The relationship between people of different cultures can sometimes create problems, one of the most commons being Stereotypes. A stereotype is when you relation a determined culture to a group of values, ideas or way of living (commonly bad things), and generalize them to all the people of that culture. This may bring you huge problems, because although people from the same culture can share ideas or a way of living, all persons are different.
Violator, a Thrash Metal band from Brazil.
Personally, I have never felt discriminated or treated different because of my culture, but I have known a very strong stereotype, and this is against Heavy Metal Fans. Some people of our society think that if you wear black or like heavy music or have long hair your are crazy, alcoholic or satanic. I'm sure that good or bad actions come from inside, and that the way you dress doesn't change your values or aptitudes.
Other common stereotypes are against Arabs, Peruvians, Americans, and many other cultures. In fact, most of the cultures of the world are stereotyped with some bad things.
Language is strictly ligated to Culture, as culture determines the way we are and the way we live. Therefore, it's quite hard to describe culture. Different persons have postulates theories about what is culture, and I will present them below.
Matthew Arnold thinks that culture is something we aspire to, as he says "The noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we find it". He states that culture is something we want to achieve for a better world.
Other scientists think that culture is something outside of us that we learn or we are born into. Claude Levi-Strauss says "(Culture) is made up of rules of conduct, which are not invented and whose function is generally not understood by people who obey them". Also, Edward Tyler states that "(Culture) is acquired by a man as a member of a society"
But there are others that think that culture is something developed by humans. Raymond Williams, for example, says that "The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind". Finally, Clifford Geertz thinks that humans are suspended in culture as spiders are suspended in webs, and that we build culture every day as spiders spin their webs.
Language and thoughts have a strong relationship. It seems that one wouldn't exist without the other, but one must have come first. Different scientists and investigators have tried to answer this query, and I will present some of them in this entry.
Ferdinand de Saussure stated that language and thought cannot be easily separated and that they were like the two faces of a sheet of paper: you can't cut one face without cutting the other. He described language as Langue (abstract system of sings and rules that make up language structure) and Parole (Langue being used). He also said that there can't be a detailed thought without speech, nor meaningful words without thought, so both need of the other to exist.
Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard, said that "Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects. These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later." This means she believes that thought came first, because young children can think in objects without language.
Steven Pinker also has an opinion in this topic, which is showed in the following video.
Pinker thinks that we think in images, and that language is the just the way we communicate our thoughts to others. This means that he clearly separates thought and language, and that he is sure that thought comes before language.
Tomorrow, Saturday the 17th of march, we celebrate the Saint Patrick's Day! I invite you all to wear green clothes, celebrate the shamrock and, why not, search for some gold at the end of a rainbow!
But before we celebrate anything, we must know the history of Saint Patrick. Saint Patrick is the Saint Patron of Ireland and he lived between the years 387-461 (Years can vary, as there are different versions). The story tells that at the age of sixteen he was kidnapped from his native land of the Roman British Isles by a band pirates, and sold into slavery in Ireland. Saint Patrick worked as a shepherd and turned to religion for solace. After six years of slavery he escaped to the Irish coast and fled home to Britain. Then, he felt that he must go back to Ireland and turn Irish to christianity. Therefore, he studied for several years and then went to Ireland, where he converted a lot of people to christianity. Also, Saint Patrick is credited for bringing written words to Ireland, and also there is a myth that says that he banished the snakes from Ireland!
One interesting fact about Saint Patrick's Day is the Shamrock, on of the most common symbols of this celebration. This is because Irish think that Saint Patrick used the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity. Many other myths and legends about Saint Patrick's Day enrich this celebration.
If we think about language, another question that we will probably ask is about how does language come in our brains, or "How do we acquire Language?". In this sense, there are different theories that try to explain this phenomenon, and I'll present them in a mind map.
(Click on the image to expand it)
Personally, I think that we born with the ability to talk, because we have "something" in our heads that animals don't have, and that's why only humans can talk. But also, I think that we learn many things about language as we grow, specially because there are different languages, so persons from all the world can learn and talk different languages, but we all have the same ability.
Language has different aspects to be analyzed. One aspect that really catches my attention is how language raised in the first communities of humans that lived in our world. In this entry, we will be trying to learn more about the history of language, by watching two videos and answering some questions about them.
Video 1:
1. Why is it said that people in East Africa developed more than the rest?
This is said because investigations prove that people that lived in early Africa had a better language than other communities around the world.
2. What happened to the earlier languages on Earth?
Most of them disappeared and their traces were lost.
3. According to Dr Johanna Nichols, what were the first utterances made by Humans?
The first utterances were calls, as people needed to call each other for basic activities. These "calls" evolved and turned into words over time.
Video 2:
1. What is the biblical story of "the Tower of Babel"?
The story tells that people tried to build a very high tower that will reach the sky. In response to this, God changed their languages and spread them all over the world, and of course, they couldn't finish building the tower.
2. What does historical evidence tell us of this biblical event? Historical evidence explains the evolution of different languages by saying that when people started to move to new places around the world, the language started to change and resulted in different languages over time, because each community changes their language. This is why we have a lot of languages in the world, and not only one.
3. What's the relationship between genes and language? They have a very strong relationship. People with similar genes are more likely to speak the same language.
4. Why do languages constantly change? Because language is learn by generations, and each one of this generations makes slight changes in their language. Over time, greater changes will be seen.
If we analyze the basics of language, one of the first questions that we ask ourselves are "Why do we talk?" and "How do we learn to talk?". This questions have not yet been answered. The following video shows an experiment that tries to understand how do we learn to talk. Then, I added some questions and what are my answer to them.
1. Which is the 'trick' (process) that enables us to communicate something to others?
The trick is to transfer our thoughts to other person by a sequence of sounds that both persons can understand.
2. Do animals talk? If not, What do they do to communicate?
They don't talk as we do, they just communicate by sounds. I think that the big difference between animal and human's communication is that our language have some determined rules that we must follow to understand each other, while the animals communication is way more basic and it's not proven that they can really understand each other.
3. What do we express when we talk?
Thoughts, emotions, information, ideas.
4. What did Dr Deb Roy try to achieve in his house?
He tries to turn his own house in a language laboratory, where he can record 24/7, in order to analyze and study how the language develops in children.
5. Which are the earliest stages in language for a child?
Babbling goes first. Then he starts saying some basic words, like "dad" or "mom". After some time he starts putting two words together, for example "more milk" or "green car". Then, he will try to make short sentences and more complex structures.
6. What external and internal factors made the data recollected in the experiment into something they could use?
The raw data is useless. Therefore, experts have to transcribe it, analyze it, and observe how the people that surrounds the child and their way of talking affects the way the child develops his own language.
7. How did the parents' speech change from their son's first word until he could utter more complex structures?
When the child starts saying words, parents unconsciously simplify their language. After some time, they start using more complex sentences again.
8. What does Dr Deb Roy compare the "blossoming" of a speech form?
As young children can't utter or don't know a lot of words, they often try to say a sentence that they had heard "as it sounds" using noises like "ga...ga..." or "ba...ba...". Of course no one can understand those wrong-made sentences, but children try to copy what they hear from their parents.
In our lives, we use language every day. We seem not to care about it, but it would be almost impossible to live without a way to communicate with others. However, if we ask ourselves what is language itself, we have a quite interesting question, as a language is not only a group of sounds. I think language is a system created by a community of people, who give a meaning to a determined combination of sounds, in order to allow the exchange of ideas between persons. In this sense, the language is both the sounds and the meaning that these sounds have, and also the feelings that involve some words.
If we go more in depth, language can be an awesome tool if we know how to use it properly. The way we express ourselves makes a great difference in the way other people take our ideas. Language can be helpful to express our point of view or convince someone. However, if we have problems in the use of language, it can be a great impediment at the moment of sharing our ideas. Another aspect that we have to consider is that there are different languages around the world, therefore, knowing more than one language may help us a lot in the globalized world we live in.
