Anna Wierzbicka (Polish: Anna Wierzbicka, 10 March 1938, Warsaw) is a Polish and Australian linguist. Area of interest: linguistic semantics, pragmatics and interlingual interactions, Russian studies. For many years he has been trying to identify a natural semantic metalanguage.
She received her professional education in Poland. In 1964-1965, she was on an internship for six months at the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. During this period, she repeatedly discussed the ideas of linguistic semantics with Moscow linguists, primarily with I.A. Melchuk, A.K. Zholkovsky and Yu.D. Apresyan. Returning to Poland, she collaborated with the leading Polish semanticist Andrzej Boguslawski.
In 1966-1967, she attended lectures on general grammar by Noam Chomsky at MIT (USA). In 1972 she moved to Australia; since 1973 - Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University in Canberra. Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences since 1996. Foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Department of Literature and Language since 1999.
Books (3)
Understanding cultures through keywords
The main points developed in A. Wierzbicka's book are that different languages differ significantly in terms of their vocabulary and these differences reflect differences in the core values of the corresponding cultural communities.
In her book, A. Wierzbicka strives to show that any culture can be researched, subjected to comparative analysis and described using the key words of the language serving a given culture.
The theoretical foundation of such an analysis can be a natural semantic metalanguage, which is reconstructed on the basis of extensive comparative linguistic research.
The book is addressed not only to linguists, but also to anthropologists, psychologists and philosophers.
Semantic universals and basic concepts
The book by the world-famous linguist, a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, contains a number of works (including the latest translations), collectively illustrating various aspects of the use of language and culture.
In particular, the book examines various topics of grammatical, word-formation and lexical semantics, analyzes key concepts of various cultures, including Russian culture, and describes the semantics of the Gospel texts.
The book is intended for a very wide range of readers, from specialists in linguistics, cognitive psychology, philosophy and cultural studies to non-specialists, who will find in it interesting information about language, culture, thinking, their connections and mutual influences.
Language. Culture. Cognition
Anna Vezhbitskaya is a world-famous linguist, whose publications in the USSR and Russia have always been random and episodic and have not satisfied the interest in her work.
Her field of activity lies at the intersection of linguistics and a number of other sciences, primarily cultural studies, cultural psychology and cognitive science. A. Vezhbitskaya develops theories of metalanguage and ethnogramma that have no analogues in the linguistic world, creates completely original descriptions of various languages, allowing one to penetrate through strict linguistic analysis into the culture and way of thinking of the corresponding peoples.
Anna Vezhbitskaya’s first book in Russian “Language. Culture. Cognition" is a collection of articles collected by the author specifically for publication in Russia and focused primarily on the Russian language and Russian culture.
1. Analysis of culture and semantics of language
In the introduction to the bookVocabularies of Public Life(Wuthnow 1992) noted cultural sociologist Robert Wuthnow notes: “In our century, perhaps more than at any other time, the analysis of culture lies at the heart of the human sciences.” An important characteristic of work in this field, according to Wuthnow, is its interdisciplinary nature: “Anthropology, literary criticism, political philosophy, the study of religion, cultural history, and cognitive psychology are rich fields from which new ideas can be drawn” (2).
The absence of linguistics from this list is striking. This omission is all the more noteworthy because Wuthnow associates “the vivacity and freshness of thought characteristic of modern sociological study of culture [with the depth of] interest given to linguistic questions” (2). The purpose of this book is to show that the analysis of culture can gain new insights from linguistics, in particular from linguistic semantics, and that the semantic point of view of culture is something that the analysis of culture can hardly afford to ignore. The relevance of semantics is not limited to lexical semantics, but perhaps in no other field is it so clear and obvious. Therefore, this book will focus on vocabulary analysis.
Edward Sapir's profound insights, several of which serve as epigraphs for this book, remain valid and important more than sixty years later: first, that “language [is] a symbolic guide to the understanding of culture” ( Sapir 1949:162); secondly, regarding the fact that “vocabulary is a very sensitive indicator of the culture of a people” (27); and thirdly, regarding the fact that linguistics “is of strategic importance for the methodology of the social sciences” (166).
2. Words and cultures
There is a very close connection between the life of a society and the vocabulary of the language it speaks. This applies equally to the internal and external aspects of life. An obvious example from the visible, material sphere is food. Of course, it is no coincidence that, for example, in the Polish language there are special words denoting hodgepodge of stewed cabbage(bigos), beet soup (barszcz)and a special kind of plum jam(poividta),and that there are no such words in English, or that in English there is a special word for orange (or orange-like) jam(marmalade),and in Japanese there is a word for a strong alcoholic drink made from rice(sake).Obviously, such words can tell us something about the customs of these peoples related to food and drink.
The existence of linguistically specific designations for special kinds of “things” (visible and tangible, such as food) is something that even ordinary, monolingual people are usually aware of. It is also well known that there are various customs and social institutions that have a designation in one language and not in other languages. Consider, for example, the German nounBruderschaft"Bruderschaft", literally "brotherhood", which Harrap's German-English Dictionary ( Harrap's German and English dictionary)diligently interprets it as “(drinking together as) an oath of “brotherhood” with someone (after which you can address each other as “you”)” (“( to drink) the pledge of "brotherhood" with someone (subsequently addressing each other as "du ")"). Obviously, the absence of a word meaning “brothershaft” in English is due to the fact that English no longer makes the distinction between intimate/familiar “you” (“you” (“)”). thou ") and the drier “you” (“ you ”) and that in English-speaking societies there is no generally accepted ritual of drinking together as a sign of an oath of eternal friendship.
Likewise, it is no coincidence that in English there is no word corresponding to the Russian verb christen yourself interpreted by the “Oxford Russian-English Dictionary” as “to exchange three kisses (as an Easter greeting)” (“ to exchange triple kiss (as Easter salutation )"), or| that there is no word corresponding to the Japanese word mai denoting the formal act of the bride-to-be and her family meeting the groom-to-be and his family for the first time.
It is very important that what belongs to material culture i social rituals and institutions also refers to the values, ideals and attitudes of people and how they think about the world and their lives in this world.
A good example of this is provided by the untranslatable Russian word vulgar(adjective) and its derivatives (nouns vulgarity, vulgar And vulgar the Russian émigré writer Nabokov devoted many pages to a detailed examination of which ( Nabokov 1961). To quote some of Nabokov's comments:
The Russian language is able to express by means of one pitiless word the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the other three European languages I happen to know possess no special term [In Russian, with the help of one merciless word you can express the essence of a widespread defect , for which three friends of the European languages I know do not have a special designation] (64).
English words expressing several, although by no means all, aspects of poshlust are for instance: "cheap, sham, common, smutty, pink and-blue, high falutin", in bad taste" [Some, although not all, shades of vulgarity are expressed, for example, by the English words cheap, sham, common, smutty, pink -and-blue, high falutin", in bad taste"] (64).
However, according to Nabokov, these English wordsware adequate because, firstly, they are not aimed at exposing, flaunting or condemning any kind of “cheapness” in the same way as the word vulgarity and related words are aimed at; a secondly, they do not have the same “absolute” implications that the word vulgarity has:
All these however suggest merely certain false values for the detection of which no particular shrewdness is required. In fact, they tend, these words to supply an obvious classification of values at a given period of human history; but what Russians call poshlust is beautifully timeless and so cleverly painted all over with protective tints that iti presence (in a book, in a soul, in an institution, in a thousand other places) often escapes detection [ All of them imply only certain types of falsehood, the detection of which does not require special insight. In fact, these words rather provide a superficial classification of values for a particular historical period; but what the Russians call vulgarity is charmingly timeless and so cunningly painted in protective colors that it is often not possible to detect it (in a book, in the soul, in public institutions and in a thousand other places)] .
Thus, we can say that the word vulgarity(and related words) both reflects and confirms a keen awareness that false values exist and that they need to be ridiculed and overthrown; but in order to present its implications in a systematic form, we need to consider its meaning more analytically than Nabokov saw fit to do.
“Oxford Russian-English Dictionary”(Oxford Russian-English dictionary)attributes to the word vulgar two glosses:
"I. vulgar, common; 2. common place, trivial, trite, banal " ["1. vulgar, ordinary; 2. mediocre, trivial, hackneyed, banal”], but this is very different from the interpretations given in Russian dictionaries, such as the following: “low in spiritual, moral terms, petty, insignificant, mediocre” (SRY) or “ordinary, base in spiritually and morally, alien to higher interests and demands.”
It is worthy of attention how wide the semantic range of the word is. vulgar, some idea of which can be obtained from the English translations given above, but what is even more striking is the attention included in the meaning of the word vulgar disgust and condemnation on the part of the speaker, even stronger in the derived noun vulgar which with disgust puts an end to man as a spiritual nonentity, “devoid of higher interests.” (The translation given in the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary is “ vulgar person, common person [“vulgar man, common man”] seems to imply social prejudice, when in fact the person is condemned on moral, spiritual and, so to speak, aesthetic grounds.)
From the perspective of an English speaker, the whole concept may seem as exotic as the concepts encoded in words ear("fish soup") or borsch(“Russian beet soup”), and yet, from a “Russian” point of view, this is a vivid and accepted way of evaluation. To quote Nabokov again: “ Ever since Russia began to think, and up to the time that her mind went blank under the influence of the extraordinary regime she has been enduring for these last twenty-five years, educated, sensitive and free-minded Russians were acutely aware of the furtive and clammy touch of poshlusl""[“From the time when Russia began to think, until the time when her mind was devastated under the influence of the emergency regime that she has endured for the last twenty years, all educated, sensitive and free-thinking Russians have keenly felt the stealing, sticky touch of vulgarity”] (64 ) 1 .
In fact, the specific Russian concept of "vulgarity" can serve as an excellent introduction to a whole system of attitudes, the impression of which can be gained by considering some other untranslatable Russian words, such as true(something like "higher truth"), soul(considered as the spiritual, moral and emotional core of a person and a kind of internal theater in which his moral and emotional life unfolds); scoundrel("a vile person who inspires contempt"), bastard("a vile person who inspires disgust"), scoundrel(“a vile person who inspires resentment”; for a discussion of these words, see Wierzbicka 1992b ) or verb condemn, used colloquially in sentences such as:
I condemn him.
Women, as a rule, condemned Marusya. Men mostly sympathized with her (Dovlatov 1986: 91).
A number of Russian words and expressions reflect the tendency to judge other people in one's speech, to make absolute moral judgments, and to associate moral judgments with emotions, as well as the emphasis on the “absolute” and “highest values” in the culture at large (cf. Wierzbicka 1992b).
But while generalizations concerning “absolutes,” “passion for moral judgment,” “categorical value judgments,” and the like are often true, they are also vague and unreliable. And one of the main goals of this book is precisely to replace such vague and unreliable generalizations with a careful and systematic analysis of the meanings of words and to replace (or supplement) impressionistic ideas with methodologically sound evidence.
However, the starting point is visible to the naked eye. It lies in the long-standing awareness of the fact that the meanings of words in different languages do not coincide (even if, for lack of a better word, they are artificially put into correspondence with each other in dictionaries), that they reflect and convey a way of life and a way of thinking characteristic of a given society (or linguistic community), and that they represent invaluable keys to understanding culture. No one expressed this long-standing idea better than John Locke ( Locke 1959):
Even a modest knowledge of different languages will easily convince everyone of the truth of this position: for example, it is easy to notice in one language a large number of words that have no correspondence in another. This clearly shows that the population of one country, by their customs and their way of life, found it necessary to form and name such various complex ideas as the population of another never created. This could not happen if such species were the product of the constant work of nature, and not aggregates which the mind abstracts and forms for the purpose of naming [ sic] and for ease of communication. The terms of our law, which are not empty words, can hardly find corresponding words in Spanish and Italian, languages that are not poor; still less, it seems to me, can they be translated into the Caribbean or Vesta language; and the word versura of the Romans or the word corban of the Jews do not have corresponding words in other languages; the reason for this is clear from what has been said above. Moreover, if we delve into the matter a little deeper and accurately compare different languages, we will find that although in translations and dictionaries in these languages words corresponding to each other are assumed, yet among the names of complex ideas ... there is hardly one word in ten that would mean exactly the same idea as the other word by which it is conveyed in dictionaries... This is too obvious a proof to be doubted, and we will find it to a much greater extent in the names of more abstract and complex ideas. Such are most of the names that make up discourses on morality; if, out of curiosity, they begin to compare such words with those by which they are translated into other languages, they will find that very few of the latter words exactly correspond to them in the entire scope of their meaning (27).
And in our century, Edward Sapir made a similar remark:
Languages are very heterogeneous in the nature of their vocabulary. Differences that seem inevitable to us may be completely ignored by languages reflecting a completely different type of culture, and these in turn may make distinctions that are incomprehensible to us.
Such lexical differences extend far beyond the names of cultural objects such as arrowhead, chain mail, or gunboat. They are equally characteristic of the mental domain (27).
3. Different words, different ways of thinking?
In some ways it may seem obvious that words with special, culture-specific meanings reflect and convey not only a way of life characteristic of a given society, but also a way of thinking. For example, in Japan people not only talk about “ miai ” (using the word miai), but also think about miai (using either the word miai or a related concept). For example, in the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro ( Ishiguro 1986) the hero, Masuji Ono, thinks a lot - both in advance and in retrospect - about the miai of his youngest daughter Noriko; and, of course, he thinks about it in terms of the conceptual category associated with the word miai (so he even retains this word in the English text).
It is clear that the word miai reflects not only the presence of a certain social ritual, but also a certain way of thinking about important life events.
Mutatis mutandis , the same applies to vulgarity. Of course, objects and phenomena that deserve such a label exist - the world of Anglo-Saxon popular culture contains a huge variety of phenomena that deserve the label vulgarity, for example, a whole genre of body rippers, but call this genre by vulgarity - would mean viewing it through the prism of the conceptual category that the Russian language gives us.
If such an experienced witness as Nabokov tells us that Russians often think about these kinds of things in terms of a conceptual category vulgarity, then we have no reason not to believe him - taking into account that the Russian language itself gives us objective evidence in favor of this statement in the form of the presence of a whole family of related words: vulgar, vulgarity, vulgarity, vulgarity And vulgarity.
There is often debate about whether words that contain culture-specific conceptual categories, such as vulgarity, but, apparently, these disputes are based on a misunderstanding: of course, both. Like a wordmini,word vulgarity both reflects and stimulates a particular point of view on human actions and events. Culture-specific words are conceptual tools that reflect a society's past experiences of acting and thinking about various things in certain ways; and they help perpetuate these ways. As society changes, these tools may also gradually be modified and discarded. In this sense, the inventory of a society’s conceptual tools never “determines” its worldview completely, but obviously influences it.
Likewise, the views of an individual are never entirely “determined” by the conceptual tools provided by his native language, partly because there will always be alternative modes of expression. But his mother tongue obviously influences his conceptual outlook on life. It is obviously no coincidence that Nabokov views both life and art from the point of view of the concept of vulgarity, while Ishiguro does not, or that Ishiguro thinks about life from the point of view of such concepts as " on "(cf. chapter 6, section 3*), but Nabokov does not do this. * We are talking about Wierzbicka’s bookUnderstanding Cultures through their Key Words,where this “Introduction” is taken from.- Note translation
It is usually obvious to people who are well versed in two different languages and two different cultures (or more) that language and way of thinking are interrelated (cf. Hunt & Benaji 1988). To question the existence of such a connection on the basis of an alleged lack of evidence is to fail to understand what is the nature of the evidence that might be relevant in a given context. The fact that neither brain science nor computer science can tell us anything about the connections between the way we speak and the way we think, and about the differences in the way we think due to differences in languages and cultures, hardly whether he proves that there are no such connections at all. Nevertheless, among monolinguals, as well as among some cognitive scientists, there is a categorical denial of the existence of such connections and differences.
One particularly noteworthy example of such denial comes from the recent best-selling linguistic book written by MIT psychologist Steven Pinker, whose book The Language Instinct ( Pinker 1994) is extolled on the dust jacket as “magnificent,” “dazzling,” and “brilliant,” and Noam Chomsky praises it (on the dust jacket) as “an extremely valuable book, very informative and very well written.” Pinker ( Pinker 1994: 58) writes:
As we will see in this chapter, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that languages significantly shape the way speakers of those languages think. The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists knew nothing about how thinking happened, or even how to study it. Now that they know how to think about thinking, the temptation to equate it with language has become less for the sole reason that words are easier to touch with your hands than thoughts (58).
Of course, in Pinker’s book there is no data indicating a possible connection between differences in thinking and differences in languages, but it is not clear how he proves that “there is no such data.” To begin with, it does not consider any languages other than English. In general, this book is characterized by a complete lack of interest in other languages and other cultures, emphasized by the fact that of the 517 works included in Pinker's bibliography, all of the works are in English.
Pinker expresses his condemnation of the theory of “linguistic relativity” without mincing words. “She is unfaithful, completely unfaithful,” he asserts (57). He ridicules the assumption that “fundamental categories of reality are not present in the real world, but are imposed by culture (and therefore can be questioned...)” (57), without even considering the possibility that while some categories may be innate, others may indeed be culturally imposed. O He also completely rejects the views expressed by Whorf ( Whorf 1956) in a famous passage that deserves to be quoted again:
We dissect nature in the direction suggested by our native language. We distinguish certain categories and types in the world of phenomena not at all because they (these categories and types) are self-evident; on the contrary, the world appears before us as a kaleidoscopic stream of impressions, which must be organized by our consciousness, and this means mainly by the language system stored in our consciousness. We dismember the world, organize it into concepts and distribute meanings in one way and not another, mainly because we are participants in an agreement that prescribes such systematization. This agreement is valid for a specific speech community and is enshrined in the system of models of our language. This agreement, of course, has not been formulated by anyone and is only implied, and yet we are parties to this agreement; we will not be able to speak at all unless we subscribe to the systematization and classification of the material determined by the specified agreement (213).
Of course, there is a lot of exaggeration in this passage (as I will try to show below). However, no one who has actually engaged in cross-cultural comparisons will deny that there is a considerable amount of truth in it.
Pinker says that “the more we consider Whorf's arguments, the less meaningful they seem” (60). But what matters is not whether Whorf's specific examples and analytical comments are convincing. (On this occasion, everyone now agrees that no; in particular Malotki [ Malotki 1983] showed that Whorf's ideas regarding the Hopi language were going in the wrong direction.) But Whorf's basic thesis is that “we partition nature in the direction suggested by our native language,” and that “we partition the world [as] enshrined in the system models of our language”, contains a deep insight into the essence of the matter, which should be recognized by anyone whose empirical horizon extends beyond the boundaries of the native language.
Pinker rejects not only the “strong version” of Whorf’s (and Sapir’s) theory, which states that “the way people think is determined by the categories found in their native language,” but also the “weak version,” which states that “differences between languages entail differences in the way their speakers think” (57).
When someone claims that thought is independent of language, in practice this usually means that he is absolutizing his native language and using it as a source of adequate labels for supposed “mental categories” (cf. Lutz 1990). “Language instinct” is no exception in this regard. Pinker ( Pinker 1994) writes: “Because mental life occurs independently of a particular language, concepts of freedom ( freedom ) and equalities can always be an object of thought, even if they do not have a linguistic designation” (82). But, as I will show in Chapter 3, the concept " freedom "is not independent of a particular language (differing, for example, from the Roman concept" libertas " or the Russian concept of "freedom"). It is shaped by culture and history, being part of the common heritage of speakers of English. In fact, it is an example of the “implied agreement” of members of a particular speech community, which Whorf spoke of in the passage so decisively rejected by Pinker.
Whorf, of course, went too far when he said that the world appears to us “as a kaleidoscopic stream of impressions,” since evidence (particularly linguistic evidence) suggests that the distinction between “who” and “what” (“someone” and “ something”) is universal and does not depend on how people belonging to one or another culture “dismember nature” (see. Goddard & Wierzbicka 1994).
But perhaps the expression “kaleidoscopic flow of impressions” was just a figurative exaggeration. In fact, Whorf ( Whorf 1956) did not claim that ALL “fundamental categories of reality” are “imposed by culture.” On the contrary, in at least some of his writings he recognized the existence of a “common inventory of ideas” underlying all the different languages of the world:
The very existence of such a general inventory of ideas, perhaps possessing its own, as yet unexplored structure, does not yet seem to have received much recognition; but, it seems to me, without it it would be impossible to communicate thoughts through language; it includes the general principle of the possibility of such communication and, in a sense, represents a universal language, the entrance to which is various specific languages (36).
Whorf may also have exaggerated the differences between languages and cultures and the conceptual universes associated with them, as well as the degree of absolute binding agreement to which we are “participants” and which holds for a particular speech community. We can always find a way around the “terms of the agreement” by using paraphrases and circumlocutions of one kind or another. But this can only be done at the cost of certain costs (using longer, more complex, more cumbersome expressions than those that we use, relying on the usual way of expression provided to us by our native language). In addition, we can try to avoid only those conventions that we are aware of. In most cases the power of a man's native language over the character of his thinking is so strong that he thinks no more of the conventional agreements in which he takes part than of the air he breathes; and when others try to call his attention to these conventions, he may even deny their existence with seemingly unshakable self-confidence. Again, this point is well illustrated by the experiences of those who were forced to adapt to life within a different culture and language, like the Polish-American writer Eva Hoffman ( Hoffman 1989), whose “semiotic memoir” entitled “Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language” (Lost in translation: A life in a new language), should be required reading for anyone interested in the subject:
“If you have never eaten a real tomato, you will think that the artificial tomato is the real one, and you will be completely satisfied with it,” I told my friends. “Only when you try both will you know what the difference is,” even if it is almost impossible to describe in words.” This turned out to be the most convincing evidence I have ever given. My friends were touched by the parable of the artificial tomato. But when I tried to apply it by analogy to the sphere of inner life, they reared up. Of course, in our heads and souls everything is more universal; the ocean of reality is one and indivisible. No, I screamed in each of our arguments, no! There are worlds outside of us. There are forms of perception that are incommensurable with each other’s topographies of experience, which cannot be guessed from one’s limited experience.
I believe that my friends often suspected me of a certain perverse uncooperativeness, of an inexplicable desire to irritate them and destroy their pleasant unanimity. I suspected that this unanimity was aimed at enslaving me and depriving me of my characteristic form and aroma. However, I have to somehow come to an agreement. Now that I am no longer their guest, I can no longer ignore the prevailing reality here or sit on the sidelines observing the amusing customs of the locals. I have to study How live with them, find common ground. I am afraid that I will have to give up too many of my positions, which fills me with such passionate energy of rage (204).
The personal intuitions of bilingual and bicultural insiders such as Eva Hoffman are echoed by the analytical insights of scholars with broad and deep knowledge of different languages and cultures, such as Sapir ( Sapir 1949), who wrote that in each linguistic community “in the course of complex historical development, one way of thinking, a special type of reaction is established as typical, as normal” (311) and that, since certain special thinking skills become fixed in language, “a philosopher needs to understand language if only in order to protect himself from his own linguistic habits”(16.
“People can be forgiven for overestimating the role of language,” says Pinker ( Pinker 1994: 67). You can also forgive people who underestimate her. But the belief that one can understand human cognition and human psychology in general on the basis of English alone seems short-sighted, if not downright monocentric.
The field of emotions provides a good illustration of the trap that one can fall into when trying to identify universals common to all people on the basis of one native language. A typical scenario (in which “P” stands for psychologist and “L” for linguist) unfolds as follows:
P: Sadness and anger are universal human emotions.
L: Sadness And anger - These are English words that do not have equivalents in all other languages. Why should these particular English words - and not some words of language X for which there are no equivalents in English - correctly capture some universal emotions?
P: It doesn't matter whether other languages have words for sadness or anger or not. Let's not deify words! I'm talking about emotions, not words.
L: Yes, but when talking about these emotions, you use culturally specific English words and thereby introduce the Anglo-Saxon view of emotions.
P: I don't think so. I'm sure people from these other cultures also experience sadness and anger, even if they don't have words for them.
L: Maybe they feel sadness and anger, but their categorization of emotions is different from the categorization reflected in the lexical composition of the English language. Why should the English taxonomy of emotions be a better guide to universal emotions than a taxonomy of emotions embodied in any other language?
P: Let’s not exaggerate the importance of language.
To demonstrate to the reader that this dialogue is not pure fiction, let me quote a recent objection by the famous psychologist Richard Lazarus, directed, among other things, at me:
Wierzbicka believes that I underestimate the depth of culturally determined diversity of emotional concepts, as well as the problem of language.
Words have the power to influence people, but - as written in capital letters in Whorf's hypotheses - they are not able to overcome the conditions that make people sad or angry, which people are able to some extent to feel without words...
In fact, I believe that all people experience anger, sadness and similar feelings, regardless of what they call them. .. Words are important, but we should not deify them.
Unfortunately, by refusing to pay attention to words and the semantic differences between words belonging to different languages, scientists who take this position end up doing exactly what they wanted to avoid, namely, “deifying” the words of their native language and reifying the contents contained in them. concepts. Thus, without meaning to, they again illustrate how powerful the power of our native language can be over the nature of our thinking.
Believing that people in all cultures have a concept of "goal" even if they don't have a word for it is like believing that people in all cultures have a concept of "orange jam" (" marmalade ") and, moreover, that this concept is somehow more relevant to them than the concept of "plum jam" (" plum jam "), even if you find that they have a separate word for plum jam, there is no separate word for orange jam.
In fact, the concept " anger "no more universal than the Italian concept" rabbi " or the Russian concept of "anger". (Detailed considerationrabbi see Wierzbicka 1995; O anger With Wierzbicka, in press b .) Saying this does not mean disputing the existence of universals characteristic of all people, but it means when trying to identify and apply them them on the map to address the cross-linguistic perspective.
4. Cultural development and lexical composition of the language
Even before Boas first mentioned the four Eskimo words for “snow,” anthropologists began to regard vocabulary development as an indicator of the interests and differences between different cultures (Hymes 1964:167).
Since Himes wrote this, a famous example of Eskimo words for snow came into question ( Pullum 1991), but the validity of the general principle of “cultural elaboration” seemed to remain intact. Some examples illustrating this principle have not stood the test of time, but in order to admiringly accept the main thesis expressed by Herder ( Herder 1966), there is no need to find convincing the way he illustrates this point:
Each [language] is rich and wretched in its own way, but, of course, each in its own way. If the Arabs have so many words for stone, camel, sword, snake (what they live among), then the language of Ceylon, in accordance with the inclinations of its inhabitants, is rich in flattering words, respectful names and verbal embellishment. Instead of the word “woman,” it uses, depending on rank and class, twelve different names, while, for example, we, unpolite Germans, are forced here to resort to borrowing from our neighbors. Depending on class, rank and number, “you” is expressed in sixteen different ways, and this is the case both in the language of hired workers and in the language of courtiers. The style of the language is one of extravagance. In Siam there are eight different ways of saying “I” and “we” depending on whether the master is speaking to the servant or the servant to the master. (...) In each of these cases the synonymy is connected with the customs, character and origin of the people; and the creative spirit of people is manifested everywhere (154-155).
However, recently it is not only some of the illustrations that have come under criticism, but also the principle of cultural elaboration as such, although at times critics seem unable to decide whether to consider it a false or a boring truism.
For example, Pinker ( Pinker 1994) writes with reference to Pullum ( Pullum 1994): “On the issue of anthropological canards, we note that consideration of the relationship between language and thinking would not be complete without mentioning the Great Eskimo Lexical Hoax. Contrary to popular belief, Eskimos have no more words for snow than native English speakers” (64). However, Pullum himself ridicules references to the notorious variety of Eskimo words for snow in slightly different expressions: “To the last degree boring, even if true. The mere mention of these hackneyed, illegible references to the legendary ice blocks allows us to despise all these banalities" (quoted in Pinker 1994: 65).
What Pullum does not seem to take into account is that, once we have established the principle of cultural elaboration, albeit on the basis of “boring” examples, we can apply it to areas whose structure is less obvious to the naked eye. This is the reason (or at least one of the reasons) that language may be, as Sapir put it, a guide to “social reality,” that is, a guide to understanding culture in the broad sense of the word (including way of life, thinking and feeling).
If anyone finds it boring that, for example, the Hanunoo language in the Philippines has ninety words for rice ( Conklin 1957), then this is his problem. For those who do not find comparisons of cultures boring, the principle of cultural elaboration plays a fundamental role. Because it is so relevant to this book (especially the chapter on “friendship”), I illustrate the principle here with a few examples from Dixon’s book The Languages of Australia ( Dixon, The languages of Australia, 1994).
As one might expect, Australian languages have a rich vocabulary for describing culturally significant objects. ...Australian languages usually have names for different types of sand, but there may not be a generalized lexeme corresponding to the English word sand"sand". There are often many labels for different parts of the emu and eel, not to mention other animals; and there may be special designations for each of the four or five stages the pupa passes through on the way from larva to beetle (103-104).
There are verbs there that allow you to distinguish between culturally significant actions - for example, one verb would mean "spearing" in cases where the trajectory of the spear is directed by a woomera (a woomera is a spear-throwing tool used by Australian Aborigines.- Note ed.), another - when the actor holds a spear in his hand and sees where the blow is aimed, another - when the javelin thrower pokes at random, say, into thick grass, in which he noticed some kind of movement (unlike the state of affairs in English neither one of these verbal roots is not connected in any way with the noun "spear") (106).
One lexical area in which Australian languages excel is in the naming of different types of noise. For example, I can easily register in the Yidini language about three dozen lexemes denoting varieties of noise, including Dalmba"cutting sound" mida"the sound made by a man clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, or an eel striking water" moral"sound when clapping hands" nyurrugu "sound distant conversation, when you can’t make out the words,” yuyuruqgul"the sound made by a snake slithering through the grass" garga“the sound made by an approaching person, such as the sound made by his feet stepping on leaves or grass, or by his cane, which he drags along the ground” (105).
First of all, Dixon emphasizes (referring to the remarks of Kenneth Hale) the significant development of kinship terms in Australian languages and their cultural significance.
Hale also notes that cultural elaboration is naturally reflected in lexical structures. Among the Warlpiri, for example, where kinship algebra has an intellectual significance similar to that of mathematics in other parts of the world, one finds an elaborate, even extensive, system of kinship terms, whereby knowledgeable Warlpiri are able to articulate a truly impressive set of principles belonging to the system as a whole. , - by the way, this elaboration goes beyond the immediate needs of Warlpirian society, thereby revealing its true status as an intellectual sphere capable of bringing significant satisfaction to those individuals who throughout their lives become more and more specialists in it. ...Similar remarks apply to many other Australian tribes (108).
It is hard to believe that anyone would actually consider these examples of cultural elaboration to be obvious to the point of being trivial or uninteresting, but if someone does, there is hardly any point in having a discussion with him about it.
5. Word frequency and culture
While vocabulary development is undoubtedly a key indicator of the specific characteristics of different cultures, it is certainly not the only indicator. A related indicator, often overlooked, is frequency of use. For example, if an English word can be compared in meaning to a Russian word, but the English word is common and the Russian word is rarely used (or vice versa), then this difference suggests a difference in cultural significance.
It is not easy to get an accurate idea of how common a word is in any given society. In fact, the task of completely objectively “measuring” word frequency is inherently intractable. The results will always depend on the size of the corpus and the choice of texts included in it.
So does it really make sense to try to compare cultures by comparing word frequencies recorded in available frequency dictionaries? For example, if we discover that in the corpus of American English texts by Kucera and Francis ( Kucera and Francis 1967) and Carroll (Carrol 1971) (hereinafter K & F and C et al.) word ifoccurs respectively 2,461 and 2,199 times per 1 million words, while in the corpus of Russian texts by Zasorina the corresponding word If occurs 1,979 times, can we infer anything from this about the role that the hypothetical way of thinking plays in these two cultures?
Personally my answer is that (in case i/vs. If) no, we cannot, and that it would be naive to try to do so, since a difference of this order may be purely accidental.
On the other hand, if we find that the frequency I given for an English wordhomeland,is equal to 5 (both in K & F and in C et al.), while the frequency of the Russian word homeland, translated in dictionaries as " homeland ", is 172, the situation is qualitatively different. To neglect a difference of this order (approximately 1:30) would be even more foolish than to attach great importance to a difference of 20% or 50%. (Of course, with small numbers, even large differences in proportions can be purely random.)
In the case of the word homelandIt turns out that both English frequency dictionaries mentioned here give the same figure, but in many other cases the figures given in them differ significantly. For example, the wordstupid“stupid” appears in the corpus C et al. 9 times, and in the K & F case - 25 times;idiot"idiot" appears 1 time in C et al. and 4 times - in K & F; and the word /oo("fool" appears 21 times in C et al. and 42 times in K & F. All these differences can obviously be ignored as random. However, when we compare the English indicators with the Russian ones, the picture that emerges hardly can be rejected in a similar way:
From these figures a clear and distinct generalization emerges (relative to the entire family of words), which is entirely consistent with the general propositions independently derived from non-quantitative data; it lies in the fact that Russian culture encourages “direct”, sharp, unconditional value judgments, while Anglo-Saxon culture does not 2 . This is consistent with other statistics, such as those regarding the use of hyperbolic adverbs absolutely And absolutely And their English analogues ( absolutely, utterly and perfectly):
Another example: the use of wordsterribly And awfullyin English and words scary And terrible in Russian:
If we add to this that in Russian there is also a hyperbolic noun horror with a high frequency of 80 and a complete lack of equivalents in English, the difference between the two cultures in their attitude towards “exaggeration” will become even more noticeable.
Similarly, if we notice that in one English dictionary (K&F) there are 132 occurrences of the wordtruth,whereas in the other (C et al .) -only 37, a difference that may initially confuse us. However, when we we find that the numbers for the closest Russian equivalent of the wordtruth,namely words Truth, are 579, we are likely to be less inclined to dismiss these differences as “random.”
Anyone who is familiar with both Anglo-Saxon culture (in any of its varieties) and Russian culture intuitively knows that homeland is (or at least was until recently) a commonly used Russian word and that the concept encoded in it is culturally significant - to a much greater extent than the English word homelandand the concept encoded in it. It is not surprising that the frequency data, however unreliable they may be in general, confirm this. Likewise, the fact that Russians tend to talk about “truth” more often than native English speakers talk about “ truth ”, will hardly seem surprising to those familiar with both cultures. The fact that there is another word in the Russian lexicon that means something like “ truth ", namely true, even if the word frequency true(79), in contrast to word frequency Truth, not so strikingly high, provides additional evidence in favor of the significance of this general theme in Russian culture. Not intending to expose here the truth or the truth real semantic analysis, I could say that the word true means not just “truth (“ truth "), but rather something like the "ultimate truth of the "hidden truth" (cf. Mondry & Taylor 1992, Shmelev 1996) that it is characterized by combinations with the word search, as in the first of the following examples:
I don’t need gold, I’m looking for one truth (Alexander Pushkin, “Scenes from Knightly Times”);
I still believe in goodness, in truth (Ivan Turgenev, “The Noble Nest”);
True good, and Truth not bad (Dahl 1882).
But if the characteristic Russian concept “truth” plays a significant role in Russian culture, then the concept “truth” occupies an even more central place in it, as shown by numerous (often rhymed) proverbs and sayings (the first example is from the SRY, and the rest from Dal 1955):
The truth stings the eyes;
It’s easier to live without truth, but hard to die;
Everything will pass, only the truth will remain;
Varvara is my aunt, but really my sister;
Without truth there is no living, but howling;
It carries truth from the bottom of the sea;
Truth saves from water, from fire;
Don’t sue for the truth: throw off your hat and bow;
Cover the truth with gold, trample it in the mud - everything will come out;
Eat your bread and salt, but listen to the truth!
This is just a small sample. Dahl's Dictionary of Proverbs (Dahl 1955) contains dozens of proverbs, mostly related to true, and dozens of others related to its opposites: lie And lie(some of them excuse and justify lying as an inevitable concession to life circumstances, despite all the splendor of the truth):
The holy truth is good, but it is not suitable for people;
Don't tell your wife every truth.
Equally revealing are such common collocations as, first of all, the truth is true And truth mother (mother is a gentle peasant diminutive for mother), often used in combination with verbs speak And cut(see Dahl 1955 and 1977) or in the phrase cut the truth in the face:
tell (cut) the truth-uterus (mother);
cut the truth in the face.
The idea of throwing the whole “cutting” truth in the face of another person (“in his eyes”), combined with the idea that the “full truth” should be loved, cherished and revered like a mother, is contrary to the norms of Anglo-Saxon culture, which values “tact”, “white lie” (“ white lies" ), “non-interference in other people’s affairs,” etc. But, as the linguistic data presented here show, this idea is an integral part of Russian culture. Offer:
I love mother truth
given in the SSRLYa equally reveals the traditional Russian concern with the truth and attitude towards it.
I am not saying that the concerns and values of a cultural community will always be reflected in common words, and in particular in abstract nouns such as Truth And fate. Sometimes they are rather reflected in particles, interjections, set expressions or speech formulas (see, for example, Pawley & Syder 1983). Some words may be indicative of a given culture without being widely used.
Frequency is not everything, but it is very significant and indicative. Frequency dictionaries are nothing more than a general indicator of cultural significance and should only be used in conjunction with other sources of information about what a given cultural community is concerned with. But it would be unwise to ignore them completely. They give us some of the necessary information. However, in order to fully understand and correctly interpret what they tell us, digital indicators must be considered in the context of careful semantic analysis.
6. Key words and nuclear values of culture
Along with “cultural elaboration” and “frequency”, another important principle connecting the lexical composition of a language and culture is the principle of “key words” (cf. Evans-Pritchard 1968, Williams 1976, Parkin 1982, Moeran 1989). In fact, these three principles turn out to be interrelated.
“Key words” are words that are especially important and indicative of a particular culture. For example, in his book “Semantics, Culture and Cognition” (Semantics, culture and cognition, Wierzbicka 1992b ) I tried to show that Russian words play a particularly important role in Russian culture fate, soul And yearning and that the insight they give into this culture is truly invaluable.
There is no finite set of such words in any language, and there is no “objective discovery procedure” that would identify them. To demonstrate that a word has a special meaning for a particular culture, it is necessary to consider the arguments in favor of it. Of course, each such statement will need to be supported by data, but data is one thing, and the “discovery procedure” is another. For example, it would be ridiculous to criticize Ruth Benedict for the special attention she paid to Japanese wordsgin and on , or Michelle Rosaldo for her special attention to the wordligetof Ilonggo on the grounds that neither explained what led them to the conclusion that the words in question were worth focusing on, and did not justify their choice on the basis of any general discovery procedures. What matters is whether Benedict and Rosaldo's choices lead to significant insights that can be appreciated by other researchers familiar with the cultures in question.
How can one justify the claim that a particular word is one of the “key words” of a certain culture? First of all, it may be necessary to establish (with or without the help of a frequency dictionary) that the word in question is a common word and not a peripheral word. It may also be necessary to establish that the word in question (whatever its general frequency of use) is used very frequently in a particular semantic domain, such as the domain of emotion or the domain of moral judgment. In addition, it may be necessary to demonstrate that a given word is at the center of an entire phraseological family, similar to the family of expressions with the Russian word soul(cf. Wierzbicka 1992b): on the soul, in the soul, on the soul, soul to soul, pour out the soul, take the soul away, open the soul, soul wide open, talk heart to heart etc. It may also be possible to show that the supposed “key word” occurs frequently in proverbs, in sayings, in popular songs, in book titles, etc.
But the point is not how to “prove” whether this or that word is one of the key words of a culture, but rather, by undertaking a thorough study of some part of such words, to be able to say something about this culture significant and non-trivial. If our choice of words to focus on is not “inspired” by the material itself, we simply will not be able to demonstrate anything interesting.
The use of “keywords” as a method of studying culture can be criticized as “atomistic research, inferior to “holistic” approaches that focus on broader cultural patterns rather than “randomly chosen individual words.” An objection of this kind may have force in relation to some “word studies”, if these studies really constitute analysis" randomly selected individual words”, considered as isolated lexical units.
However, as I hope to show in this book, the analysis of cultural “key words” does not have to be carried out in the spirit of old-fashioned atomism. On the contrary, some words can be analyzed as central points around which entire areas of culture are organized. By carefully examining these central points, we may be able to demonstrate general organizing principles that give structure and coherence to the cultural field as a whole and often have explanatory power that extends across a range of domains.
Keywords like soul or fate, In russian language are like a loose end that we managed to find in a tangled ball of wool: by pulling on it, we may be able to untangle a whole tangled “tangle” of attitudes, values, expectations, embodied not only in words, but also in common combinations, in stable expressions , in grammatical constructions, in proverbs, etc. For example, the word fate leads us to other words “related to fate”, such as judgment, humility, fate, lot and rock, to such combinations as blow of fate, and to such stable expressions as nothing can be done about it grammatical constructions, such as the abundance of impersonal dative-infinitive constructions that are very characteristic of Russian syntax, to numerous proverbs, and so on (for a detailed discussion of this, see Wierzbicka 1992b ). Similarly, in Japanese, keywords such as enryo (roughly "interpersonal restraint"), (roughly "debt of gratitude") andomoiyari(roughly “benefactive empathy”), can lead us to the core of a whole complex of cultural values and attitudes, expressed, among other things, in the common practice of conversation and revealing a whole network of culture-specific “culture-bound scripts” 3 (cf. Wierzbicka, in press a).
NOTES
1 In fact, the concept of “vulgarity” survived into the Soviet era and was even used by official ideology. For example, Dovlatov (1986) reports (with hidden irony?) that the song “I wish to drink the nectar of your lips” was banned by censorship as anti-Soviet with the justification: “vulgarity.”
2 I hasten to add that the expression “Anglo-Saxon culture” (which is objectionable to many) is intended to designate the common core of the various “Anglo-Saxon cultures” and does not imply homogeneity,
3 On the concept of “nuclear cultural property” see Smolicz 1979.
LITERATURE
- Dal Vladimir. 1955. Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language. 4 t. Moscow.
- Dal Vladimir. 1977. Proverbs of the Russian people: collection. Leipzig: Zen-liiilantiquaria der DDR.
- Shmelev Alexey. 1996. The lexical composition of the Russian language as a reflection of the “Russian soul”. Russian language at school 4: 83-90.
- Carrol John B., Peter Davies and Barry Richman. 1971. The American Heritage word frequency book. Boston.
- Conklin Harold. 1957. Hanunoo agriculture. Rome.
- Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. 1968, The Nuerr: A description of the modes of liveliness and political institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon.
- Goddard Cliff and Wierzbicka Anna. 1994, eds. Semantic ane lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Herder Johann Gottfried. 1966. On the origin of language. New York: Frederik Unger.
- Hoffman Eva. 1989. Lost in translation: A new life in a new language. New York: Dutton.
- Hunt Earl and Mahzarin R.Benaji. 1988. The Whorfian hipotesis revised: A cognitive science view of linguistic and cultural effects of thought. In Berry et al. 1988: 57-84.
- Ishiguro Kazuo. 1986. An artist of the floating world. New York: Putnam.
- Kucera Henry and Nelson Francis. 1967. Computational analyzes of present-day American English. Providence.
- Locke John. 1959 An essay concerning human understanding. Ed. A. C. Fraser. Oxford: Clarendon.
- Lutz Catherine. 1990. Unnatural emotions. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
- Malotki Ekkehart. 198. Hopi time: A linguistic analysts of the temporal concepts in the hopi language. Berlin: Mouton.
- Moeran Brian. 1989. Language and popular culture in Japan. Manchester and New York: Manchester Univ. Press.
- Mondry Henrietta and John R. Taylor. 1992. On lyuing in Russian. Language and communication 12.2: 133-143.
- Nabokov Vladimir 1961. Nikolai Gogol". New York: New Direction.
- Parkin David. ed. 1982. Semantic anthropology. London: Academic Press.
- Pinker Steven. 1994. The language instinct. New York: William Morrow.
- Pullum Geoffrey K. 1991. The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax and other irreverent essays on the study of language. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
- Sapir E. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949.
- Wierzbicka Anna 1992b. Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations. - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Wierzbicka Anna. 1995. Everyday conception of emotions: S semantic perspective. In Russel et al. 1995: 17-47.
- Wierzbicka, in press b. "Sadness" and "anger" in Russian: The non-universality of the so-called "basic human emotions". In Dirven (forthcoming).
- Williams Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Flamingo, Fontana.
- Whorf B.L. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. J. B. Carroll (ed.). New York: Wiley, 1956.
- Wuthnow Robert, ed.1992. Vocabularies of public life: Empyrical Essays in symbolic structure. London, Routledge.
A. Vezhbitskaya UNDERSTANDING CULTURES THROUGH KEY WORDS (Excerpt)(Culture and ethnicity. - Volgograd, 2002) Word frequency and culture While vocabulary development is undoubtedly a key indicator of the specific characteristics of different cultures, it is certainly not the only indicator. A related indicator, often overlooked, is frequency of use. For example, if some English word can be compared in meaning to some Russian word, but the English word is common and the Russian word is rarely used (or vice versa), then this difference suggests a difference in cultural significance. It is not easy to get an accurate idea of how common a word is in any given society... The results will always depend on the size of the corpus and the choice of texts included in it. So does it really make sense to try to compare cultures by comparing word frequencies recorded in available frequency dictionaries? For example, if we discover that in the corpus of American English texts by Kucera and Francis and Carroll the word If occurs respectively 2.461 and 2.199 times per million words, whereas in the corpus of Russian texts by Zasorina the corresponding word occurs 1.979 times, can we conclude anything from this about the role that the hypothetical way of thinking plays in these two cultures? Personally, my answer is that no, we cannot, and that it would be naive to try to do so, since a difference of this order may be purely accidental. On the other hand, if we find that the frequency given for an English word Homeland, is equal to 5, whereas the frequency of the Russian word Motherland is 172, the situation is qualitatively different. Neglecting a difference of this order (approximately 1:30) would be even more foolish than attaching great importance to a difference of 20% or 50%. In the case of the word Homeland It turns out that both frequency dictionaries of the English language mentioned here give the same figure, but in many other cases the figures given in them differ significantly. For example the word Stupid“stupid” appears in Corpus C et al. 9 times, and the K&F case - 25 times; Idiot"idiot" appears 1 time in C et al. and 4 times in K and the word fool appears 21 times in C et al.
and 42 times in K&F. All these differences, obviously, can be neglected as random. However, when we compare the English figures with the Russians, the picture that emerges can hardly be dismissed in the same way:
Fool 43/21 Fool 122 Stupid 25/9 Silly 199 Stupidly 12/0,4 Stupid 134 Idiot 14/1 Idiot 129
From these figures a clear and clear generalization emerges (relative to the entire family of words), which is entirely consistent with the general provisions derived independently, on the basis of non-quantitative data; it is that Russian culture encourages “direct,” harsh, unconditional value judgments, while Anglo-Saxon culture does not. This is consistent with other statistics: word usage Terribly And Awfully in English and words Scary And Terrible in Russian:
English (K&F/C et al.) Russian Terribly 18/9 Terrible 170 Awfully 10/7 Scary 159 Horribly 12/1 -
If we add to this that in Russian there is also a hyperbolic noun Horror with a high frequency of 80 and a complete lack of equivalents in English, the difference between the two cultures in their attitude towards “exaggeration” will become even more noticeable. Similarly, if we notice that one English dictionary (K&F) has 132 occurrences of words Truth, while in another (C et al.) - only 37, this difference may at first lead us to confusion. However, when we discover that the numbers for the closest Russian equivalent of the word Truth, namely Is it true, are 579, we are likely to be less inclined to dismiss these differences as “random.” Anyone who is familiar with both Anglo-Saxon culture (in any of its varieties) and Russian culture intuitively knows that Motherland is a commonly used Russian word and that the concept encoded in it is culturally significant - to a much greater extent than the English word Homeland and the concept encoded in it.
It is not surprising that the frequency data, however unreliable they may be in general, confirm this. Likewise, the fact that Russians tend to talk about “truth” more often than native English speakers talk about “truth” is hardly surprising to those familiar with both cultures. The fact that there is another word in the Russian lexicon that means something like “truth”, namely True(79), in contrast to word frequency Is it true, is not so strikingly high, provides additional evidence in favor of the significance of this general theme in Russian culture. Keywords and nuclear values of culture Along with “cultural elaboration” and “frequency”, another important principle connecting the lexical composition of a language and culture is the principle of “key words”. “Key words” are words that are especially important and indicative of a particular culture. For example, in my book “Semantics, Culture and Cognition” I tried to show that Russian words play a particularly important role in Russian culture Fate, soul And Yearning and that the insight they give into this culture is truly invaluable.
Some words can be analyzed as focal points around which entire areas of culture are organized. By carefully examining these central points, we may be able to demonstrate general organizing principles that give structure and coherence to the cultural field as a whole and often have explanatory power that extends across a range of domains. Keywords like Soul or Fate, in Russian, are similar to the free end that we managed to find in a tangled ball of wool; by pulling on it, we may be able to unravel a whole tangled “tangle” of attitudes, values and expectations, embodied not only in words, but also in common combinations, in grammatical constructions, in proverbs, etc. For example, the word Fate leads to other words "related to fate", such as Destined, humility, fate, lot And Rock, to such combinations as Blows of fate, and to such stable expressions as It's nothing you can do, to grammatical constructions, such as the abundance of impersonal dative-infinitive constructions, which are very characteristic of Russian syntax, to numerous proverbs, and so on.
While vocabulary development is undoubtedly a key indicator of the specific characteristics of different cultures, it is certainly not the only indicator. A related indicator, often overlooked, is frequency of use. For example, if some English word can be compared in meaning to some Russian word, but the English word is common and the Russian word is rarely used (or vice versa), then this difference suggests a difference in cultural significance.
It is not easy to get an accurate idea of how common a word is in any given society... The results will always depend on the size of the corpus and the choice of texts included in it.
So does it really make sense to try to compare cultures by comparing word frequencies recorded in available frequency dictionaries? For example, if we discover that in the corpus of American English texts by Kucera AND Francis and Carroll the word if occurs respectively 2,461 and 2,199 times per million words, whereas in the corpus of Russian texts by Zasorina the corresponding word If occurs 1,979 times, can we infer anything from this about the role that the hypothetical way of thinking plays in these two cultures?
Personally, my answer is that... no, we cannot, and that it would be naive to try to do so, since a difference of this order may be purely coincidental.
On the other hand, if we find that the frequency given for an English word homeland, is equal to 5..., whereas the frequency of the Russian word homeland is 172, the situation is qualitatively different. Neglecting a difference of this order (approximately 1:30) would be even more stupid than attaching great importance to a difference of 20% or 50%...
In the case of the word homeland It turns out that both frequency dictionaries of the English language mentioned here give the same figure, but in many other cases the figures given in them differ significantly. For example the word stupid“stupid” appears in Corpus C et al. 9 times, and for the K&F case – 25 times; idiot "idiot" appears 1 time in C et al. and 4 times - in K a word fool “fool” appears 21 times in C et al. and 42 times in K&F. All these differences, obviously, can be neglected as random. However, when we compare the English figures with the Russians, the picture that emerges can hardly be dismissed in the same way:
fool 43/21 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ fool 122
stupid 9/25 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _stupid 199
stupidly 12/0.4 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ stupid 134
idiot 14/1 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ idiot 129
From these figures a clear and clear generalization emerges (relative to the entire family of words), which is entirely consistent with the general provisions derived independently, on the basis of non-quantitative data; it is that Russian culture encourages “direct,” harsh, unconditional value judgments, while Anglo-Saxon culture does not. This is consistent with other statistics...: word usage terribly And awfully in English and words scary And terrible in Russian:
English (K&F/C et al.) Russian
terribly 18/9 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ terrible 170
awfully 10/7 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ scary 159
horribly 12/1
If we add to this that in Russian there is also a hyperbolic noun horror with a high frequency of 80 and a complete lack of equivalents in English, the difference between the two cultures in their attitude towards “exaggeration” will become even more noticeable.
Similarly, if we notice that the Water English Dictionary (K&F) has 132 occurrences of the words truth, while in another (C et al.) - only 37, this difference may at first lead us to confusion. However, when we discover that the numbers for the closest Russian equivalent of the word truth, namely Truth, are 579, we are likely to be less inclined to dismiss these differences as “random.”
Anyone who is familiar with both Anglo-Saxon culture (in any of its varieties) and Russian culture intuitively knows that homeland is... a commonly used Russian word and that the concept encoded in it is culturally significant - to a much greater extent than the English word homeland and the concept coded in it. It is not surprising that the frequency data, however unreliable they may be in general, confirm this. Likewise, the fact that Russians tend to talk about “truth” more often than native English speakers talk about “ truth”, will hardly seem surprising to those familiar with both cultures. The fact that there is another word in the Russian lexicon that means something like “ truth", namely true(79), in contrast to word frequency Truth, is not so strikingly high, provides additional evidence in favor of the significance of this general theme in Russian culture...
Keywords and nuclear values of culture
Along with “cultural elaboration” and “frequency”, another important principle connecting the lexical composition of a language and culture is the principle of “key words”...
“Key words” are words that are especially important and indicative of a particular culture. For example, in my book “Semantics, Culture and Cognition”... I tried to show that Russian words play a particularly important role in Russian culture fate, soul And yearning and that the insight they give into this culture is truly invaluable...
…Some words can be analyzed as central points around which entire areas of culture are organized. By carefully examining these central points, we may be able to demonstrate general organizing principles that give structure and coherence to the cultural field as a whole and often have explanatory power that extends across a range of domains.
Keywords like soul or fate, in Russian, are similar to the free end that we managed to find in a tangled ball of wool; by pulling on it, we may be able to unravel a whole tangled “tangle” of attitudes, values and expectations, embodied not only in words, but also in common combinations, in grammatical constructions, in proverbs, etc. For example, the word fate leads to other words "related to fate", such as destined, humility, fate, lot And rock, to such combinations as blows of fate, and to such stable expressions as it's nothing you can do, to grammatical constructions, such as the abundance of impersonal dative-infinitive constructions, which are very characteristic of Russian syntax, to numerous proverbs, and so on.
Reprinted from: Anna Vezhbitskaya. Understanding cultures through keywords / Transl. from English A. D. Shmeleva. – M.: Languages of Slavic Culture, 2001. – 288 p. – (Language. Semiotics. Culture. Small series)