Discussion Language and Culture The word culture has several related senses, they are important to be mentioned. These senses can be briefly explained as follows: There is, first of all, the sense in which culture is more or less synonymous with civilization and, in an older and extreme formulation of the contrast, opposed to 'barbarism'. This is the sense that is operative, in English, in the adjective 'cultured'. It rests ultimately upon the classical conception of what constitutes excellence in art, literature, manners and social institutions. Revived by the Renaissance humanists, the classical conception was emphasized by thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and associated by them with their view of human history as progress and self-development.
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The view of history was challenged, as were many of the ideas of the Enlightenment, by Herder, who said of the German equivalent of „culture': "nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing is more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods" (Williams, 1976, 1983, p. 79).
It is interesting to note, in this connection, that the expression 'language de culture (literally, "language of culture") is commonly employed by French-speaking scholars to distinguish what are held to be culturally more advanced from culturally less advanced languages. 'Kultursprache' is similarly used in German. Although there is no accepted equivalent in English, the attitude on which the use of such expression rests is no less common in English-speaking societies. Most linguists nowadays take the view that there are no primitive languages. However, it is worth looking at this question again with particular reference to what one might call the classical conception of culture. The word culture is to be interpreted, not in its classical sense, but in what might be described loosely as its anthropological sense. In fact, this is the sense in which Herder proposed that the term should be used; but it was not until about eighty years later that anthropologists writing in English adopted this usage. In this second sense, culture is employed without any implication of unilinear human progress from barbarism to civilization and without a prior value being made as to the aesthetic or intellectual quality of a particular society's art, literature, institutions and so on. In this sense of the term, which has spread from anthropology to the other social sciences, every society has its own culture; and different subgroups within a society may have their own distinctive subculture. Herder's promotion of the word culture in this sense was bound up with this thesis of the interdependence of language and thought, on the one hand, and, on the other, with his view that a nation's language and culture were manifestations of its distinctive national spirit or mind. Indeed, many other writers in the Romantic movement had similar ideas. This is one strand in the complex historical development of the socalled Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which dominated all discussion of language and culture, as it did of language and thought, a generation ago. Although the word culture is now widely employed in the social sciences, and especially by anthropologists, in the sense that has just been identified, it can be defined, technically, in several different ways. Culture may be described as socially acquired knowledge, to be precise, as the knowledge that someone has by virtue of his being a member of a particular society.Two points must be made here about the use of the word knowledge. First, it is to be understood as covering both practical and prepositional knowledge: both knowing how to do something and knowing that something is or is not so. Second, as far as prepositional knowledge is concerned, it is the fact that something is held to be true that counts, not its actual truth or falsity. Furthermore, in relation to most, if not all, cultures we must allow for different kinds or levels of truth, such that for example the truth of a religious or mythological statement is evaluated differently from that of a straightforward factual report. Looking from this point of view, science itself is a part of culture. And in the discussion of the relationship between language and culture no priority should be given to scientific knowledge over common-sense knowledge or even superstition.
It is customary to draw a distinction between cultural and biological transmission. As far as language is concerned, it is quite possible that there is an innate language-acquisition faculty. Whether or not this is so, there is no doubt that one's knowledge of one's native language is culturally transmitted: it is acquired, though not necessarily learned, by virtue of one's membership of a particular society. Moreover, even if there is a genetically transmitted language-faculty, this cannot result in the acquisition and knowledge of a language unless the data upon which the language-faculty operates are supplied by the society in which the child is growing up and, arguably, in conditions which do not seriously affect the child's cognitive and emotional development. This means that the cultural and the biological in language are interdependent. Indeed, it will be obvious, on reflection, that one's linguistic competence, regardless of its biological basis, comes within the scope of our definition of culture. And it may very well be that other kinds of socially acquired knowledge-including myth, religious belief and so on-have as much of a species-specific biological basis as language does. This point should be borne in mind when one is considering the acquisition and structure of language in terms of the opposition between the biological and the cultural. In fact, it is no longer possible to think in terms of a sharp distinction between nature and nurture. Herder talks about the interdependence of language and thought. Humboldt comes closer to linguistic determinism. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as it is usually presented, combines linguistic determinism (language determines thought) with linguistic relativity (There is no limit to the structural diversity of languages).
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Concerning the above discussion in addition to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis the following points appear in the mind: 1. We are, in all our thinking and forever, at the understanding of the particular language which has become the means of expression for our society, we experience and practice our expression by means of the characteristics, peculiarities, and sometimes literary words encoded in our language. 2. The characteristics, peculiarities, and literary words encoded in one language system are distinctive, typical, and unique to that system and they are dissimilar as well as incomparable with those of other systems. 3. Since the culture of a particular place or nation is different from others, sometimes the misunderstanding and misconception occurs when one from another nation uses the language of that nation. 4. In order to understand the specific words, literary terms, and even sometimes the simple words in one language, we must be familiar with the culture of that nation. Thus, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis mostly indicates the influence of language on thought. It is worth mentioning that, as a reality, memory and perception are affected by the availability of appropriate words and expression. For example, experiments have shown that visual memories tend to be distorted so that they are in closer correspondence with commonly used expressions; and that people tend to notice the thing that are codable in their language: i.e. things that fall within the scope of readily available words and expressions. Codability, in this sense, is a matter of degree. Something which comes within the denotation of a common single word is more highly codable than something whose description requires a specially constructed phrase. Codability is not unavoidably constant and uniform throughout a language-community-especially when we are dealing with a community as complex, as diffuse and as varied as the native speakers of English. All too often, the correlation of language and culture is made at a very general level, and with the tacit or explicit assumption that those who speak the same language must necessarily share the same culture. This assumption is manifestly false in respect of many languages and many cultures. No less important is the fact that the codability is not simply a matter of the existence of single-word lexemes. Particular languages are associated historically with particular cultures; the languages provide the key to the associated cultures, and especially to their literature; the languages themselves cannot be fully understood otherwise than in the context of the cultures in which they are inextricably embedded; subsequently, language and culture are studied together. It so happens that English and the other major languages of Europe are, in many respect, highly unrepresentative of the languages of the world. English, in particular, has been used in the administration of an empire of great cultural diversity. It is spoken as a native language by members of many different ethnic groups and adherents of many religions, living in many parts of the world. It is widely employed by anthropologists, missioners and writers of all kinds, not only in the description of every known society, but also in novels, plays and etc., which have their setting in countries and societies in which English is not normally spoken. The above points indicate that English, to an even greater extent than other European languages, has been enlarged and modifie