Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation by Michael Agar
page 66:
Whorf looked at grammar and vocabulary, noticed the differences between one language and another, and said that they were more than just arbitrary differences that let you talk about the same objective, world.
The differences make you live in a different world.
This is strong, subversive stuff. The world can’t be separated from the language used to talk about it. They’re wrapped up together like hydrogen and oxygen in water. You can’t pull them apart and still have water to drink.
Objective reality disappears in the mist. Two different languages aren’t just alternative ways to talk about the same reality. Alternative languages carry with them a different theory of what reality in fact is. A shift from one language to another is a shift between two different worlds, where speakers of each one think their version is “objective”, but they’re both wrong.
Very much like the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty et al on intersubjectivity.
(At the core of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. /Wiki)
pages 13/14:
These different ways of looking at things had come to life in our common language, and they tied in with who we were, with our different social identities. The differences happened inside the same language, just as differences do between languages as distinct as Japanese and English….
Something happened…that had to do with who we were. Something came up, jolted us with a difference, made us aware that the “natural” way of doing things wasn’t “natural” at all [but learned]....
Differences like these- the sort of misunderstandings that we usually associate with a foreign language- happen inside a language all the time.
On page 250, He talks about the term Languaculture, to drive home the point that communication is not about words, or grammar, or proper verb conjugation- but about the people who use the language, their self and social identities, and the interaction between them against a broader cultural background.
Where the langua part is:
[T]hat this noun means that thing, and this verb means that action, so that the two together mean action on this thing… Word meanings in the sense of reference, and sentence meanings in terms of propositional structure.
And the culture part is:
How those words and sentences shimmer with associations, connotations… [A] sense of how to converse, argue, and tell a lie… [A] sense of who they’re talking with, and how they see them, of how that specific moment ties in with all the others that go into the flow of daily life, of how the talk fits into the society and the currents of history that lie behind it.
page 209:
Languaculture is a social fact. It sets limits on what you can say and sets up expectations of how you’re supposed to talk. But there are people… who struggle against the limits. Their experience of culture takes shape within their own. Rich points come into consciousness and inspire new frames, frames that make a new kind of discourse possible….
The new languaculture is a way to change the world by changing what it is that can be thought, said, and done.
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