Language seed post

Language is such an enormous topic (as are all the things we touch on in this class), that just about anything you can think about can be examined through its lense, or vice-versa. One of the qualities that makes us human is our ability to use language to reflect ON language, to be "meta-" about our tools as well as the things we make with those tools, even as we go merrily about making even more. (Some scholars, such as Mark Turner, have even suggested that this meta-examination concludes with a "backwards" conclusion: that language came about through story, rather than story coming about through language. Check out his book, The Literary Mind .)  Many kinds of knowledge almost can't be brought into consciousness without language, even though, as we learned in the last unit, "knowledge" and "language" are scarcely interchangeable words. This unit is where we become more focused on the ways language, and especially spoken language, shapes, stores, transmits, and creates knowledge of various types.

Below, I have given you some questions to begin asking, and then a list of some major secondary, scholarly sources to look into in thinking about language. Most of these will be merely, or barely, touched on in internet places like Wikis, but we want you to go farther. So for the sources themselves, you may have to use books (flat, rectangular, dusty, papery things; no passwords necessary). We have already given some direction by dividing the "language" group assignments up into four very broad approaches: preservation, acquisition, functions, and systems. Some additional directions within those could include (but are by no means limited to) the following:


Preservation questioning can start with questions like
(How) CAN oral language be preserved? Are there mnemonic strategies specific to cultures? In the absence of sound-coded (phonetic) writing systems, can things like pictographs capture the nuances of an oral performance? Especially thinking prior to audio recording technologies, can there be such a thing as a "primary source" for an oral performance; is the record of an oral event already "secondary" to the immediate experience?

Acquisition questions (remembering that this course is about history and culture, rather than individual psychological development) can include
From whence DO we "acquire" what we know through oral sources of knowledge? Where does a given oral traditional "text" (e.g. The Illiad) come from, and HOW does it come to us--before we have it in written form? Who is source of the verbal knowledge, and what difference does it make whether we (or any audience) hear an utterance, song, story, etc. from one person rather than another person? (If it does matter, then) Where does the difference come from? Does the speaker's social position give the utterance Authority, or does the utterance's Authority give the speaker (a certain) social position? Etc.
You may also consider briefly the questions of childhood first language acquisition, but please do so with an eye toward the broader World Civilizations awareness of the course.

Questions to start your thinking on language functions might include
How many ways does orally-transmitted language do its work? What is that work? What are the differences in the ways those functions "mean" (again, consider speaker/audience implications here)? Some functions to consider: announcing, declaring, performing, threatening, praising, warning, etc. What role do these functions serve in different situations; are they substantially different when performed in private than in public? What kind of "private" or "public" situations would/could change the force or function of the same utterance?

And for systems:
What is an oral language system? In what ways does it differ from a writing system, and (why) does it matter? What systems of distinction within a language make the performance of orally-transmitted knowledge unique? What about systems of humor within an oral language (i.e. does "witty" humor use or constitute a "system" distinct from "sarcastic" humor? Why/How)? What about coded systems-within-systems: spies with an agreed-upon cipher seeming to talk about the weather, actually communicating about troop movements and state secrets--?

Dr. B's post from earlier has some very good suggestions for how to use sources as jumping off points. The following titles and authors are just a beginning; each of them stands at the mouth of a mine filled with incredibly rich veins of thought, information, and KNOWLEDGE for you to go exploring. Don't stop on the outside of the mine; jam a hardhat on your head, grab a pickaxe and a bag, and go exploring deep!

Some scholarly sources/names to get you started:

• Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct, and others. Author of a lot of books on language and linguistics for a general reader. Because he is trying to be engaging, sometimes he's a little polemical, but very fun to read)
• John Searle (Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. The philosopher of language who developed Speech-act theory; slower going because he is usually writing for other philosophers and scholars, but very rich and rewarding stuff. A related title by John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words). 
• Alfred Lord (Singer of Tales, about the Balkan bards of the last century and how people who compose orally do it. Scholarly, but fascinating)
• Elizabeth Loftus (Memory. Loftus is the world's foremost expert on memory. She was very active in the legal battles of the 1990s involving "repressed memory" accusations of sex and ritual abuse.
• Frances A. Yates (Memory, 1966. Classic study of the faculty of memory from ancient Greek orators up through the 17th century.)
• Paul Grice (Studies in the Way of Words. An oldie but a goodie. Grice is the source of the "Gricean Maxims," a set of rules observed and derived from social interactions involving language [how is one "polite" or "rude" with words, for instance?]. This book was originally a set of lectures given way back in the 1960s, but to show how good Grice was, most subsequent scholarship on his work has resulted in data that support his ideas.)
• George Steiner (After Babel. A really interesting study of translation theory and the divergence of language over time. Really great for looking at cross-cultural understanding and language commensurability)
• Umberto Eco (Ohhhh, so much!  Eco is a semioticist and novelist and overall obscenely intelligent human. He writes in Italian [but even Italian people, apparently, read him in English because he's so erudite in Italian no one can understand him]; he wrote the novel that The Da Vinci Code wanted to be if it ever grew up [Foucault's Pendulum; don't read it unless you want to be deeply disturbed]. He has several books of really fine essays about language, including my favorite, Kant and the Platypus. I know! Just the title--! Dr. B's favorite Eco title: The Search for the Perfect Language)
• Deborah Tannen (You Just Don't Understand, etc. From the heavy to the lighter, Tannen is the Georgetown pragmatics linguist who became famous--well, as famous as a linguist can hope to get--for popularizing the gendered-language observations of the 1990s. She is a lot of fun to read, and you find yourself nodding and smacking your forehead as you do, but be warned that a lot of her stuff is overly simplified, since she gives some relatively heavy-handed interpretations of her data, instead of giving the data for us to conclude.)