[Xmca-l] Re: Indigenous Australian English

[Greg Thompson]

Andy,

Not sure if this gets at what you're describing but Whorf deals quite
extensively with the tendency of English to make processes into things. His
classic piece on this addresses the way that English (speakers) can turn
processes like lightning or waves or even time itself into countable nouns
and how this might affect the way that we understand the world around us
(esp. time). Really fascinating stuff and not unrelated to Vygotsky's idea
of semiotic mediation (as an old paper by John Lucy pointed out a long time
ago).

I wish I knew more about the aboriginal Australian languages and could
point more toward the kinds of things that you are talking about but I'm no
linguist and most of what I know are restricted to the differences in
directional terms as compared to English - cardinal vs. relative (and I
happened to be teaching this two days ago - or should I say "two nights
have passed since I taught this").

Cheers,
greg


On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 7:00 AM Elizabeth Fein <nickrenz@uchicago.edu>
wrote:

> This conversation is also making me think of a recently emerging option at
> least in English vernacular (I don't know if this is showing up in other
> languages): dropping the preposition "of" before an abstract noun in order
> to emphasize the authoritative power of the concept itself in the absence
> of any specific manifestation.  (i.e. "...because *science*" or "because
> *reasons*"). This is a bit different of course because it is a deliberate
> grammatical modification to an existing form that calls attention to itself
> as such.
>
> Best,
> Elizabeth
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 8:37 AM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I think it means that Australians are leading the way into a future
>> without articles. Actually, very few languages use an article system; as
>> you know, Russian does not, and neither does Chinese, Korean, Tibetan or
>> Turkish.
>>
>> As you point out, English doesn't always use articles either. When we
>> embed singular nouns in prepositional phrases, the use of the article tends
>> to depend on the meaning. Compare "in the morning" with "at night", or "at
>> weekend" with "over the the weekend", "down town" with "down the street",
>> etc. The usual analysis is that "at night" functions mostly as an adverb
>> ("nightwise") while "in the morning" is a minor verb (i.e. a verb with no
>> subject but an object). "I go home", "I speak language" and "I spent two
>> weeks in hospital/jail/church" can be analyzed in much the same way.
>>
>> I find it useful to think of articles as part of a whole range of
>> prenominal modifiers that go from deictic to defining. So for example when
>> my student writes "My mom had to have an urgent C-section surgical
>> operation" the "an" part is maximally orienting but minimally defining (it
>> just means I am orienting towards it as an instance of something but it
>> doesn't say what it's an instance of), the "urgent" part is somewhat less
>> orienting and more defining, the "C-section" part is classifying, and
>> therefore more defining still, until we come to the part that is maximally
>> defining and minimally orienting, "operation". Not only nominal groups but
>> verbal groups obey this rule ("had to have", where "had" is tensed because
>> it is orienting and locates the speaker in time but "to have" is untensed
>> and simply defines the nature of the process). Whole clauses can also be
>> seen this way ("My mom" is the deictic part of the clause and "operation"
>> is the defining part).
>>
>> Not all languages do this, because not all languages need to. So for
>> example Russian doesn't require this kind of rigid order. Because of those
>> pesky cases, so hard for Russian students to master, it is always clear
>> who does what to whom by what means, and the order simply doesn't matter.
>> Same is true in Latin. This is why I think you miss the point a little when
>> you speak of "a perizhivanie" vs. "perizhivanie". That's not how you think
>> in Russian.
>>
>> dk
>>
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 8:57 PM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>>
>>> While we have the attention of some linguists .... Indigenous
>>> Australians have a way of using certain specific words, for example,
>>> country, culture, language, community, which in English we usually use with
>>> a personal pronoun, as in "I can speak your language," or article, "is this
>>> the country you come from?" as if they were countable nouns, but which
>>> Indigenous Australians use without an article or personal pronoun, as in "I
>>> went to country" or "when I speak language ...," much like the word "home"
>>> which can be used without the "my" or "your."
>>>
>>> This usage conveys a meaning which is generally understood, but is used
>>> only in relation to the Indigenous people. I understand it. But I find it
>>> hard to put into words what is actually being done when words are used like
>>> this. I use words like "science" or "religion" in the same way, I guess.
>>> What does it mean linguistically??
>>>
>>> Andy
>>> --
>>> ------------------------------
>>> Andy Blunden
>>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>>
>>

-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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