Paul Friedrich - The Language Parallax: Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy

Texas Linguistics Series

Editorial Board

Winfred P. Lehmann, Chair

Joel Sherzer

Carlota S. Smith

The Language Parallax

Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy

By Paul Friedrich

University of Texas Press
Austin

Copyright 1986 by the University of Texas Press
All rights reserved

First edition, 1986

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Friedrich, Paul, 1927

The language parallax.

(Texas linguistics series)

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. 2. Poetry. 3. LanguagesPhilosophy. I. Title. II. Series.
PS35.F72 1986 306.4 85-15091
ISBN 0-292-74650-4
ISBN 0-292-74651-2 (pbk.)

See for permission notices.

ISBN 978-0-292-76251-0 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-76252-7 (individual e-book)

doi: 10.7560/746503

For my mother, Lenore Friedrich, my daughter, Kanya, and my wife, Deborah

Contents

by William Bright

Figures

Tables

Paul Friedrich: An Appreciation

I first became acquainted with the name of Paul Friedrich when I read his brilliant review (in Language 37:163-168, 1961) of the volume Linguistic Diversity in South Asia, edited by Charles Ferguson and John Gumperz. Apart from his appropriate criticism of the papers (including mine), I was especially impressed by his delightful term orthographic dazzlereferring to the effect that a prestigious writing system can have on literate speakers consciousness of their language. Subsequently, I enjoyed reading Pauls 1962 articles, Language and Politics in India and An Evolutionary Sketch of Russian Kinship; and in 1964 I had the pleasure of meeting him for the first time at the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference in Los Angeles and at Arrowhead Lake. I still have a strong visual and auditory memory of Pauls paper, Structural Implications of Russian Pronominal Usage. His effective recitation of extended passages from Gorki, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Pushkinas well as his sensitive analysis of those authors usage of pronounsmoved his audience to an ovation. I might have guessed then that Paul was at heart not only an anthropologist and linguist, but a poet as well.

In the following years, we remained in touch, mainly through correspondence concerning several manuscriptsespecially on the Tarascan languagewhich I accepted from Paul in my capacity as editor of Language. I came to know him as a scholar of extraordinary range, whose competence was displayed by now-classic works in such diverse fields as political anthropology (Agrarian Revolt in aMexican Village, 1977), comparative Indo-European (Proto-Indo-European Trees, 1970), and theory of verbal aspect (On Aspect Theory and Homeric Aspect, 1974). I also appreciated the geographical breadth of his interests, which include South Asia, Mexico, Russia, ancient Greece, and indeed the whole Proto-Indo-European world.

More recently, however, even further aspects of Pauls creativity were revealed to me by his Meaning of Aphrodite (1978)a study of myth which is at once philological, anthropological, and poeticand by his samizdat collections of poems, Neighboring Leaves Ride This Wind (1976) and Bastard Moons (1979b).

When a volume of my own collected papers was published in 1976, Paul reviewed it for Language (1978); but at the suggestion of a similar collection of his own papers, to be edited by A. Dil, Paul wrote me that he was not yet ready to be pickled. Fortunately he relented, and in 1979 his book Language, Context, and the Imagination was published. The title of the volume, taken as the conjunction of three terms (never a disjunction!), clearly indicates the thrust of Pauls work. Along with twelve reprinted articles, that volume also included the essay Poetic Language and the Imagination, which previously had received only limited distribution; here he began explicitly to discuss poetic creativity as a key factor in understanding the nature and use of language. A revised version of that essay forms of the present volume.

What I have written above has been largely in terms of personal interaction. This is because of my own feeling that understanding of human existence in general can often be best reached through consideration of individual experiencea view which is also apparent in much of Pauls work, e.g., his studies of the Tarascan leader Primo Tapia and the Homeric hero Achilles, and in the intensely personal nature of many of his poems. I will not attempt to paraphrase here the broader insights into language, context, and the imagination which Paul offers in the essays that follow. I will only say that, in combining the gift for rigorous, explicit analysis of linguistic facts with a suitable appreciation of the order-to-chaos continuum in language, Paul reminds me of no one so much as that other prolific anthropologist-linguist-poet, Edward Sapir. Ive always regretted that I was born too late to know Sapir; but Im delighted that I know Paul Friedrich.

William Bright

Acknowledgments

For their comments on various versions of various portions of THE LANGUAGE PARALLAX I am particularly indebted to John Attinasi and Dell Hymes, who critiqued three chapters each (3, 4, and 7, and 2, 3, and 6, respectively); Joel Sherzer on and poet, provided a crucial metaphor years ago.

Speaking more comprehensively, Tim Buckley must be singled out for critiquing all but . Christine Gever did a superb editing job on the manuscript, as did Gail Hajenian Miller on the index. Above all, I am grateful to my wife Deborah Gordon Friedrich, who contributed to the style, organization, and overall ideas in this book at all levels of all chapters and staunchly supported the whole enterprise.

P.F

Chicago 1985

parallax, n. I. the apparent change in the position of an object resulting from a change in the direction or position from which it is viewed.

Websters New Twentieth Century Dictionary

Introduction

In a sense that is simple but pertinent, linguistic relativism and the closely related linguistic chauvinism are forms of awareness that have been evolving among us for a long time. They must have been acute in the Upper Paleolithic, when Cro-Magnons ordered their enmities and mobilized their affinities on the basis, in part, of how families over there spoke. Linguistic chauvinism was endemic in early Greek thought, and in Greek philosophy the dispute over nature versus convention constitutes an integral part of what might be called proto-relativism (since convention is language-culture specific). The Age of Discovery and subsequent Colonialism enormously stimulated speculation both on differences between languages and their relative qualities and on the dialectically related question of what might be common or universal. A cultivated relativism certainly was essential to Romanticism, in both its literary and its national and folkloristic phases. And relativism in more sophisticated senses has received much critical and scientific attention over the past hundred years, to the degree that a great deal of anthropology and linguistics can be interpreted as inputif often implicitly or unwittingly. There is an obvious, dialectical relation between relativism and chauvinism, ethnocentrism, and racism, just as relativism may contribute to international understanding, political pluralism, and even cross-language poetic inspiration; in short, relativism has powerful political, ethical, and aesthetic implications. Some of these are expressed below in terms of outrage against ) in order to elaborate a general but in some ways novel version of linguistic relativism and the related hypothesis of poetic indeterminacy.