[Xmca-l] Mamamamamahln'iqk'okmaqama

[David Kellogg]

Benjamin Lee Whorf was an inspector for a fire insurance company in
Connecticut, run by, among others,the poet Wallace Stevens. While doing
inspections, he noticed that in addition to the material situational
setting (the bricks and mortar) of factories, the relationships between
people, realized as language, could be a fire hazard. So for example
workers taking a cigarette break sometimes threw their fag ends into
"empty" gasoline barrels, which were full of gas fumes.

Studying with Edward Sapir (who is the real source of many of Vygotsky's
insights about internalization, about self-directed speech, and even about
the difference between visio-graphic complexes and semantic concepts),
Whorf became one of the great linguists of the twentieth century. But
although he was enrolled as a PhD student with Sapir, he never bothered to
get the degree, and as a result there has been all kinds of snarkiness
about his so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Some of this snarkiness (e.g.
Steven Pinker, John McWhorter) even dresses up its anti-geneticism as moral
rectitude, supposing that Whorf, who actually argued that Hopi grammar was
closer to Einsteinian relativity than Standard Average European, was
claiming that "primitive" people only had "primitive" thoughts because they
have primitive languages.

Consider the amazing word/sentence "mamamamamahln'iqk'okmaqama", from the
Nootka language on Vancouver Island in Canada. In English we would need a
whole sentence to render the meaning: "They each did so by virtue of their
characteristic of resembling white folks". Not only is it semantically free
of our theories of race (because it suggests that the motive of behavior is
not racial but has to do with a kind of role play), it is even
grammatically so, because it contains only one actual vocabulary item,
"mamahl", or "white folks". All the rest of the word/sentence consists of
grammatical functors like our English "of" or "the" or "like". So almost
anything, e.g. "ndma" or "doll" could be inserted without any change
inmeaning: "mamamamandman'iqk'okmaqama" means something like "they each did
so by virtue of their characteristic of resembling dolls".

Doesn't BOTH calling this kind of analysis of language either "subjective"
(i.e. dependent on the language of the analysand) or "objective" (i.e.
existing prior to human consciousness) rather miss the point? In fact,
isn't the use of "subject" and "object" in analyzing languages that lack
both simply another instance of mamamamamahln'iqk'okmaqama?

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article;

 David Kellogg (2019) THE STORYTELLER’S TALE: VYGOTSKY’S ‘VRASHCHIVANIYA’,
THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT AND ‘INGROWING’ IN THE WEEKEND STORIES OF
KOREAN CHILDREN, British Journal of Educational Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
<https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200>


Some e-prints available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GSS2cTAVAz2jaRdPIkvj/full?target=10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200
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