By: Janet Holmes
Native American and Australian Aboriginal languages are often cited as examples which roundly refute popular misconceptions about primitive languages, e.g. 'simple societies can't have complex grammars'. Kwakiutl, a Native American language, for example, requires a grammatical classification of nouns based on whether they are visible or not. And while French requires every noun to be assigned to one of two genders, Dyirbal, an Australian Aboriginal language, has four such categories.
Using Western criteria, the traditional nomadic lifestyle of the Aboriginal people of Australia seems very simple. Their culture, however, is thousands of years old and their languages are amongst the most interesting and grammatically complex that have been researched. Every noun in Dyirbal belongs to one of the four classes, illustrated in table 1. Consequently, whenever a Dyirbal speaker uses a noun in a sentence the noun must be preceded by one of the four classifiers: bayi, balan, balam or bala. Can you identify any semantic coherence between the items in the different classes?
While there is some basis perceived shared semantic features for the allocation of Dyirbal nouns to different classes, the answer to this question is not at all obvious to those from other cultures. The general patterns Dyirbal speakers seem to use to learn the system can be summarised as follows:
I. Bayi: (human) males; some animals
II. Balan: (human) females, birds, water, fire, fighting
III. Balam: non-flesh food
IV. Bala: everything else
Particular types of experience establish associations which determine the class membership of some items. So, for instance, fish are in class I because they are animated, and fishing implements are also in class I because they associated with fish. This also explains why sun and stars are in the same class as fire. However, Dyirbal myths and cultural beliefs also make a contribution to class allocation. So, contrary to Western mythology, the moon is male and husband of the sun, which is female. Hence the moon is in class I with men, while the sun is in class II with women. Birds are believed to be the dead human females, and hence they are also in class II. The system is of course automatic for Dyirbal speakers, and one should not necessarily expect a speaker to be able to explain it to an outsider. Nor should we expect the relationship between categorisation and cultural beliefs to be direct, transparent or available to reflection. After all, a German speaker would be hard pressed to explain Mädchen meaning 'girl' is in the same category as inanimate objects such as books (Buch), while English speakers would have difficulty interpreting the significance of the fact that the English demonstratives this vs that code degrees of proximity to the speaker.
Even at the lexico-semantic level Aboriginal languages challenge Western preconceptions about primitive languages, as table 2 illustrates.
Clearly Kunwinjku has many more terms to label distinctions among kangaroos and wallabies than English does. The reasons are obvious: kangaroos are an important part of the Aboriginal people's environment. In cultures which use rice as a staple of diet, there are distinct terms not only for different types of rice, but also for many different ways of cooking rice. Bird-watchers, skiers, geologists and gardeners are similarly able to lexically identify distinctions of importance to them. This suggests an alternative to Whorf's position, then: rather than language determining what is perceived, it is rather the physical and socio-environment which determines the distinctions that the language develops.
From this perspective, language provides a means of encoding a community's knowledge, beliefs, values, i.e. its culture. Tahitians don't make a distinction between 'sadness' and 'sickness', for instance, using the same word both. This reflects their belief that 'sadness/sickness' can be attributed to an attack by evil spirits, a belief that may initially seem odd to someone from Western culture. However, Western medical practice now recognises depression as an illness, and English uses many metaphorical terms for depression which no doubt appear just as strange to those from other cultures, e.g. feeling blue, in low spirits, feeling down, under the weather, and so on. The word mate covers a continuum from 'sick' and 'dead' in Maori, a continuum that Western cultures perceives as a sharp division reflected in the use of two quite different words. But Maori culture does not make a sharp distinction between the living and the dead. The dead are considered to watch over the living and are in this sense always present. Dead kinsfolk are always explicitly referred to in any ritual, and treated as an extension of the living family. Less tangible concepts such as kinship further illustrate the complexities of the relationship between language and culture. In Maori culture, relative age is very important. Even the status of the tribe or iwi to which you belong will be identified in teina and tuakana terms relative to other tribes. The importance of the extended family or whānau as an important social unit is also reflected in the kinship system. Kinship labels reflect the mutual rights and obligations of different members of the whānau towards each other. In rural areas of New Zealand Maori children typically grow up close contact with their grandparents, aunties and uncles, and they may spend extended periods of time living in the households of relations other than their parents. These traditional social relationships are reflected in the use of the same term whaea both for child's mother and for the mother's sisters, while the term pāpā refers not only to a child's father but also to his father's brothers. The same pattern holds for terms used to refer to a child's siblings and cousins; in these cases gender and relative age are semantically marked, but degree of kinship (as viewed through Western eyes) is not lexically distinguished. So the lexical labels identify those with similar social rights and obligations in relation to the speaker. Clearly, linguistic terminology here reflects important cultural relationships.
It has been suggested that all kinship systems are likely to encode distinctions based on genealogy and biology: so parenthood, marriage relationships, sex and generation are distinctions expressed in some way in most systems that have been studied. But the precise ways in which they are encoded, the fineness of the distinctions and their cultural significance differs dramatically from one culture to another. In Njamal. an Australian Aboriginal language with no more than 100 speakers in the 1950s when the data was collected, the complex and intricate kinship system provides insights into the ways in which the tribe's activities were organised. Like Maori, Njamal has distinct terms for younger vs older siblings and younger cousins. Maraga, for example, refers to a younger brother or sister, and to some younger cousins. And in Njamal, there is a specific kinship term for every member of the tribe, however distantly they are related to you. This clearly indicates the importance of kinship relationships in the social organisation of the tribe.
Every Njamal person belongs to one of two distinct 'moieties' (descent groups) and in this tribe your moiety membership is determined by your father. Moiety membership is signalled explicitly throughout the kinship system, reflecting and reinforcing the fact that for Njamal people, moiety membership is a fundamental distinction of tribal life. Shared moiety membership creates obligation to care for people when they need it. Moiety membership also restricts your marriage options since you may only marry someone from the other moiety. This makes sense of the fact that some cousins have same kinship terms as brothers and sisters, while others do not. You can marry your father's sister's children (opposite moiety), but not your father's brother's children (same moiety). Thus kinship terms signal your potential marriage patterns. Again, the lexical labels serve as indicators of the complex mutual social rights and obligations of community members.
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| Pauh, bacang, mangga, mempelam and kuini are Malay mango terms. |
Native American and Australian Aboriginal languages are often cited as examples which roundly refute popular misconceptions about primitive languages, e.g. 'simple societies can't have complex grammars'. Kwakiutl, a Native American language, for example, requires a grammatical classification of nouns based on whether they are visible or not. And while French requires every noun to be assigned to one of two genders, Dyirbal, an Australian Aboriginal language, has four such categories.
Using Western criteria, the traditional nomadic lifestyle of the Aboriginal people of Australia seems very simple. Their culture, however, is thousands of years old and their languages are amongst the most interesting and grammatically complex that have been researched. Every noun in Dyirbal belongs to one of the four classes, illustrated in table 1. Consequently, whenever a Dyirbal speaker uses a noun in a sentence the noun must be preceded by one of the four classifiers: bayi, balan, balam or bala. Can you identify any semantic coherence between the items in the different classes?
While there is some basis perceived shared semantic features for the allocation of Dyirbal nouns to different classes, the answer to this question is not at all obvious to those from other cultures. The general patterns Dyirbal speakers seem to use to learn the system can be summarised as follows:
I. Bayi: (human) males; some animals
II. Balan: (human) females, birds, water, fire, fighting
III. Balam: non-flesh food
IV. Bala: everything else
 |
| Table 1: Dyirbal noun classes |
Particular types of experience establish associations which determine the class membership of some items. So, for instance, fish are in class I because they are animated, and fishing implements are also in class I because they associated with fish. This also explains why sun and stars are in the same class as fire. However, Dyirbal myths and cultural beliefs also make a contribution to class allocation. So, contrary to Western mythology, the moon is male and husband of the sun, which is female. Hence the moon is in class I with men, while the sun is in class II with women. Birds are believed to be the dead human females, and hence they are also in class II. The system is of course automatic for Dyirbal speakers, and one should not necessarily expect a speaker to be able to explain it to an outsider. Nor should we expect the relationship between categorisation and cultural beliefs to be direct, transparent or available to reflection. After all, a German speaker would be hard pressed to explain Mädchen meaning 'girl' is in the same category as inanimate objects such as books (Buch), while English speakers would have difficulty interpreting the significance of the fact that the English demonstratives this vs that code degrees of proximity to the speaker.
Even at the lexico-semantic level Aboriginal languages challenge Western preconceptions about primitive languages, as table 2 illustrates.
 |
| Table 2: Kunwinjku kangaroo terms |
Clearly Kunwinjku has many more terms to label distinctions among kangaroos and wallabies than English does. The reasons are obvious: kangaroos are an important part of the Aboriginal people's environment. In cultures which use rice as a staple of diet, there are distinct terms not only for different types of rice, but also for many different ways of cooking rice. Bird-watchers, skiers, geologists and gardeners are similarly able to lexically identify distinctions of importance to them. This suggests an alternative to Whorf's position, then: rather than language determining what is perceived, it is rather the physical and socio-environment which determines the distinctions that the language develops.
From this perspective, language provides a means of encoding a community's knowledge, beliefs, values, i.e. its culture. Tahitians don't make a distinction between 'sadness' and 'sickness', for instance, using the same word both. This reflects their belief that 'sadness/sickness' can be attributed to an attack by evil spirits, a belief that may initially seem odd to someone from Western culture. However, Western medical practice now recognises depression as an illness, and English uses many metaphorical terms for depression which no doubt appear just as strange to those from other cultures, e.g. feeling blue, in low spirits, feeling down, under the weather, and so on. The word mate covers a continuum from 'sick' and 'dead' in Maori, a continuum that Western cultures perceives as a sharp division reflected in the use of two quite different words. But Maori culture does not make a sharp distinction between the living and the dead. The dead are considered to watch over the living and are in this sense always present. Dead kinsfolk are always explicitly referred to in any ritual, and treated as an extension of the living family. Less tangible concepts such as kinship further illustrate the complexities of the relationship between language and culture. In Maori culture, relative age is very important. Even the status of the tribe or iwi to which you belong will be identified in teina and tuakana terms relative to other tribes. The importance of the extended family or whānau as an important social unit is also reflected in the kinship system. Kinship labels reflect the mutual rights and obligations of different members of the whānau towards each other. In rural areas of New Zealand Maori children typically grow up close contact with their grandparents, aunties and uncles, and they may spend extended periods of time living in the households of relations other than their parents. These traditional social relationships are reflected in the use of the same term whaea both for child's mother and for the mother's sisters, while the term pāpā refers not only to a child's father but also to his father's brothers. The same pattern holds for terms used to refer to a child's siblings and cousins; in these cases gender and relative age are semantically marked, but degree of kinship (as viewed through Western eyes) is not lexically distinguished. So the lexical labels identify those with similar social rights and obligations in relation to the speaker. Clearly, linguistic terminology here reflects important cultural relationships.
It has been suggested that all kinship systems are likely to encode distinctions based on genealogy and biology: so parenthood, marriage relationships, sex and generation are distinctions expressed in some way in most systems that have been studied. But the precise ways in which they are encoded, the fineness of the distinctions and their cultural significance differs dramatically from one culture to another. In Njamal. an Australian Aboriginal language with no more than 100 speakers in the 1950s when the data was collected, the complex and intricate kinship system provides insights into the ways in which the tribe's activities were organised. Like Maori, Njamal has distinct terms for younger vs older siblings and younger cousins. Maraga, for example, refers to a younger brother or sister, and to some younger cousins. And in Njamal, there is a specific kinship term for every member of the tribe, however distantly they are related to you. This clearly indicates the importance of kinship relationships in the social organisation of the tribe.
Every Njamal person belongs to one of two distinct 'moieties' (descent groups) and in this tribe your moiety membership is determined by your father. Moiety membership is signalled explicitly throughout the kinship system, reflecting and reinforcing the fact that for Njamal people, moiety membership is a fundamental distinction of tribal life. Shared moiety membership creates obligation to care for people when they need it. Moiety membership also restricts your marriage options since you may only marry someone from the other moiety. This makes sense of the fact that some cousins have same kinship terms as brothers and sisters, while others do not. You can marry your father's sister's children (opposite moiety), but not your father's brother's children (same moiety). Thus kinship terms signal your potential marriage patterns. Again, the lexical labels serve as indicators of the complex mutual social rights and obligations of community members.
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| The 4th Faculty of Languages and Linguistics International Postgraduate Conference: Expanding Research in Languages and Linguistics in Asia (FLLIPC 2013) |
