The Language We Speak Determine Our View of the World
...ther. We humans not only show affection through body contact, but also through the way we express ourselves. Furthermore, the only way that animals can solve their indifferences is through physically attacking each other, whereas we can resolve our interpersonal conflicts through a rational discussion. This is all due to the fact that human beings are able to verbally communicate their feelings, emotions and thoughts. This means that we do not always have to be face- to face with someone, but can also exchange information over long distances and refer across time. In other words the fundamental difference between man and all other creatures on the planet is that man has linguistic abilities and that we are able to reflect, whereas animals simply act on instinct. It is language which enables us to move from instinct to consciousness and self-consciousness. And here I would like to discuss about the language and culture of Eskimo further to prove my own thoughts on this topic. First of all I think it is important to ask these questions below: What is an Eskimo? What is an Eskimo language? What is a word? How many references are there to snow in a given Eskimo language? Eskimo---A general term used to refer to a number of groups inhabiting the coastline from the Bering Sea to Greenland and the Chukchi Peninsula in NE Siberia. Since the 1970s Eskimo groups in Canada and Greenland have adopted the name Inuit. Eskimos are racially distinct from American Indians, and are not, as previously believed, merely “Indians transformed.” In fact, the Eskimos are most closely related to the Mongolian peoples of eastern Asia. The popular conception of the Eskimos—whale hunters dressed in heavy fur clothing and living in dome-shaped ice lodges—is derived from the Eskimos who live farthest north, on the Arctic islands of Canada and along northwestern Greenland. The family of Native American languages consisting of Aleut (spoken on the Aleutian Islands and the Kodiak Peninsula) and Eskimo (spoken in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberia). Aleut is the language of fewer than one thousand people, and Eskimo is native to almost 100,000 people. There are a few varieties of the Eskimo language. Eskimo and Aleut have enough similarities to justify the theory that they are descendants of a single ancestor language. A striking and important feature of both tongues is polysynthesism. In a polysynthetic language, a one-word unit composed of a number of word elements can convey the meaning of an entire sentence in an Indo-European language. Eskimo and Aleut make great use of suffixes, but almost never of prefixes. Internal vowel changes are rare. Both languages are highly inflected. The difference between transitive and intransitive verbs is clearly shown. Three numbers are found—singular, dual, and plural. Phonetically, there are three main vowels in Eskimo, and from 13 to 20 consonants, the number varying according to the dialect. In earlier times the Eskimos had only pictographic writing. In spite of regional differences, Eskimo groups are surprisingly uniform in language, physical type, and culture, and, as a group, are distinct in these traits from all neighbors. They speak dialects of the same language, Eskimo, which is a major branch of the Eskimo-Aleut family of languages. Their antiquity is unknown, but it is generally agreed that they were relatively recent migrants to the Americas from NE Asia, spreading from west to east over the course of the past 5,000 years. Speaking of “WORD”, this is not as simple a question as may be commonly supposed. Woodbury suggests "lexemes" are more useful than "words." It is like an independent dictionary entry. But Eskimo languages have such complex inflections that each single noun lexeme may have about 280 distinct inflected forms, while each verb lexeme may have over 1000. The Eskimo languages are the prototypical example of a polysynthetic language, wherein one word contains several elements of the situation. This allows very complex ideas to be expressed in one word. Thus "my snow", "your snow", etc., would each be one word in Eskimo, a stem form with a possessive affix. So that is why there are so many words in Eskimo for snow. How does language actually influence our specifically animal operations? A case in point would be that when we look at an object, for example a tree, do we see it in its pure, realistic and natural way or is language imposing a certain influence on the way we look at this tree? Do we regard it as an object of nature which is a tall woody plant having a single, usually, long and straight main stem, generally with a few or no branches on its lower part? Or are we simply seeing it that way because of the context of the language in our culture? It suggests that the structure of a language influences the way in which its speakers view the world today. Since the languages of the world differ greatly in regard t...