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0:12
Hi everyone, and welcome back to the week for Overview here in your culture, anthropology class, anthropology, one or two. So this week we're talking about language and you just have one chapter to read. But I should note that this chapter is really complex. And in fact, we offer an entire class just on the subject of what we call anthropological linguistics or language and culture, and that is our anthro 108 class. So if you're interested in language and culture and all
0:38
the connections we'll be talking about today between those two subjects, definitely enroll in our anthropology class. I really recommend it. You'll cover the topics I'm covering today in much more depth. If you can imagine. Just the topics of language and gender might be one week in the class when we get to Charles Hockett, work on the forms of language that could itself be its own week. So we'll be looking at language symbols and then a bit on the connections of language and
1:04
gender. So first off, we can talk about language and symbols and really define some terms and get a sense of what we're talking about here. So language could be called any system of communication. It could be sounds. It could be gestures. It could be hieroglyphs. It could be alphabetic writing that's put together in a meaningful way according to a set of rules. And we often talk about things like syntax and grammar and how you take the words of a vocabulary or a
1:31
lexicon and piece them together. If someone, as we'll talk about this week, if someone's creating a sci fi language, you can't just create a bunch of gibberish. In fact, most of us would recognize something would be off with a language that is just made up. And that's why the folks that create sci fi languages for Star Wars and Star Trek and Game of Thrones are really interested in something that is an actual language that has, as the anthropologist Haveland says, this set of rules in
2:00
a meaningful way in which the various elements, whatever those are, are put together. Now, we can talk a little bit about language origins, and I encourage you to check this out on your own. You can look at how, for example, Indo-European languages, which is one of the languages that we speak a branch of it and also connected to, as you can see here, parts of Europe and then Australia and much of South America. So you get a I think, a real good sense of here, just how languages evolve
2:28
over time and you get a sense of the connections between various languages. There's so much linguistic diversity around the world. In fact, even in like a U.S. city like Los Angeles, there could be close to 200 languages spoken. And we're not even talking about dialects, which are the regional variations of language that are really important for anthropologists who study language to consider in terms of their specificity. So language, origins, really important topic. We also
2:55
can talk about the biological basis of language. And what I'm showing you here is some material that supplements what's in the chapter. So we definitely know that things like upright posture, the making of tools, intelligence and language are really aspects that define us as a species, as Homo sapiens. When we get into language itself, we know that certain characteristics are necessary, not just cognition and the brain, but definitely our our here are hearing our ears and also our
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vocal apparatuses that are used to produce sound, including, as you could see, the trachea, the vocal cord, among other biological parts of our body. Now, when we get into the inference is about when did language evolve and when did it develop? Very tricky to determine and the archaeological record. In fact, I often say it's kind of a chicken and egg question, like the tools developed first and then language and language develop and then tools. And the reason I'm talking about stone
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tools is it's a great example of a form of cognition reflected in material culture, remains that we know indicates high levels of intelligence. The same thing can be said as we'll talk about in a second of cave art of primitive forms of religion that we note in our evolutionary history from biological anthropology and archaeology. Now, we often ask a question connecting biology to culture. Was language necessary for social organization and the emergence of what we now call
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culture? A lot of culture anthropologists, myself included, would say yes, that we definitely, definitely needed language. And language is one of those devices that allows us to create empathy and altruism, feelings towards others and not just feelings for yourself. And as a result, we think language was a key way of creating intimacy among interpersonal communication and forms of interaction between people. So a lot of us would say that language and culture are intertwined and
4:46
thus very likely evolved at the same points in time. Now, a lot of anthropologists have discovered that in the archaeological record, some of the evidence, if you will, the soft tissue of our faces, of our mouths, of our throats and so forth don't survive. So sometimes we have to do reconstructions and there are some really cool reconstructions of Neanderthal type of languages that you can check out on the Internet. That maybe gives you a sense of how archaeologists tried to
5:13
infer, even though they're lacking the soft tissue in the archaeological record. And this is an example where archaeologists or anthropologists have taken fossil skulls, added Clay, to try to reconstruct this vocal area that we know is so key in terms of the anatomy and biology of language and thus come up with inference that a particular type of structure could be with all the soft tissue. They're inferring this. It could produce certain sounds and types of language. What type of
5:43
language, though? We, of course, would would not know because we can't travel back in time. Now, we know that somewhere around 50000 years or earlier, there's what we call a creative revolution. We see things in the archaeological record like cave art. We start to believe that ritual is developing because we find non utilitarian items are non useful items in graves. And thus we think there's. Spirituality that's burgeoning or developing, there might be higher cognition, sense of self and
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other altruism, and thus we connect that to forms of language. Also developing now, there's some interesting research people have talked about. Was there, in fact, a language gene? And if you want to, you can check out this particular article, and I believe I've linked this. If not, you can check it out from the Linguistics Society of America, talking about when language started and how we can again make some inferences. So I really encourage you in your work as you read beyond this class, to
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think about questions like this, because it's one of the most complex questions in terms of the evolution of human language, as reflected or not reflected in the archaeological record. Now, non-human language is very interesting as well, and it's important to make some comparisons between the types of signals, the nature of them, what they can communicate, what they can't communicate when we're say, comparing what we call animal symbiosis. And that refers to systems of
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signing, so systems of giving particular gestures. So if a honeybee moves in a particular way, in a particular pattern and speed, that then can communicate something to other honeybees. That's not the same, though, as what it's going to be getting into with language where language is generative and it can grow over time. So we don't have to create a new language just to create new vocabulary with technology. As a great example, when new forms of technology develop, we have ways
7:34
of incorporating and developing our language such that we can talk about that a lot of these other animals semiosis and signing systems and communication systems are not necessarily that same level complexity. It's not saying it's a good or bad thing. It's not saying that humans are better, but it is saying that the language we're talking about here differs greatly in nature. And this is straight from the textbook. We talk about call systems. And this is really what I was
7:59
getting at a second ago. As they say here, most animals use a combination of two or more systems in communication, but their systems are closed systems in that they cannot create new meanings or messages. Human communication is an open system that can easily create new meanings and messages. And they also talk about how animal communication systems are innate. They often don't have to learn. They just kind of know in some species maybe do have forms of learning that have to go along with
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it. We all know from our experiences speaking and learning languages at an earlier age that it's very hard to learn language and in fact, a lot of people would say. If you really want to learn a second language, you need to do it early on and you need to practice often, not maybe some of our language classes or systems in the early grades where I remember they try to teach us Spanish and they would come in and teach us five words a week and we would write them down and stuff. That's not
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really an effective way to learn language. We talk about language immersion because we realize it's a very social thing, thus emphasizing the connection of culture and language as well as its acquisition and learning and children. Now, much of nonhuman linguistics remains speculative. And one of the reasons is we often have to infer about higher level language and thought, some suggest that such studies or attempts to impose human language on non-human, say primates are an anthropocentric
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enterprise, meaning that we're assuming that Washoe or all the other famous chimps or apes who had levels of using American Sign language were assuming that they want to communicate with us and we're often assuming what they're communicating. There was one famous study I believe it was in in the case of Washoe, where the particular chimp communicated something and put together a word for, I think, a type of fruit and the word dirty or unclean. And the person studying this inferred
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that was an insult, that the chimp was upset and it combined two words to make an insult. But again, just like this, this diagram or comic sort of suggests here we don't know exactly what communication means. And it might be something like this in this chart or in this comic where indeed it's maybe not true communication, but it's a recognition of the other species there. It's not the kind of communication, though, that we can say really indicates a higher level of learning. Now,
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you can check out Desmond Morris, his video in our media section this week called The Language of the Body. I think it's really great to key in on some of this when we talk about non-human language and also when we get into things like proximity and body language and other forms of communication beyond our words and our speech patterns. So I mention in the case of honeybees, we talk about animal semiosis and have suggested as well that it's definitely the case that we we sometimes note
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a different type of language or communication system being spoken, jumping back a little bit to biology in the brain and biology and language. We know that certain areas, again, of our vocal cavity are needed, our vocal cords and so forth. And you can think about individuals with disabilities who have challenges when there's some damage that happens, say, to the brain or to particular parts of their body, thus preventing them from speaking fully. We know that there's an
11:16
interplay between various areas of the brain and how we produce sound and meaning through our vocalizations. And the book talks about the larynx, the palate and so forth, and how speech is a product of really many complex things going on in our body at one time. So really important to recognize the biological sides of this. Now we can also look at medicine and language and I'll just say have some experience. Am I going to get into it here? But experience with someone with brain
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cancer and very specifically working with a neurosurgeon here, Edward Chang, who does a lot of research. So that actually included this and this New York Times article and then a couple of his videos. So I know this surgeon pretty well and I just know some of his work and how people have brain cancer and have what's called a craniotomy, which is the tumor that's removed from the brain, never fully removed. A glioblastoma, which is one of the most difficult forms of brain cancer, is
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not curable. But what they can do, the surgeons can go in and remove much of the malignant area of the brain, very challenging to do. But one of the things that's that's very challenging is in post craniotomies, you see a lot of instances of challenges with speech. And so one of the things that Dr. Chang does at University of California, San Francisco, where he's a surgeon, is he has a research team. And following these surgeries, he will actually then send one of his assistants, the
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assistants will do all sorts of linguistic studies with the brain cancer patients after their surgery. And I was it was really interesting for me to witness some of this because I thought, like, this is a great opportunity to learn not just more about how to deal with and treat GBM glioblastoma multiforme or brain cancer, that particular type of brain cancer, but also to look at some of the linguistic challenges that happen to patients after they have parts of their brains removed
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doing what's called a resection. So speech and language difficulties, you could see there are a lot of connections between one in five people with a brain tumor diagnosis have a lot of difficulties with communication. So the research effort that he's making, in addition to his work as a neurosurgeon, is really fundamental to thinking about how patients can recover and better deal with their lives and their linguistic challenges following a craniotomy. Now, childhood language
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acquisition, I think, is another key issue, and in the text you can look at both the universal grammar theories and critical age range hypothesis. What is really key here is a lot of the indications are, again, language acquisition is a matter of exposure and immersion. So, again, if you have kids or if you're trying to learn a language, the key is to do it when you're young and to really immerse yourself. Do one of the study abroad programs work in another country if
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you get a chance to take classes in another country, because being around people who actually speak the language is really key to the acquisition of it. Now we can talk a little bit about what we call semiotics. And semiotics is a fancy way of talking about different signs or symbols. And by a sign, we don't literally mean a stop sign, although a stop sign is actually a sign, we mean anything in the world that can communicate some level of meaning. There's different levels of
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complexity when we study semiotics. And in fact, in my graduate program at the University of Iowa, I took a program. I took a class, rather, that was called semiotics. It was an anthropology class that just focused on these theories. And Charles Sanders Pierce, it's not pronounced "Pierce", but "Purse" is one of the really key founders of this discipline, along with Edwin Saussure, who is very famous for his notions of the arbitrariness of meanings and semiotics and signs. So Pierce
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believe that there are three elements, what he called a sign vehicle, something which represents something in a way, one way or another, an object, which is what the second vehicle represents. And the interpreter dtente, which is a new sign created within the interpreter's mind that is composed of the signed vehicle, plus the object itself. It is this element which is farthest removed from semiotic apprehension. So I encourage you, if you get the urge here to study more about
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semiotics. Another thing that Pierce talked about was the different modes. So there's something we call an icon, which would have a motivated connection. And typically that would be something that shares the physical similarity with something else. So if you saw a sign that was warning about fire danger and there was a picture of fire on that, you could say that really is kind of working at the level of the icon versus an index where there's a co-occurrence or co association in time
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and space. So if you see smoke, you say, well, that is, you know, as an example, the index. That must mean that there's fire, not always the case. But again, we kind of piece that together in our complex systems of communication. And then the symbol to go back to the work of Saussure, who said there's an arbitrary connection between something that represents something else in the world and that which it represents. So, for example, if we have the word dog in English and in German, it's
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Hunde. You know, it's not necessarily the case that there is a reason why we call our version dog and Germans call it Hund. Now, there are some theories out there, including some interesting Russian linguistic theories that actually say that a lot of what happens in into European language, there's an evolution from one primary form and they actually suggest something interesting that it's more like iconic. So the idea is the word water, some would suggest over time evolved
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because the early examples of however that word was spoken by a proto human ancestors sounded like maybe the flow of water. It's kind of a controversial theory out there, but it is interesting. And that would go against what Saussure is saying, which he says there's no meaningful connection between a sign and something it represents or a symbol and something it represents. Now, a symbol is something that doesn't have that motivated association. So we can make something
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symbolic and say, you know, a particular sign or symbol or object has a meaning over time that meaning is created. And there doesn't have to be, as in the case of the icon or the index or anything like a co-occurrence or a physical or some other similarity. And again, you can look at some examples here. We can also talk about what the differences between the signifier and signified. So I just wanted to give you a little bit there. A crash course in semiotics. We won't
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cover it that much. But it's important just to get some of this background. Again, this is the idea of Saussure. The arbitrariness of the sign is a central property of language when it's regarded as a system of signs emphasized by Fernandez Cesur and Cicero, which suggests that linguistic signs are arbitrary as there's no direct link between the form and the meaning of a sign. Now, there are exceptions to this, and we can think of words like quark or forms of onomatopoeia where you're
18:16
basically trying to represent in the sound that you're making, that sound that you are trying to represent from, say, another species or animal. And it really reminds us a little bit of the icon where there's a much more motivated connection as opposed to an unmotivated or arbitrary connection. So it's getting a little theoretical here. I know, but this is kind of just the level of depth that you can get into if you study. Semiotics and the topology of language and culture now Victor
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Turner is a really important symbolic anthropologist who took symbols to a new level of dimension. One of my first anthropology instructors actually was a student of Victor Turner. So I read a lot of his work, Victor Turner's work in our anthropology classes. And Turner was really interested in this key idea that symbols instigate social action, that they basically create situations where people do things because of the nature of the symbols. And I think
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of this in our contemporary political times with the red MAGA hat that's connected to Trump supporters and just some of the symbols that people brought along to the terrorist insurrection, the attack on the capital that happened back a year or so ago in January. And I think about some of the symbols, because very often people look to the symbols as a form of justification or even a political form of communication amongst a group and almost like a form of esprit de corps or group group cohesion
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develops because of these symbols. So taking some of Turner's work from anthropology from ages ago, back in the 50s and 60s, we can apply it today to a lot of our political systems, our culture of branding and pop culture, and talk about how symbols cause us to do certain things or act in certain ways, thus emphasizing this idea of symbols, instigating social action. Now, metaphors are often really important in the discussion of these issues in anthropology, and I included for
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this week metaphors we live by, if you want to check it off by Lakoff and Johnson, a super influential text about the role of metaphor in our everyday lives. And if we want to look at what a metaphor is, very simple definition. Is it something that expresses another thing? It expresses one idea using the domain, if you will, of another idea. So things that can sometimes be not even related like conduit metaphors or something where you're thinking of the idea
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getting across to someone, it's it's almost like it's moving through space or you're reason came through to us. So there's a lot of metaphorical language that we use. If someone says that person works like a machine or something, it's connecting the person's work to an object that is not organic or living, but a machine, a piece of technology. So check out Lakoff and Johnson's work, because it's super fascinating in terms of the implications that the book talks about some
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various forms of language that connect to spoken or written language, but are actually beyond it or complementary to it. So kinesics is an example of body language. As I'm talking, I often will do this as you probably do. It's just another way to communicate things. You can emphasize things as a speaker if you're making a point and say, really, listen here, write like your hands are saying something beyond what your your vocal apparat are are saying or doing to produce the sounds or the
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meaning. So kinesics and body language are superimportant. If someone's sitting in a class and they're kind of like this and their heads down, it kind of indicates they're bored. And so maybe you try to do something to pick them up and say, hey, you know, let's get you involved in this discussion. So kinesics are a huge part of our language in our everyday lives as our proxemics or spatial forms of language. So if you look at various charts and I encourage you to check out
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the video of this week from Vox on proxemics and what proxemics mean, you could look in different cultures and look at the interpersonal just distances between people and understand how those work. If you've ever met or had friends, I remember in graduate school different friends from different cultures, sometimes they would get really close to me when speaking and at first it was a little off putting. And then I realized what was at work is proxemics. That is just a different
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culture and thus a different way of negotiating space and language. So it's really interesting to see that some cultures will have, you know, very distant kind of proxemics or closer or more intimate proxemics again, using our notions of cultural relativism. It's not good or bad to be one way or the other. It's just a difference that we experience in our cultures. Now, body language is an example of speech beyond our actual language. So we can look at examples of pitch, loudness,
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tempo and duration of the sound during pitch can convey any number of messages, a question, sarcasm, defiance, surprise, confidence or lack of it. And so it's kind of interesting, right? Like if someone says, I ask you a question, what do you think of that? Did you or did you like did you like your dinner? Yeah, it's OK. Right? If you say that just the the pitch, the duration of it, the way I'm saying it, kind of what we call the affect, which is how we kind of communicate our personal
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meaning or moods often in our cultures, the way we say something relates to a language. And it's very important because if you're doing any research in language, you're often are looking at things beyond the words and the meanings themselves. You're looking at this interplay. Of all of these aspects of Proxima para language and also Kinesis now this is a very famous study by Charles Hockett and this is discussed very in very good detail in the textbook. I did want to go over it here,
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though. He called these design features. And the idea behind the design features is it really indicates a key aspect of having a complex language. Some of these could be shared by non-human species. A lot of these towards the end, as they get more complex, are really specific to humans. So one thing he said is you have to have a vocal auditory channel. You have to have communication that includes speech out of your mouth and then into someone else's ear. Now we
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know an American sign language, of course, doing signs. It can also be, you know, speech happening with your fingers in your hands. And then the eyes are picking up that communication. But he was very interested in this idea of the vocal auditory channel and talks about some advantages, including advantages over other sensory forms like touch odor and visual communication, also broadcast transmission and directional and reception so anyone within range can hear what we're saying and
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they can get the information that they need in terms of the direction and timing of sound. Now, again, if you have a disability or as I was talking about with a post-operative brain cancer patients having craniotomies, of course, a lot of this breaks apart. And thus that's a reason we really need to study it more carefully following those surgeries. There's also what we call rapid fading or a transitory nature to things. Speech is transitory. It's gone quickly and that's generally
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a disadvantage. Now, of course, with recording devices today, we can deal with some of that. But if you're listening to someone's speech and you don't take any notes, you lose maybe a lot of that meaning after the fact, just because of your memory and the fact that you don't remember as many things that that maybe you could if you would actually take a transcription of that speech. There's also an interchangeability. So if I sound say something to you, another person who speaks my
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language can also say and understand that. So it's interchangeable. There's also total feedback. We can hear and feel our speech so we can adjust, we can compensate even if we have a loss of hearing or a motor speech skill. So there's something going on in the brain with complex cognition. So even with brain cancer post-operative patients, they can compensate for language loss and literal loss of their brain functions following a craniotomy. There's also what we call
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specialization. So you could see hear someone whistling to call a dog is a very specialized form of communication that allows you to do things in times or situations that really could have an evolutionary advantage to them. I'm thinking of something like raising your voice or someone shouting help or something like that. It's going to really draw the attention and thus maybe has an evolutionary connection back to our early ancestors because they needed ways of signifying
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danger, let's say if they were being confronted with other predators and they had to protect their own clan or tribe during times of danger. There's also what we call semanticist, which is the association of Linguistic Signals with aspects of the social, cultural and physical world of a speech community. Some features of the world are highlighted, others are downplayed, and human language is able to convey very specific, detailed messages. Words have stable relationships of the
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objects and events that they represent. So in other words, to put it simply, if someone says to you you're eating dinner and they say, pass the salt, you don't have to learn like, well, what does this person mean by salt and what do they mean by pass? What do I do? What I don't understand this. You just know that right now, if you're very young and you don't have a lot of language or a lot of knowledge, of course, you might not know what salt is on a table. But the
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idea of semanticist suggests we don't have to constantly rework language. And this also connects to some of the future features where we talk about productivity and language being able to grow with time and to bring in new terms. Now, there's also the design feature of arbitrariness, and this is sistas notion. We won't go over it again. But there's an open nature of the link between an object and the meaning, what we call it, how we refer to it. You know, it's it really allows
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language to grow and to not be restricted by a limited number of terms or sounds for particular expressions in the world. There's also discreetness language is limited to a small number of sounds, and they're relatively small differences between sounds. It does get tricky, right? If you say Pin and Bean and a lot of movies, they might say P as in Paul and B as in Boy or something, because sometimes it's hard to hear if someone said Pen or Bean and you have to ask them
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to repeat themselves. But that discreetness is really key with with human language displacements. Another key one, this is allowing you to refer to things, events, places, people, contexts that are not present. So by displacing and saying shades of Julius Caesar, you don't have to go back in time to Rome and experience Julius Caesar. And the Roman world, no, in fact, it allows you language, allows human languages, allows you to displace meaning in time and in space, which is super key
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and something we often cannot find, like with our pets are dogs and cats when we're trying to communicate with them. I just mentioned this one human language is productive. So if someone has blue hair and in the past you didn't have blue hair, you don't have to invent an entirely new word for the hair. You could say she has blue hair and insert the word blue there. It's also the case. We do this with a lot of forms of technology. We speak of things. The language grows over. Time is
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productive. We don't have to invent a new language. We can add new terms and phrases to our existing language. Thus, it's a productive language, traditional transmission. This is maybe the most significant of these last four specific languages are taught and learned. They're passed on from one generation to another. In turn, languages enable humans to learn other things through tradition rather than direct experience. Such learning has a great survival value. So you can learn something
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like if you take, let's say, a manual to something, I can go through this manual, read it all and learn whatever it is that it's teaching me. And I don't actually have to maybe go and talk to a professional or an expert. Now, there's some degree of this where, you know, often I will go to YouTube because I like seeing things hands on, particularly if it involves technology. But as this diagram shows here, you know, you can talk about this. You don't have to experience directly
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an igloo. You can show a picture of it, the parent to the child. And thus it's a form of what we call traditional transmission superimportant for learning, for language and for culture. There's also duality of patterning. Presumably we say this is a recent development. There's a system of phonemes or sounds and morphemes or meaningful units of meaning. Such a language is patterned on both sound and meaning levels, all modern languages have this system with a virtually
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limitless capacity for expression and growth. So duality of patterning happens at the sound level and the meaning level. So if you say PAS as a phoneme and then you say please write, that's that has meaning to it, whereas PAS is just a sound. But we need the sound and meaning to create language and thus we speak of duality, of patterning. So as you look at how markets work there, it's really key to understanding the nature of language, including the nature of universal
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language and how languages communicate in various ways and what that communication entails, including among different species. The book has a really good chart about the universals of language. I won't go over all these, but we can talk about symbolic systems, various word orders. So we have in English what's called subject verb object (SVO) language. So I do something to something else. I pick up the pencil and I write with it. So the subject is I verb, I'm picking up and then the
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object is the pencil or the pen or the highlighter. So it's an SVO language and other languages. I recall in my linguistic anthro classes we study languages where they didn't have an SVO. They might have had a VSO or a different word order. But the word order again, really allows you to understand the nuance of the language. And when there's a regularity, I know in learning German in high school and college, sometimes, you know, irregular situations in language makes it really
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hard to learn that language. And in fact, English is a super challenging language because it has so many examples of irregularity. The verb to be is an example of, you know, a challenging verb, I think in English and also in other languages. And then some of those we talked about duality, patterning and discrete sounds, grammatical levels and so forth. But it's important just to review what these universals of language are. So check that out in the in the reading. Now, we talk about
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descriptive linguistics and descriptive linguistics studies, the phonemes of a language we call that phonology, and they can also study the lexicon or vocabulary of a language to know how the morphemes or those units of meaning are used to create new words or what we call morphology. They analyzed the rules by which speakers create phrases and sentences or what we call syntax. And they look at how these features all combine to convey meaning in certain social fields or
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contexts. And we call that semantics and pragmatics. And we'll talk about those terms here in a second. Now, fieldwork in anthropology and linguistic anthropology is also important.
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And I feel like a little bit I include Chuck Frank's work here, asking for a drink so you can you can check that out, which gives you a sense of just like how anthropologists think about language, you could do direct eliciting so you could ask someone, what's your word for cow in a particular language and you could write that down. You could also do what we call participant observation that we've been learning about. And you can record text using video cameras or audio cameras or audio
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systems and then transcribe those and try to understand language at that level of a text itself. Now, going back to phonemes, we know phonemes are the minimal unit of sound that can be used in the language. So we might have something like P. Ah, actually, you could think of how a pea can be spoken in different contexts and the human language system is so capable of producing so many sounds that it really is all about that growth in that ability for productivity displacement and
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some of the other things that that we talked about with Harcourt's understandings of language. Now, the morphine then would actually be taking the meaningful unit of language and breaking it down in terms of meaning, not in terms of sound. So as an example of that, we can look at something like the prefix "re" which you could think of rearrange or remake. And it means, again, are back to the beginning or do again do a second time. So that really allows you, when you're studying a
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language to know, like if it's English is going to very often have that feature as a prefix, as a unit of meaning in front of another word, and thus it really helps you understand that language. Now, of course, there are examples of irregularity where "re" doesn't always mean that, but it's great to have that and to know that because it really gives you an advantage in learning that language and using that language. We can also talk about what we call syntax and syntax is the way that we
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take morphemes as those units of meaning and meaningful them meaningfully and grammatically tie them together. There are two main types of syntactic rules, rules that govern word order and rules that direct the use of certain morphemes that form a grammatical or perform a grammatical function. For example, the order of words in the English sentence the cat chased the dog cannot be changed around or its meaning would change. The dog chased the cat. So we know that the word order
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very often matters for the meaning. And I remember in learning German, it was sometimes tricky to remember certain things with verbs and certain verb endings, certain verbs that would go at the end or more stay, say, in the middle of the sentence. So obviously we could say the dog chased the cat means something different. Dog, cat. The chase is meaningless. We don't know what that means. English relies on word order much more than many other languages do because it has so few
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morphine's that can do the same type of work. So it's often interesting to see how things like syntax will pick up or help you out. If you will improve upon the fact that you maybe you don't have enough morphemes in language to say complex things or to communicate complex things. If you take a linguistics class, you study again, all this in a lot of depth and complexity. Now we can also look at pragmatics and talk about the social and cultural aspects of meaning and how the
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context of an interaction affects it. And this is directly from the book. One aspect of pragmatics is the speech act. Any time we speak, we're performing an act. But what are we actually trying to accomplish with that? Utterance may not be interpretable through the dictionary meanings of the word itself. For example, you're at the dinner table and say, can you pass the salt? We actually talked about that with Hackett's example. You're probably not asking if the person is capable of
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giving you the salt. Often the more polite an utterance, the less direct it will be. Syntactically, for example, rather than using the imperative syntactic form saying give me a cup of coffee is considered more polite to use the form and say, would you please give me a cup of coffee? So pragmatics really looks at the specific utterances and the speech acts as jail. Austin talked about in his literary criticism and theory. And it really gets in kind of to the meaning and
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specific performance of language in a sociocultural interpersonal context. We can talk a little bit about sociolinguistics and language variation. I think one of the interesting things, having a father in law from Austria is looking at dialect or as they say, their dialect and specifically looking at how different in a regional variation, how different words can be or phrases. So you could look at examples. You don't have to know German to do this for different words
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and how in standard German you have Auriga common versus overcomer in the West Austrian dialect. You can also see adding vowels, as they say here and there to various words, and you can see other examples of words that look nothing like their German counterparts. And so trying to think of an example here.
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You know, there's some some similarity here with Koua and Kiya, but, you know, look rather different. So it's interesting to look at the issue of dialects and how dialects work. And they're really an interesting form of linguistic variation that we notice in regions linguistic variation. We could talk about a lot of different reasons as to why variation occurs. Settlement patterns, people moving dialects, changing different migration routes. Certain geographical
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factors like isolation of one area from another could lead to differences in language happening and then language contact. When some groups begin to interact with other groups, you get different kind of languages. Developing an example of that might be people bringing over Jewish people bringing over Yiddish to the United States. Yiddish has forms of Hebrew and also German in it. So it's interesting when you get languages and variations that develop in a lot of these cultural
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cases, we can also talk about region and occupation people using different expressions if they're farming, if they're urban versus rural peoples, their linguistic processes, social class and group references can also refer to a lot of differences in speech. And we also talk about what we call registers. Registers refers to how you speak to, say, your friends, how you speak to your boss, how you speak to your loved one, versus how you speak to your parents. Maybe in some languages
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there's more formality expected. So in German use, Zev, versus do as you're talking to adults versus talking to one of your friends or colleagues. So registers are really significant in language. We can also talk about standard language, and as the book indicates, we really should get beyond this idea that there's a proper way of speaking. We all know about vernaculars. If you use the word ain't as an example, most of us probably aren't going to correct you for using that. If someone's a
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prescriptive grammarian, they might do that. And I think it's actually problematic when people say that there's a standard English that we all speak and it gets into a lot of racism and ethnocentrism when people start to associate, say, language with a culture, with an ethnic group or their level of intelligence. So anthropologists and linguistic anthropologists who study language appreciate vernaculars and really challenge the idea that there's a standard type of English. And here are
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examples here. You can watch the video for this week on bilingualism and the cultural imperialism of language. The English language, the English first movement in the United States is an example of people trying to say, you know, you should only speak English here. And the question I always say is why linguistic diversity is amazing. And in fact, if you go to Europe, people do not speak one language in any of the cultures there. It's so rare. Most people speak English plus another
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language. I know so many Europeans who speak English, German, Italian, maybe a little bit of Spanish and French. So it's very common. And we can look at some charts here about why maybe certain languages are spoken more than others and where bilingualism is present or not. We get a lot of bilingualism, of course, and say the state of California, but maybe we don't in certain parts of the Midwest or the South. So interesting to think about. I really advise that you check out the
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language video here on bilingualism. Now, Ebonics is an example. Years ago, so-called African American vernacular English or Ebonics was a language that was being taught and some schools and this got a lot of political controversy. In fact, most of the big linguistic organizations said we totally support the teaching of African-American vernacular English. It created a lot of controversy because people said, well, this isn't proper English, but what is proper English?
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We don't speak the king's English from the UK that's spoken there. So it's really interesting when this takes on political dimensions. And I really encourage you to look at some of this work and research and see what you can make of this. When people start to associate language and culture with very negative or ethnocentric assumptions, as we've talked about in earlier weeks, of the class now disappear. WHARFIE hypothesis or the book just causes the the war
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hypothesis is an example of how language and reality interconnect. So the idea might be in Hopea language, there could be 30 different words for types of snow, whereas in another language there isn't. And as a result of that, it tells you something about the structure of how those people think their reality and thus suggests that there's a relationship between the reality experienced by the speakers and the language that the speakers speak. Or right now, the lexicon is kind of the
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word for a vocabulary. It's a vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge. For example, in medicine, there are very specific words that are used in linguistics. A lexicon is a language's inventory of what we call Lexy's. The word lexicon derives from various Greek words and meaning of or for words. So it's very interesting to think about how there's maybe a very specific lexicon. For those of you who work like in the ski industry or the casino industry, you might refer to specific
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contexts or people or situations or events with very specific words that you would know if you weren't a part of that very specific community that uses that vocabulary or lexicon. We know that ethnicity and social class also connects to language and some cases the way that someone speaks, which could be the vocabulary or it could be a certain manner, like if they have a very nasally way of speaking, that might try to be an example. And they're trying to convey being higher
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class than they really are in terms of its connection to social class. And and we know that in a lot of cultures, like in the UK. People can know quite immediately where someone is from, what social class they're in based on the unique ways in which they speak, and that's something I think that is very interesting that maybe we have a little bit of in the United States, but but not as much as the UK. We also know that there's a very important connection of language among the deaf
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community and American Sign Language. And any of you that speak American Sign Language, I would love for you to talk about some of this in the discussion post this week. And then we know there's a real key connection here that we'll talk about in a bit between language and gender. Now, historical linguistics would get into the origins of language. Again, Proteau Indo-European, which is the branch that encompasses English, wood and clay, includes, say, Germanic languages and also
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Slavic languages, Italian and Albanian languages. So it's really interesting to look at the evolution of languages over time. And if you ever hear similarities, if you watch a Dutch show and you hear words that sound like German and so forth, you begin to see the relationships. Or Yiddish is an example of a language that has a combination of Hebrew and also German words in it. So historical, linguistic, super interesting. If you get involved in studying it, we can talk about language change,
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different reasons. There could be internal reasons. Prescriptive grammarians might say you need to not say the word ain't. And so if the word ain't goes away and people don't say it inappropriately, if they say isn't instead of ain't, then that's an example of a forced change happening internally. There's also group identity. Language can be a marker of pride or a particular type of group dynamic. It can also be an emulation. If a group has a particular type of prestige, you might start
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using phrases or words or a mode of speaking or affect that maybe mimics that other group because you aspire to be more like them. We can also see social reasons such as reinterpretation. Someone reinterprets a phrase. It catches on the way they say things declaring independence. Sometimes teens have very specific words, almost like dialects that they use, including on social media. That's an example of language change, dialect differentiation. Various social reasons can lead
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to major differences in language, in terms of dialect, as we talked about in the Austrian case, and then linguistic revitalisation movements, the attempt to re-establish the prominence of a language in a particular place and Quebec. And the example of Québecois is a great instance of this, where the concern is we don't want too much English coming into our language. So we're going to try to preserve, in this case of Montreal and Quebec, the indigenous language and not allow a
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lot of English words coming into our vocabulary. And that's an example of what some would call linguistic nationalism. And I think it'll be an interesting debate if you want to have this under discussion boards this week, because it's really hard to say. Write like you're trying to preserve your language, but you also realize we live in a more, more and more global world. And thus language communicates across borders, not just within the confines of our countries or cities or
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nations. We also see that language changes because of extinction. Unfortunately, a threatened language over time is lost because the number of speakers speaking it die out. Years ago, Latin, for example, used to be taught at little community college. It's not taught now. Latin will probably never fully go extinct. But it's very uncommon, I think, to see Latin being taught in a lot of colleges and universities and high schools. We can also see that borrowing happens. Sometimes we have
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loanwords. You can have a French word that is brought into English or a German word that's also brought into English. Many examples of that substratum interference is something that happens if you have individuals who learn a second language and they influence the native speakers to speak in a different way. Some would say it's very tricky to document this, but it is an actual occurrence that happens because the folks learning the language do it differently and influence those
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who were first language learners in that second language learners. They begin to say things differently or change the way of saying things. We also have what we call pidgin Creoles. These are languages that develop over time in the old days because of trade and contact associations or missionaries maybe connecting through their missionary work with other cultures. And then it becomes part of a language that's kind of shared between the two groups. A Creole means it is a
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pigeon that becomes standardised over time and has more complicated grammar and a more expansive vocabulary to it. We can look at some examples of various pigeons and Creoles around the world, and this is a nice map of some of those. We can also talk about linguistic extinction I just mentioned and check out the two videos this week in our media section that talk about linguistic extinction, because I think it's a real key issue that we don't spend enough time talking about. I
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also thought you might be interested in multilingual Europe challenges and opportunities. So check out how Europeans, particularly in business, political commerce and technological census, deal with the fact that there are multiple languages being spoken. What language then becomes the language of trade? You might have heard years ago of Esperanto this attempt to develop sort of a more global language that never kept on or caught on, rather. But it was an example of maybe trying
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to deal with some of this diversity of language that we now see in the world. And the question becomes, how do we communicate if we don't all speak the same language? So check out that reading this week. Also, in terms of globalization and language, the book talks about examples here of language death. And I think it's really important to remember that as pop culture develops and spreads throughout the world, a lot of languages and cultures die out and thus we have to be very
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cognizant of this happening now. We can shift here a little bit to language and gender. I encourage you to look at the text. I included gender and conversational interaction that has a lot of work of Deborah Tannen. And then you can also watch her her video gender specific language rituals in that particular video. And by the way, in your work this week, if you want to post about this, talk about how some of this doesn't apply to situations that you've experienced in your own life. So the
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idea of females using more eye contact versus males using less eye contact, then men being talkative in public and quiet in private and so forth, fighting for fun, not fighting for fun. So as you watch this video, you can just get a sense of whether or not you think this is true or not. There are a lot of examples of language and gender I think we should talk about in everyday life, even in terms of proximity and body language. Sometimes you might notice how men are seated at a
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table and maybe take up more space or spread their legs out, whereas women maybe pull their bodies in more and feel more confined in that social space. So any time you see those differences, you want to note these and just try to understand them as an anthropologist would in terms of trying to piece together language and gender. Now, language and technology is equally interesting. I encourage you to watch the video I posted for you on emojis. And also the video on the F word, which I think is
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really interesting just in terms of the history of that swearword and what it means to us over time. Now, as we start to think about Twitter or other forms of social media, we can also think about how our language is changing. If we say the word tweet, for example, or we tweeted that verb did not exist back in the 80s or the 90s. So, again, language is productive and grows. And technology is an interesting example of language because some people would suggest to us that technology is
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causing negative things to happen in our language in terms of how people communicate. If you're used to typing things in a short string of characters on Twitter and then you type something, say in your discussion posts in this class and use abbreviations, or you don't capitalize the eye, that not that non-standard use of English language that develops from the technological examples here and there are influences begins to maybe negatively affect how we communicate, say, in a
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class or how you communicate with others. So language and technology is a very interesting one to look at as an example. Now check out the reading called sci fi languages as well to get a sense of what's involved in creating a sci fi language. And then you can look at detract from Game of Thrones and also invented languages from other movies and sci fi examples. I'm trying to think of the new Dune movie that's coming out here in 2021 will have specific uses of language, but
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certainly Star Trek, Star Wars, a lot of, you know, films out there. And big media empires have languages that are created. And she's important to see how linguists and anthropologists think about created languages. And they're not just throwing words or sounds together in any means. Now, it's also interesting to think about how A.I. programs out there in terms of technology are impacting language. So it'd be interesting to see what you think about A.I. programs that can write songs
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supposedly or even write poems or maybe even papers for classes. I've heard about bots sort of invading some distance education classes where people have bots that kind of do all the work for them. And that's an example of artificial intelligence trying to use algorithms to try to trick a class into thinking that the students in the class are real, even though they might actually be bots that are doing something, say, for the purpose of abusing financial aid or trying
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to take advantage of financial aid. Now, again, if you're interested in this topic, we have a full fledged class called Language and culture. Anthro one eight really encourage you to take that class. It's a super fun class. And if you like any of the stuff we talked about this week, you'll see much more of that being discussed in language and culture. So I really do encourage you to check that class out and maybe take advantage of it if you're at all interested in this topic in more
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depth. So that'll be it for this week here. Looking at language symbols and that short example of gender, as well as a few other examples like language and technology as usual. Be sure to read the book, check out the additional readings and the media that include and then take advantage of some of the context here from this lecture. And week four, as you think about doing your discussion post here in this week, as always, good luck. If you have any questions about anything
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related to the reading or the media this week, reach out. Don't hesitate to do so, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. So thanks for listening. I'll be back with week five videocast.
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