Anna Wierzbicka - Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words

William Bright, General Editor

I Gunter Senft: Classificatory Particles in Kilivila

2 Janis B. Nuckolls: Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua

3 David B. Kronenfeld: Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers: Semantic Extension from the Ethnoscience Tradition

4 Lyle Campbell: American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America

5 Chase Hensel: Telling Ourselves: Ethnicity and Discourse in Southwestern Alaska

6 Rosaleen Howard-Malverde (ed.): Creating Context in Andean Cultures

7 Charles L. Briggs (ed.): Disorderly Discourse: Narrative, Conflict, and Inequality

8 Anna Wierzbicka: Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese

ANNA WIERZBICKA

Research for this book was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council, which enabled me to obtain valuable research assistance throughout this project. I am extremely grateful to my very able research assistant, Helen O'Loghlin, whose help, both intellectual and organizational, was indispensable.

I would also like to express my gratitude to colleagues who read and commented on some of the chapters of this book, and in particular to Andrzej Boguslawski, Cliff Goddard, Igor Mel'cuk, and Alan Rumsey. Cliff Goddard read the whole manuscript and was, as always, more than generous with criticisms and suggestions for improvement. I would also like to acknowledge, with thanks, the contribution of my daughter Mary Besemeres, who has discussed with me many of the issues raised in this book and has contributed valuable ideas, observations, and references.

Finally, it is a pleasure to express my special thanks to Ellalene Seymour for her unfailingly efficient, thoughtful and good-humored typing and editing of the successive drafts of the hook.

January 1996

Language [is] a symbolic guide to culture. Vocabulary is a very sensitive index of the culture of a people. [L]inguistics is of strategic importance for the methodology of social science.

Edward Sapir

In his introduction to Vocabularies of Public Life (1992) the well-known sociologist of culture Robert Wuthnow observes: "Perhaps more than at any other time in the present century, cultural analysis lies at the center of human sciences." A significant feature of the work in this area, according to Wuthnow, is its interdisciplinary character: "Anthropology, literary criticism, political philosophy, religious studies, cultural history, and cognitive psychology are all rich fields from which new insights can be derived." (2)

One discipline conspicuously absent from this list is linguistics. The omission is all the more striking in that Wuthnow links "the vitality and new thinking characteristic of the current sociological studies of culture [with] the depth of interest being given to questions of language" (2). This book seeks to demonstrate that cultural analysis can also gain important new insights from linguistics, in particular from linguistic semantics, and that the semantic perspective on culture is something that cultural analysis can ill afford to ignore. The relevance of semantics is not restricted to vocabulary, but perhaps in no other area is it so clearly obvious. It is therefore on vocabulary that this book concentrates.

More than sixty years on, Edward Sapir's profound insights, several of which serve as epigraphs to this book, have lost none of their validity or importance: first, that "language [is] a symbolic guide to culture" (Sapir 1949:162); second, that "vocabulary is a very sensitive index of the culture of a people" (27); and, third, that "linguistics is of strategic importance for the methodology of social science" (166).

There is a very close link between the life of a society and the lexicon of the language spoken by it. This applies in equal measure to the outer and inner aspects of life. An obvious example from the material, visible domain is that of food. It is clearly not an accident that, for example, Polish has special words for cabbage stew (bigos), beetroot soup (barszcz), and plum jam (powidfa), which English does not; or that English has, for example, a special word for orange (or orange-like) jam (marmalade), and Japanese it word for a strong alcoholic drink made from rice (sake). Obviously, such words can tell us something about the eating or drinking habits of the peoples in question.

The existence of language-specific names for special kinds of "things" (visible and tangible, such as food) is something that even ordinary, monolingual people are usually aware of. The existence of different customs and social institutions which have specific names in one language but not in others is also widely known. Consider, for example, the German noun Bruderschaft, literally `brotherhood', which Harrap's German and English dictionary glosses laboriously as "(to drink) the pledge of `brotherhood' with someone (subsequently addressing each other as `du')." Clearly, the absence of a word for "Bruderschaft" in English has something to do with the fact that English no longer makes a distinction between an intimate/familiar "thou" and a more distant "you," and that English-speaking societies do not have a common ritual of pledging friendship through drinking.

Similarly, it is no accident that English doesn't have a word corresponding to the Russian verb xristosonat'sja (literally "to Christ one another"), glossed by the Oxford Russian-English dictionary as "to exchange a triple kiss (as Easter salutation)," or that it doesn't have a word corresponding to the Japanese word miai, referring to a formal occasion when the prospective bride and her family meet the prospective bridegroom and his family for the first time.

Most important, what applies to material culture and to social rituals and institutions applies also to people's values, ideals, and attitudes and to their ways of thinking about the world and our life in it.

A good example is provided by the untranslatable Russian word poslvj (adjective) and its derivatives (nouns) poslost', posljak, and posljacka, to which the emigre Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov (1961) devoted many pages of detailed discussion. 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. (64)

English words expressing several, although by no means all, aspects of poshlust Isicl are for instance: "cheap, sham, common, smutty, pink-and-blue, high falutin', in bad taste." (64)

According to Nabokov, however, these English words are inadequate, for first, they do not aim at unmasking, exposing, or denouncing "cheapness" of all kinds the way poslost' and its cognates do; and, second, they do not have the same "absolute" implications that poslost' does: