Language and Culture--语言与文化的关系.docVIP

Language and Culture Introduction Since human being appeared ,all kinds of languages came into being bir by bit .And with the development of languages ,cultures, varieties of cultures grew ,too .What we can not deny is that there is a intimate relationship between language and culture . There are many ways in which the phenomena of language and culture are intimately related. Both phenomena are unique to humans and have therefore been the subject of a great deal of anthropological, sociological, and even memetic study. Language, of course, is determined by culture, though the extent to which this is true is now under debate. The converse is also true to some degree: culture is determined by language - or rather, by the replicators that created both, memes. Language as Determined by Culture Early anthropologists, following the theory that words determine thought, believed that language and its structure were entirely dependent on the cultural context in which they existed. This was a logical extension of what is termed the Standard Social Science Model, which views the human mind as an indefinitely malleable structure capable of absorbing any sort of culture without constraints from genetic or neurological factors. In this vein, anthropologist Verne Ray conducted a study in the 1950s, giving color samples to different American Indian tribes and asking them to give the names of the colors. He concluded that the spectrum we see as green, yellow, etc. was an entirely arbitrary division, and each culture divided the spectrum separately. According to this hypothesis, the divisions seen between colors are a consequence of the language we learn, and do not correspond to divisions in the natural world. A similar hypothesis is upheld in the extremely popular meme of Eskimo words for snow - common stories vary from fifty to upwards of two hundred. Extreme cultural relativism of this type has now been clearly refuted. Eskimos use at most twelve different words for snow, which