ANTH_100_LECTURE_15_PART_1_SPRING_2023_

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ANTH 100 - LECTURE #15, PART 1 (SPRING, 2023).mp4 Speaker 1 [00:00:20] O'Leary of everyone is. Yeah. How is everyone doing? Speaker 2 [00:00:28] Um, I am. Speaker 1 [00:00:30] Doing well, so. Okay, let's. Let's look at our agenda for today. And let me minimize my video box here. There we go. So obviously, we're going to be looking at language. We're going to be looking at what makes symbolic. And that's the sort of point of distinction in terms of our method mode and style of communication, is it's it's symbolic. So what makes human language distinctively human? Well, it's that symbolic capacity. Power, language and culture related. They're sort of dialectically intertwined. You can't have one without the other. So it makes it sort of makes it very. Very interesting to to approach this from an anthropological perspective and not just a straight linguistic perspective. I'm always seeing this and maybe it's getting annoying, but in my Anthro 202 class, I really get into that distinction between linguistics in studying linguistics from a linguistic perspective, as opposed to a linguistic anthropological perspective, which always looks at things from a graphic perspective but situates it within a cultural context. Okay, how do we communicate without language? And there are many ways and again, this is very interesting as well. And how do how do languages shift over time? The really interesting thing is all languages are subject to an evolutionary shift. I guess in the micro and macro sense. But and we're in a time now I don't I don't know what to call this. I mean, philosophers and some anthropologists call this the age of the Anthropocene, you know, very human dominated era of our reports. Of our existence, but because it's due to the internet too, things are changing really quickly. And I'm I'm privy to this change in real time just because I've got two children who are avid. Oh, that sounds weird. It's almost like it's a choice. It's a they use the Internet a lot. It's this sort of basic tool now that when I first got it, shucks, when I was like 21, you know, I'd used it before, but we didn't get it in our house really until a little bit after the mid-nineties. It was a luxury, right? It was like dial up. So if you're on the Internet and a friend called, it would interrupt and break that that connection. And then you'd pick up the phone and hear that voice, as some of you probably remember this, right? Super loud and annoying. And man, the speeds were excruciatingly slow compared to, like, watching like, customers now. What does it mean to learn a language? Very frustrating endeavor, especially when you're getting older, but. Still a question to be asked and something we'll touch on very, very quickly later. Next for next Monday's Wednesday's lecture. Oh, my goodness. I still have allergies, but I don't even know why. What happens when languages come in contact with each other? And what kind of change does that bring about? Kind of loan or borrow words are incorporated into one language. You'll see there some very interesting contexts, like Iceland, which are the government is sort of very hard lined about their language and incorporating loanwords and Iceland disguising foreign loanwords, which sort of sounds ridiculous, but they do that. So we'll we'll talk about that. And we'll also touch on what linguistic inequality is as well. A very curious term. And at the end of this today and on Wednesday, we can say it is now safe to turn off your computer. Okay, Do it. I think there's a meme floating around of Shia LaBeouf, and my Alexis makes fun of me sometimes because. Oh, who was it? It was a parent. And then another student had said that I looked like shy, a buff. And I'm like that. Not even close. And then Alexa started torturing me with Nemes in particular. This one just. Oh, here we go. Oh, that was too. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Well, I don't even know what Why? Trust. Oh, it. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Yesterday. You set tomorrow. So just do it right. Your dreams come true. Just do it. So keep the training a success. You're going to wake up and work all day. Nothing is impossible. Like getting in in Anthro 100 books. Anyone else quit and you're not going to stop there? Go. What are you waiting for? Yes, you can just do it.

Well, you can do it. We're talking about showing your computers off. I don't look like that guy. So let's move. That's going to hilarious. Speaker 2 [00:06:41] Let's move on. Speaker 1 [00:06:44] Human language. This is Noam Chomsky. So he is a very distinguished linguist at M.I.T. and their world renowned linguistics department. He's got a really monotone, distinctive way of talking. Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon without significant analog in. And so that's that's our one mean today. Just kidding. There are a load in this lecture. I once did a lecture in medical anthropology. 347. Maybe one or two of you are in this class who are in that class, and I think 7/8 of the lecture was just means. I tried an experiment and I think it worked. What the heck is human language anyways? Well, it's a set, a series, a system of symbols that humans. Put together in such a way to convey, explain and communicate their experience of. Interstates one another, but also the world. What makes it interesting, though, is that it's a set of arbitrary symbols and. Why we call things certain things is just arbitrary. This is a pencil. If it were a pen in French Saturn's stylo stylus, perhaps based on the Latin term, something pointy, right? But these are all arbitrary words. So in different languages, these objects are labeled differently. And it's arbitrary. It's not like there is some grand sort of cosmological generator out there that labels things for us, and we just sort of have to finally be like, Okay, pencil, great. That's just what it is universally. No, it's arbitrary. And so we'll talk a little bit about this idea of speech community. And I mean, that that's you know, we look at our textbook, that's a little bit of a problematic idea. And I think community of speech practice might be a little bit more indicative as to what's going on. But these communities of speech practice or people who speak the same language for the same purposes understand that. Things are what they are owing to this process, not mentioned in our textbook called Conventionality. It's just a matter of convention. Yes, it's arbitrary, but conventionality means, you know, historically people have come together and agreed that this is a pencil that is a skateboard deck. And owing to that practice of conventionality, we can now have a commonality in terms of what we're referring to in the world and then becomes understood in. So I can say to most people who understand English, Oh, can you pass me the pencil? They're not going to pass a pillow and be like, Oh, okay. Right. Which is a little bit of a silly comment there. But anyway, is this linguistic in the sixties came up with these six design features hawk it his name was. And again, I just it's odd that the textbook is quoting things from the sixties because they know that there are more contemporary sources out there. Oh, well. Well, that's cool. But these six design features anyways, that. Comprise or make language distinctive in that being. Human language distinctive are as follows So you have in we will define each one of these in turn openness as a plastic as opposed to a closed system of language. You have this idea of duality, of pattern, and we're going to talk about phonemes and morphemes arbitrariness, and we've touched on that already. Displacement. So talking about temporality, being able to talk about things in and out of time, which is something distinctly human, which would be all of these are prevarication. Being able to use the language for all the purposes. So being able to see things that while syntactically in sync, symptomatically correct in terms of where they sit in the sentence and in terms of the flow of meaning can be completely meaning less. And I've got a meme to explain that. And then Semantic City, which is using language always in context. Situated within a cultural context to refer to things that people can understand owing to those dynamics of conventionality. So let me just make sure I'm on the right track here. Okay, so. Oh. My information didn't work direct. Okay, so this idea of openness is really I don't like the term. I think I like the term dynamic more, but it really indexes or points to the ability of speakers of human language to formulate, create and understand brand new messages. Kind of like what's going on between these two ladies.

And I don't know what this picture is hilarious to me because this woman who looks like my aunt. Is? I don't know. She's confused, man. She's getting super close to this person's face, and her mouth is quite large. And I don't know if she is a Dementor from Harry Potter sucking this woman's poor soul out of her mouth into hers. If she's got her. Bad breath. And she's examining that as a halitosis. Political scientist, I don't know who knows what's going on here, but something new is happening. And. Oh. My innovations really didn't work here. What's going on here? Yeah, she. What the heck? She's going like, what's going on here? I really. Speaker 2 [00:13:42] Sometimes I'm. Speaker 1 [00:13:45] I might have to switch textbooks here because we've got an interruption here. It's kind of abrupt. But anyways, openness is this ability to create new. New man, new messages, and to sort of bend language and render it plastic, i.e. bendable. So it's dynamic, right. And it's sort of in contrast to nonhuman primates, which have a closed system of language based on a call system. Right. And so it's said that there's been some sort of evolutionary dynamic between call systems in symbolic language and in call systems. If you remember, I think Alexis had talked about this a little bit, but these are sort of, you know, I don't want it. It's an odd thing to have to define off the cuff, but like almost like a primal utterance, like laughing. But that's not really a primal utterance. Oh. Crying, grunting, groaning. You know, these kinds of things or like some of the dads were saying, my son's best friend's dads, we hang out from time to time. Oh, Marc, do you make dad noises? Sort of like doing what? And they were like, oh, just sitting down like, Oh. And I was like, Nah, not really. Next topic. So. Yes. Anyways, these call system or call systems, they have evolved alongside language, but not into language because there's a certain complexity based on all of the six features that Hoggett pointed out that language has that these more primal utterances don't. And so I don't think a case can be made for one turning into the other. I think these just sort of evolved in parallel as well as other aspects of this openness of language. Gesture changes in rhythm. Oh my gosh. Intonation, right. These aspects are called speech prosody, and you can really affect a situation. You know, and even just off the top of my head, if I ask my son to put his shoes away. Just with your intonation, you can go from sort of like. A demanding, maybe not very nice statement. Put those shoes away or you can change the intonation a little bit and say what? Those shoes. You know, and it just depends on the situation, how frustrated you are as a parent because you're tripping over shoes in the kitchen or whatever. But all of these aspects, again, rhythm gestures that go along with it. If you're frustrated, your body language is going to match your your level of frustration and what kind of tonality you're going to use and also volume. Inhuman sign language. Ah. You know what's interesting is American Sign Language. And, I don't know, money features all of these elements. Of human language, so openness, etc.. Except it's not. You know, it's not. The vocalist, it's transformed into another mode of communication. In getting back to to this specific aspect of openness, animals and we'll talk about a little bit about nonhuman primates. Use a less sophisticated channel of communication, which more often is is visual instead of auditory. Although, you know, if we're talking about other animals in the animal world, of course, there are aspects of communication there. You know, whales in this is definitely auditory so that maybe that's more of a generalized statement based on our textbook statement. Oh, anyways, bees have almost like a chemically induced language that's based on visual cues. Speaker 2 [00:18:35] In. Speaker 1 [00:18:35] Other animals as well. So, but taking this to nonhuman primates, as

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I as I said a few moments ago, this style and approach to language, which is, you know, in a lot of ways circumscribed to call system is closed because, number one, it seems that and I'm no primatologist but nonhuman primates can. Call in an appropriate context. So, you know, a call is matched to a certain imperative, like if there's a predator or something. And I know some primates have many up to 40 to 50 different calls, you know, and they can match it based on what the predator is in, what the type of threat it is. If it's an arboreal predator, meaning it can climb up trees, there will be a call for it. If it's a ground dwelling predator, that means scramble up the trees, they'll have call for it. But it seems like it's really closed in this situation and it's not dynamic and open in subject to an innovative improvizational shift, if that makes any sense. And apparently and I have to speak about this with some distance, just since I've never even shaken a primary hand, even though Simons and Gibbons are my favorites and have been. Apparently primates aren't able to combine calls or owing to that, you know, micro evolutionary shift of language to be able to create new ones. So they're learning through a closed cultural system and then applying. But it's almost like they can't modify or build on new ones in. I don't know. I mean, maybe given the the chance or the context, they they could. But again, I don't know. I have to sort of defer to the experts here. I'm not quite sure about that. Closed call systems also lack this really interesting aspect of human language, and this is the ability. To. Talk in and out of time. Speaker 2 [00:21:07] And. Speaker 1 [00:21:07] You can refer to things that don't exist, that have never existed, or things that could exist in the future or have existed in the past. And this is about memory and being able to take oneself in a certain moment in time, in a certain sociocultural context, shift it backwards and forwards, or depending on your orientation to time. We all have to understand that Indigenous time oftentimes is spiral or circular and not linear. So we have to understand and it's not just Indigenous time, there are other modes of or other temporalities that are not, you know, instrumental in linear from point A to point B, right? So you can talk about things, Oh my gosh, like a nonexistent object. Oh, like. Oh, it gets kind of hard, right? Like a demogorgon from Stranger Things. Although it does exist in the show, it doesn't exist in real life. You know, you can talk about aliens. You know, I don't really I'm sure there's some sort of other life form out there. I've never seen one. No idea what it would look like. Don't know how long you would have to travel to run into one. I don't think it would be in the sort of form morphologically of a humanoid with two arms and two legs. I think it would more. If there are aliens out there, other lifeforms probably look more like a sea creature. Who knows? Maybe something. If you've if any of you have seen the movie called The Abyss, just straight Up the Abyss, which is about sea exploration, and they run into an alien lifeform down there, maybe it would look like that, but that's sort of like a shapeshifter. But anyways, this is the great thing about language, is we can talk about these things almost as if they exist when they sort of don't. And you can dislodge yourself out of time and talk about what happened to you when you were a little kid, You know, what was I telling? I always tell, or maybe not so much. Alexis and I are exactly the same age. Well, she's actually two months in a few days older than me. But I'm I'm always telling them about the eighties, and I get ridiculous. I rules. You know, when I was a kid, I literally did have to walk 2.2 kilometers and it was uphill, but not both ways. And I wouldn't wear any boots and I wouldn't wear a hat because I refused in minus like 30 degree weather and I still survived. Now, oh, I don't want to hear another story from the eighties. You talk about future events. Well, we're going to be doing this in all likelihood, it will unfold there be like this. So this is displacement. Speaker 2 [00:24:17] And.

Speaker 1 [00:24:17] Talking in and out of time essentially, and about objects or events or states or situations that don't exist or don't exist yet. Arbitrariness. We hinted about this or touched on this. There's really no necessary links between linguistic sounds and their meaning. It's just arbitrary. And I know and I really get into this again. Oh my gosh, here comes 202 plug. But Ferdinand Justus error. The Swiss linguist really went into this, and I talk about this a little bit more, but here's here's a little sort of meme type thing. So you've got a table in English May in Indonesian. Oh, that's a little small for me. Uh. Mounted in Arabic. I'm really sorry if I butchered that in tabula, in Latin, in this little kitten with a ball. Aw, that's a big blood blister. Says, why did those languages have different names to call that thing the same thing? Is there any pattern to naming? And. Really? No, it's all. I mean, a lot of languages, romance languages, I guess, have sort of a Latin root to them. So you can sort of see the relationship between Latin tabula and table. But that's an historic link. But ultimately, it's arbitrary and it's those rules of conventionality that I mentioned a little bit before where people just agree on something and then that becomes yet associated with it. So, you know. No, there are complicated dynamics here. Maybe for later classes. But if you think of the word tree or think of the word eraser or ice cream or these random things, you know, in the image will match that linguistic utterance in pop up in your minds and you will be able to think similar ideas. And that, again, is because of that really potent and powerful process of conventionality, duality of patterning. I don't I don't like that term. At all. Because it's a little bit misleading. But according to our textbook anyways, which we were sort of wedded to for now. Well, we are. So, first of all, that one aspect of this. Sentiment or ideas that sounds of a language. So the smallest units of sound called phonemes, which don't necessarily correspond to letters, can be organized into the smallest meaningful units. And so these are units of meaning called morphemes. Right. And so I've got a meme to sort of explain this a little bit better. But so a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound. And sometimes when you change phoneme, it can change a morphing. So think about the word tab. Right. Like put it on my tab or. The word tag. Let's play tag. Or I've got an atrociously large skin tag underneath my chin here. Or. I'm going to tap that finger with my pencil or whatever. That sounds weird, but if you change that phoneme at the end, right? Tag G, tap P. Speaker 2 [00:28:25] Or. Speaker 1 [00:28:25] Tab B, it will actually change the morpheme. So you tinker with the phoneme, which is the smallest unit of sound, and will actually change the unit of meaning and will have a different meaning. So if you send an email sometimes I'm sending so many emails a day that I itself is because I'm typing so fast, I'll spell my name wrong and I'll catch it a sign of like Mary. And I'm like, Who the hell's Mary? You know, or like Mary's? Because on my fingers I'm type lists sometimes in that little sort of mind you, this is textual, but that can completely alter the meaning of what it is that you're trying to convey. An example of a morpheme. This is a word. So hang on a second here. Oh, no. Uh. Or is that not. There we go. I'm just going to do this for two. That's. But. Okay, so. This can get a little confusing. So I'm just trying to simplify this. Okay. So an example of a morpheme is the word dog. And, you know, it gets difficult because. There we are. We'll just keep it to that. There are some exceptions to the rule here, but we'll we'll just stick to that. So we'll we'll stick with this meme here or a little sort of schema. What you can do is you can arrange morphemes. Why do I keep singing morphine? Morphine into larger units and arrange them into larger units of meaning that are syntactically in sync? Ten. SONTAG Medically correct, Which can form a sentence. So let's just do this low at the lowest level here. You've got phonemes, and these are sounds that don't necessarily or don't always correspond to letters in the alphabet. And there are 36 phonemes in English. But for the

sake of description here, we've got this idea. So individual phonemes would be C, a, T, and each has their own sound. So. And then you combine these together to make a morpheme, not morphine, into cats. And then you've got another morpheme here, EET and then another one here, mice. And so at the highest level or higher level anyways, these can be combined, so you can organize these morphemes into a sentence. Cats eat mice. Right. It's as simple as that. And I'll tell you, when I was. Oh, boy. All full on, full disclosure. When I. Decided to major in Anthro. I had taken a biological anthropology course and I loved it. And after I took that course, I was like, I'm. I'm doing this. And then when I took the cultural course, I was like, Oh, okay, this is it. Awesome. And that shifted the course of of my university university kind of trajectory. But in my in my first year, I'd taken a bunch of courses that I just I was like, Oh, I might as well take that. I have no idea what this is. And one of them was an entire linguistic anthropology course, and I hated it. I oh my gosh. It was all about the complexity of phonemes in morphemes and all. It I just. Yeah. Not maybe not. And it was back then. It was a heavy, heavy class. And I likened it a lot to almost like math because it was so in-depth. And I just think it would have been better to have made that a later your class, maybe after you took a first year course like this. But they didn't have these broad for field courses at all. Back then it was all fragmented. This is going back to 96. So anyways. Okay, so duality of patterning. We'll come back to this. All languages have duality in that they have a level at which there is a relatively small number of basic meaningless elements. Phonemes, so sounds. And if you dissect these even further when you pluck them out. So the word cats a turn, those are kind of meaningless on their own when you blow them up. So that's one level. But at another level, there's another large number of meaningful elements, i.e. words or morphemes. And so when those phonemes are combined into morphemes, that's when you get the establishment of meaning. And then at an even higher level, syntactically, and seem technologically, you can combine them into a sentence. Then you have even more meaning, and then you can convey ideas, experience and thought. Right. So that's interesting. Cement city. Not the same as is semantics or semiotics. So this patterning also includes semantics, which is the study of meaning and also socio linguistic or linguistic pragmatics, like the practical contexts in which language is used to as a tool, the right to convey meaning and to share. Move my video box here. Semantic City then is really wedding language to socio cultural context in a particular. Sort of speech or sit here in a particular. I like the term community of speech practice anyways, and so it's making things meaningful in a particular context. So I think our textbook makes the brief mention of a hockey game. You know, you're in a hockey game and you know what? Maybe not that you're at a skate park and you're there and your son is on his BMX bike and you're on your board, and then a scooter kid comes barreling through who's two years old, and you're like, Look out because you don't want anyone to run into him. That in that sort of really intense, galvanized moment, you know, you're you're worried about the well-being of this little kid, you know, who might get hit by a bigger kid on a bike or another adult on a skateboard. Right. So it basically look out means everybody freeze and then, you know, look where you're going. And then the kid puts through, goes to is a parent and then that's that. So according to here semantically in human language, which is always symbolic, this means the elements of the message have specific or fixed relation to real world or real world situations. And in this sense, a message as per this little. Things here must be understood in the same way by different receivers. So here's here's a weird. Example, last time we were in Iceland, I had an interesting situation where. It was at the dead center. So the homeless shelter where I was doing ethnographic field work and the social workers, there were two of them, plus the director had come up to me and said, Oh, we have just organized. Soccer game outside of the parking lot. Would you like to play to. And. My son. Our son is really, really, really into soccer. I never really got into organized sports. I told you all this before, but my parents made. They forced me to play soccer when I was eight, nine

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and ten. And I'd just be the kid on the field with his hands in his pockets, looking around, wanting to do something, something else. And so I don't I play soccer a lot now. And, you know, I'm getting a little bit better. I always play with my son and it's not even real soccer. It's just kind of like passing back and forth and practicing goals and goaltending. But when they ask me to play soccer, I was like, Oh, that's interesting because half the people are on hand sanitizer, meaning they're drunk. That didn't go over well. And then I thought, Oh, gosh. My track record with soccer isn't so good. And so I said, Yeah, let's let's do this. Carpe diem. Right? And so we went out onto the parking lot. It had just rained and. Oh, my gosh. It was me. Two social workers, two more social workers and a bunch of the volunteers who are all international. It's a really interesting group. And so we're playing. And then within 10 minutes, one guy is already down, hits his head, he's bleeding profusely because he was really high and drunk. Another guy fell over and then another guy who when I was taking a break, I was standing beside a sign. This fellow's name was Peter, and he was a really interesting guy, an engineering, but an engineer by a by education. And, you know, that was his job. But then he became an alcoholic and lost his family and lost his job. And he had been going through alcohol withdrawal. So his lips were turning blue. And then he just fell into me and then fell right over on the ground. And so. One of the other staff members called an ambulance. And it was really interesting because here comes the point of this example is Yona, who became a good friend of mine the same age as me. And we sort of work together there, yelled out this word and it was out from his. She was like, Oh, from. And I was like, word because I had no idea what that meant. And everybody jumps out of the way and I was like, What's going on? And then two ambulances came. And it's funny because there was a whole lot of commotion, and the three guys who went down within 10 minutes of the game were taken away. And then she yelled it again. And it was one of those situations where you're like, Oh my gosh, this is so unusual, what's going on here? So I later I said, Oh, Yona, what on earth is our friend mean? And she was like, Oh, it it simply it means look out or caution or something of that sort. And I was like, Oh, interesting. Okay. And so this is one of those situations where, as an example, I guess a semantic city, it tethers the utterance of that word. And it was just a single word, and I guess you could call it a morphing to that real world situation of get the heck out of the way. There are two ambulances coming to take these guys who have fallen back to the hospital or to the hospital. Another one of hockey's six sort of dimensions of human symbolic light, which is this this curious idea of prevarication, which, you know, I when I was a teenager, sometimes I would just read my dictionary just because I'd get bored. And so before bed, sometimes I'd be I just read it and go through. So I memorized a lot of maybe useless words, but I always thought prevarication meant to lie. And I think in a more colloquial, colloquial sense, it sort of does. But according to our textbook anyways, it means to make false, nonsensical or contradictory statements. Not really like this guy. And if I didn't know any better. I would think he was from a show called Top Gear, which is a British show, but maybe I don't even watch it. But I think prevarication more has to do with this. And this is an example from Noam Chomsky actually himself. I don't even know what that. Creature is. Some of you probably know. I like my sci fi stuff and that's about the American way. But anyways, colorless green ideas sleep furiously so syntactically it makes sense, right? Subject an object, etc.. There's a verb, but when it comes down to meaning, it's its meaning less because colorless green is. Right. An oxymoron. And ideas usually aren't associated with colors. Unless there's that. That. What is that? Synesthesia. I think it's where. What is synesthesia anyways? I think it's when things can have color. Speaker 2 [00:43:13] That. Speaker 1 [00:43:13] Don't normally get associated with. Color. Let me see here. Um. So it's not a video platform anyways. Since. Synthesizer. Let's see. I'm curious. Okay. Is a

perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experience in a second sensory or cognitive pathway? So what does that mean? Oh, okay. For example, you might hear the name Alex in See Green, or you might read the word street and taste citrus fruit. Synesthesia is when you hear music, but you see shapes or colors or you hear a word or a name and instantly see a color. Maybe we just contradicted ourselves here. Anyways, this is really a technical textbook definition of prevarication. You can have the language through its openness and dynamism. You can put morphemes together into a sentence that might actually not make sense. Moving right along here anyways. So. All linguistic aspects are cultural. And. They're embedded in cultural meetings, meetings, meetings, and can also be associated with behavioral patterns. So. What's interesting about language, and I had to focus on it quite a lot from my own dissertation research, particularly language and power dynamics and lack of power dynamics is by studying. Language or linguistic aspects of the world. You can really this opens a door or a window on people's understanding of themselves who they are in terms of their identities, their relation to other people, but what their worlds are. And it's really, really it can be very fruitful and really interesting. And I think had I not centered on language so much, my own dissertation would have been greatly impoverished, I think because I really wanted to get a sense for the life worlds of these homeless youth, right. Over those 14 months. So, you know, the plug here that our textbook makes is that language, by way of its study through or further by way of linguistic anthropology, is a great way to get a fix in to suss out the complexities of everyday life in the life words of the people with whom you're getting to know, you know. And so this can be social relations, economic exchanges, power interactions, you know, oh my gosh. From a psychological anthropological sense, you know, what people are thinking and how and how they are with themselves and the world around them. So it's, you know, almost a necessary dimension or aspect or facet to look at. And it can be quite beautiful as well. Language. It's free real estate. So all human groups. Here comes one of these sort of myth debunking statements which for the friggin racists out there who have nothing better to do than hate other people for zero reason that charge that you some people might use in terms of using that keyword primitively. Oh, that their languages aren't fully developed. They're simple. No, it's not true. All languages. So all groups have fully developed languages, and those languages are all equally as complex in terms of their grammar, in terms of their syntax, in terms of the distinctive phonemes that make up morphemes. Very, very complicated. So those lame judgments that some people make are just they're not based on anything other than a blind misinformed hatred, which we all need to toss that so that human groups have fully developed languages that are a complex means that sometimes the boundaries between languages aren't clear cut. And it's hard sometimes, right, to to cleave apart these speech communities. Right. That's why that that idea or that definition is a little problematic. Let me do a time check here. But oh, my gosh. Okay, we're getting on here. So it makes it hard because there are a lot of dynamics in terms of linguistic diffusion where people borrow words or modify words. But when it comes to, you know, languages and these. Oh, my gosh. Communities of speech practice. Speech really is only one way that ideas are conveyed or how these languages are expressed. There are no unspoken forms to them. And these include include sign language, body language, writing, obviously, Morse code as well. And we've got these little sort of pictures here. American Sign language, the really endless dynamics of body language. Or can this can these six and then Morse code as well, which I think when I was in clubs I had learned a little bit about this and then I quit and that's the end of that. So, yes, human communication. Can involve transformation as well. And it's interesting because in terms of non linguistic or maybe para linguistic forms of communication, you can do this. In terms of transforming that communication of information from one thing to another non-verbally. So sending messages with the clothes people wear.

Speaker 2 [00:50:34] Or. Speaker 1 [00:50:34] Even, you know, makeup can really send a message to how you want to be interpreted as a person or what kind of person you want to convey. And of course, communication is fraught with miscommunication. And so sometimes it's not that easy. How people walk, even how people talk. You know, in the words in terms of diction or the words they choose can convey. But that's getting into verbal communication. We're really centering on nonverbal. Yeah. And so studies of of all of these forms of of linguistic and non linguistic or verbal and nonverbal communication can be situated under this idea of semiotics, which is the study of signs. You know, and this is body language, facial expression, again, clothing, posture, all of these like minutia in terms of the dynamics of how we are as people, which is actually can be quite fascinating when you think about it. Our textbook talks a little bit about the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce written as Pierce, but pronounced as perse. And he had a lot to say about index, the calorie, the symbols, etc.. And we don't have time to flesh that right now. Let me just see here where we're at. Um. Okay. Because they don't want to go on too long here. Native speakers are people who have been speaking a language since childhood. And so what? Native speakers have in common our assumptions. And these are assumptions based not only on diction or word choice, but also intonations in the assumptions that come with those body languages that accentuate verbal language, etc.. And so what makes it difficult and again, the textbook had mentioned this is learning a new language when you're outside of that native linguistic context can be incredibly frustrating and disheartening because you have to come up with new labels sometimes for new states, and even more so, you have to, you know, going beyond the immediacy of cement history. You have to understand the cultural context not only of words themselves, but of of states in experience. And that is that can be very, very frustrating. Lev Vygotsky is a was sorry is pretty dead. Well, like super dead. But it was a Russian psychologist who drew on. Linguistics was quite interesting in his own right. And. We'll talk about one of his contemporaries, Mikhail Bakunin, which is another Russian philosopher, language and literary critic. They both had a lot to say about about language. But this little quote here, language and culture are the frameworks through which humans experience, communicate and understand a reality. So it's using these two sort of intertwined aspects of of language and culture and making it difficult to sort of tease them apart in terms of meaning, making and interpretation or the understanding of meaning. So the study of the evolution of languages and how they shift and change and modify over time is called historical linguists. Historical linguists, really historical linguistics. Maybe I've been talking for too long in this looks at a few dimensions, but one is the relationship between words and sounds in a language so between morphemes and phonemes, the connections among different languages. So that influence in terms of linguistic diffusion, the point at which languages kind of split a little bit, you know, so they might have commonalities at a branch point, but then really diverge. But what we all have to understand, despite all of these aspects that come under the study of historical linguistics, all languages are subject to shift over time due to internal dynamics, but also external socio cultural, economic and political and religious factors. So. Yeah. My kids are son more so because he loves to to game and he and his friends watch a lot of YouTubers like oh my gosh, who beautiful Obi. Not so much Dan TBM. Both my kids went through a phase with that guy back in 2018. Never. We never let them watch PewDiePie. He's annoying, but he also drops F-bombs usually a lot. But sometimes listening to them. Particularly our son is like. It's weird. And here's here's an example here about how interesting language can be. So we went to the park yesterday to to place, like not play soccer, but just to practice. It was like, Oh, can I just practice shooting goals on you? And I was like, Okay. And so. He he shot one. And I

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was like, that didn't go in. And he was like, Dad or what did he say? That super cap. And I know because I'm around them a lot, I know what that means. But I could see someone else being like, What? What? What does that mean? And so here's where cement history is really, really important for meaning production, because even if you didn't know what cap meant, chances are you can figure it out. So I obviously, through prevarication of my own, said, Oh, the ball didn't get in when it clearly did. And he was like, It totally nog mattered you. That's another Oh my gosh, here we go. Right, I'll just stick to this character. And I was like, All right, Cap, it means I lied or B.S. And so I had to I a couple months ago, I looked it up because I heard he and his friends talking about it. So, guys, what are you doing here? Yeah. Merriam Webster's dictionary will not help me here, but the Urban Dictionary will. So. Um. Cap the word lying but built different. Oh, that's an Americanization. It should be to really be correct but built differently. The example. Oh, okay. That's an interesting one. Know that's Cap. I didn't fuck the dog. All right. Speaker 2 [00:58:32] Um. Speaker 1 [00:58:34] Yeah. Cap. Basically another word for lying. It can be used. Like no cap. Or you can say stop capping. Which is what one of his friends said. Example, Bob. No camera. I really, really like. Becky. Stop tapping, bruh. Ask her out. So, yeah, this is some interesting examples here. And I think the word has been around for quite some time, but it's really coming into parlance. Well, maybe it's, oh, this is a community of speech practice, like an Internet gaming community is speech practice. It's language used for the very purpose is to achieve certain ends in terms of a group of people who have something in common. Right. And there are a whole host of other words, too, like when he plays Fortnite, he's yelling, you know, like an example sentence would be like, No, that's cap, you're a sweat. Why did you kill me so fast? Right? Maybe some of you were like, What are you talking about? Fortnite is a multiplayer online video game where you shoot people anyways. Each natural language. Each language has sort of evolved to meet the needs of its speakers and. Obviously, owing to those dynamics that I mentioned earlier, conventionality speakers develop vocabularies to index or to point to or to describe or to refer to other aspects in their lives. In one such example here, which is really interesting. This is always it's sort of an oft used or maybe even a hackneyed example, but the intuit, you know, particularly of what we've gotten into in Alaska and Greenland too. But we'll use our Canadian example in in evaluate Nunavut in Nunavik in new IT in Canada, obviously have had a very long relationship with snow and ice. And here we are. You know I think in the common things are oh, the Inuit have over 50 words to describe ice and snow, but technically there's there's 100. And so, again, despite, you know, differences excuse me, in grammar, dictionary, vocabulary, etc., all languages are extremely complex. And I don't know if if all of you can see this, but this is just some, you know. Words for snow. And, you know, I know just a couple of intimate words. But you've got snow. No snow to snow, snowy weather to get find snow or rain particles almost like sleet, I guess, in English. First falling as snow, very light falling wet and falling in the air, falling, feathery clumps of falling snow air thick with snow rippled surface. I'm not going to go through all that snow worry. Crusty snow, fresh without any ice. Softer. I'm going to go through each one of these soft and deep or snow shoes are needed for travel powder, salty, wind, beaten, fresh packed, sharp, crusty that breaks underfoot. And it's kind of interesting. I'm just I won't go through them all. But you get the point, right. And this is just something that's really, really beautiful about language. It necessary to the identity of a group of speakers is looking at the world. And seeing things and having ideas in labels associated with. What you're seeing and then being able to convey that those ideas in labels verbally and this is what makes people people in a lot of ways and this is what people are very proud of, and they'll fight for this. And I understand that. But what we'll talk about in a little bit is how. Sometimes, you know,

you can have words in terms and expressions for things that other languages might not have, which can literally make the world be experienced and almost seen differently. Right. So the way you speak and the language you use in the way it looks and articulates the world and brings the world forth and makes it meaningful, can almost make it seem that the world is experienced differently owing to those differences. And this is really ultimately what ultimately what the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seeks to to explain. And we'll talk about that on Wednesday. Here's the problem, right? We're talking about speech communities and all members of a given speech community don't necessarily have the same knowledge of the language they use. Then they may not use it in the same way, but they come together for all intents and purposes, for specific purposes. But because of these differences and because of problems of defining what a community is, defining exactly what speech is, you can see that it kind of breaks down a little bit in that idea. Speech community is not super useful. And so when you think of the term community speech practice, and this was a term developed by a linguistic anthropologist named Laura A'HEARN, it's a little bit it makes a little bit more sense. And yeah, I mean, individuals in groups use language in their own ways, you know, in terms of that openness or plasticity or dynamism of language. So the patterns of language supposedly used by communities are always changing and shifting through through communicating. Yeah. Yeah. In this last point, I'll say before we leave off for today supporting Oh, I've gone to war on too long. Differences in languages oftentimes are not absolute, but usually based in differences in context or the frequency of occurrence of linguistic communication. So we'll leave off there and then pick up in inflection that that idea and even more on Wednesday. Okay, everyone, thank you for the patience. I can feel my throat's a little bit raspy. I have no clue why. But have a good afternoon and I'll see you in just a few a couple, couple days. Okay. I'll sign off. Take care. Oh.