read the academic paper! As mentioned earlier in the thread, a preprint is here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qmgn8_v2
We make some points that connect with ideas in the thread — e.g. in discussing the languages with highest scores for “snow”, we say “The twenty highest-scoring languages include four Algic languages and five Athabaskan languages, of which three (Ahtena, Dena’ina, and Tanacross) are spoken in Alaska.”
Groups insulated from eachother by cultural restrictions still share (even if by force or necessity) the overall culture of restrictions (or suppression) and the concepts and moral and limitations on individual opportunity that they entail.
I confess I don’t know what that means. If I seize you off a boat and lock you up for illegal entry, does that mean we share a “culture of restrictions”?
We are all part of a global culture of borders, systems of legal and illegal entry, and incarceration. But I meant this at a level somewhat closer to home. If there are lines you don’t cross in a society, that may yield different cultures on the two sides, but the line itself and the things you must and mustn’t do because you’re on one side of it, are part of your culture.
Re cross-purposes, maybe some aspects labeled as culture are better assigned to social framework/environment, to distinguish them from the “real” culture created, lived and sometimes enjoyed within a particular social framework/environmrnt.
I’m one of the authors of the paper mentioned in the original post — hope it’s OK to speak up.
Of course — thanks very much for taking the time to comment, especially since your clarifications are helpful (and your suggestion that we read the actual paper a good one).
@ DE What Hat is saying (I think) is that modern ethnonationalist states are acting immorally in trying to enforce a monoculture on all those within their political domain. This is true.
-> I agree completely
@ V Apologies, the remark about the Raj was a shot in the dark; I grew up on the Texas-Mexican border and thought later that it had some similarity with South India but meant nothing deep by that.
@ Trond : agree as well
Noachian was idle curiousity.
If I hadn’t stumbled over their Wikipedia article a few years ago, I wouldn’t know about any of this.
FWIW checking the google books ngram viewer for noachide and noahide (w/ “Case-insensitive”) shows an extreme and sudden peak for the former in 2003 followed by near-immediate collapse, and a more modest but longer lasting peak in 2014-19 for the latter. I sort of suspect these are both more noise than signal and there’s something quirky or glitchy going on in the underlying dataset.
There’s a lot of crosstalk from geology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noachian
IIRC the Noachian language is apparently useful for summoning and commanding (or not) demons etc in some of the works of C Stross
the idea of the “noachide laws” having any kind of meaning outside rather recondite theology (legal/ritual professionals deciding which non-christians might not be comprehensively damned in specific ways or which non-jews might be considered authentically ethical in specific ways) is just part of the 20thC religious right project of creating the idea of a “judeo-christian” “culture” as a euphemism for Respectable Right-Wing White People. it’s jack chick and ChaBaD all the way down, and should be treated with the same respect as the idea of japethitic, semitic, and hamitic bloodlines.
share (even if by force or necessity) the overall culture of restrictions (or suppression) and the concepts and moral and limitations on individual opportunity
the line itself and the things you must and mustn’t do because you’re on one side of it, are part of your culture
um, no. if i think you’re not human, structure my society around that belief, and force you into captivity, that doesn’t mean we share a culture. steel is not something “shared” by the person wearing the shackle and the person holding the key. firearms are not something “shared” by the death squad and its victim.
@jack morava:
(Old) Enochian, I think.
(Modern Enochian would presumably only elicit contempt from demonic peevers. “Dunno what these young necromancers of today are coming to, what with all these sloppy constructions and pointless neologisms. Eat them, I say!”)
Enoch is a more spiritually badass name than Noah. More iffy-apocrypha-evoking.
What rozele said about the “Noachide” laws.
I’m now mildly curious re whether it’s true (and if so why) that “Japheth” was not a name that ever found much favor among the earlier American ethnocultural groups who were generally infatuated by Old Testament names. Maybe because the Biblical Japheth, however much thought a proto-“European” by others unduly interested in such things, was from the Puritan POV not in the proper covenanted-people lineage but kind of off to the side like Esau or Ishmael? You can find a few dudes named “Japhet” in the 1810 Census, though.
I was just the other day noticing that one of my great-great-grandfathers, Old-Testamentally-named Reuben, was part of a large family that seemed to have the whole alphabet covered, Old-Testamentally, in between his brother Asahel and his sister Zilpha/Zylpha (spelling not consistent among sources, although it’s with a “y” on her gravestone). That said, he also had inter alia a sister Harriet and a brother Lorenzo, so Yankee onomastic practices were notably drifting away from sola scriptura as the 18th century transitioned into the 19th.
@JWB: do you have a notion what was going on with spanish names in yankee families in that period? i’ve got a few in my old-line new england ancestry (my favorite, predictably, being a rozilla*), who are rock-ribbed enough that one of them got kicked out of maine for being too nice to quakers, and another was involved in starting king philip’s war. i thought for a while that the u.s. war on mexico might have something to do with it, but the timing doesn’t quite work.
.
* not to be confused with the kaiju adoshemzilla.
@rozele: I don’t. I would note that Washington Irving published _Tales of the Alhambra_ over a decade prior to the Mexican War, and its success suggests some sort of cultural resonance, including maybe an early taste of the positive-valence exoticization of Islam that ultimately brought us the Shriners.
As to my three-greats-Uncle Lorenzo, the name is the same in Spanish and Italian and I think I reflexively think of the Italian association as dominant, because Medicis etc., but it’s probably hazardous for me to assume I understand how my great-great-great-grandparents thought of the name when they applied it to a son.
An early Yankee Lorenzo was this Connecticut-born itinerant preacher, who was apparently quite a celebrity in his day and may have been a proximate source for parents ignorant of the Medicis to use the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Dow
Gonzales Lodge comes to mind.
Alonzo Church was named after his great-grandfather, says WP,
William Carlos Williams is too late to be an example, and anyhow his mother was Puerto Rican and his father raised in the Dominican Republic, so no mystery there.
Cf. Almanzo Wilder (1859–1949), of Little House on the Prairie fame, a Yankee from upstatemost New York.
I’ve been reminded that Saussure considered systems related by opposition as well as inclusion in linguistics (\eg systems in which if something is not A or B then it must be C, etc), and I suppose that’s why I tend to think of masters and slaves as part of the same system, but related by opposition. I think Anthony Burgess is said to have claimed that English and French are part of the same language (tho I think he must have included a lot of culture in what he called language).
um, no. if i think you’re not human, structure my society around that belief, and force you into captivity, that doesn’t mean we share a culture. steel is not something “shared” by the person wearing the shackle and the person holding the key. firearms are not something “shared” by the death squad and its victim
If you don’t like the word “shared” because it implies some liberality or voluntarity, let’s use “common”. Culture is a set of expected behaviors, and a set of behaviors that is expected from masters and slaves is also a culture (e.g., in the Jim Crow South, for African Americans not to speak up against Whites and for Whites not to tolerate speaking up); nobody says that culture has to be nice, comfortable, or voluntary. Human sacrifice, slavery, foot-binding, genital mutilation all are part of specific cultures.
About specialised vocabulary for horses.
Mitchell, T. F., 1957. The Language of Buying and Selling in Cyrenaica. Hésperis 44: 31–71
On page 65 there is a dialogue between a buyer and seller of a horse, with two footnotes. One compares words for horse ages to words for sheep ages and sheep and goat sizes.
The other directs to the page 69 where you find an appendix with discussion of whorls on horse body, which bring (or not) luck.
I like “Whose is this roan?” “Mine (lit. everything is God’s).”
I’ve been reminded that Saussure considered systems related by opposition as well as inclusion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raw_and_the_Cooked
I think it would make a good plot for a fairy tale. A rich merchant buys a slave girl. After long and thorough examination of sky constellations and moles on her body (and whorls, how else) that bring good luck. On their way to his home he brokes his leg and within a week he is bankrupt and homeless and unable to provide for himself he is saved only by slave girl’s efforts. Eventually she makes him a king or something.
@LH, yes, I liked it too. For the reason Lameen understands better than I do, they won’t respond to “is this [thing for sale] yours?” with direct “yes”.
Another possible response is given on p 46, but I’m not sure I understand it.
The Law and the Crooked.
“Eventually she makes him a king or something” – teaches linguistics to him.