Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts

Wild Abandon: A Novel Review

Wild Abandon: A Novel
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Wild Abandon: A Novel ReviewWild Abandon offers a fun, slightly satirical portrait of a commune in contemporary Wales. The commune, Blaen-y-Llyn, has been running for twenty years. But in the timeframe of the novel just about everyone is trying to get out of it. The only one trying to keep everything together is Don, one of the founders and self-appointed leader, whose family are the focal characters of the book. Don is a bit pompous, still dedicated to the virtues of home schooling, sustainable housing, and living off the electrical grid, but his wife, Freya, has had just about enough of his bombastic personality. His 17-year-old daughter Kate, is dying for a chance to live in the normal world, and actually runs away from the commune to live with her boyfriend's family in a standard suburban house for a while, and his son Albert is enthralled with the idea, promulgated by one of the commune's residents, that the Mayans were right and that a cataclysmic event will happen in 2012, and that only those prepared for it will be able to survive. Young Albert wants to start preparing for that event, but mostly in ways that let him act out his anger at his sister's departure, which he experiences as an abandonment. We also get to know Patrick, the moneybags of the operation, whose former success in the greeting card business and as a landlord now mostly bankroll the commune's operation. But after years of smoking too much pot, he's become excessively paranoid. In one funny scene, he goes berserk, running through the commune, thinking everyone's about to kill him, and breaking his ankle in an attempt to escape. In the end, he too is trying to get away from Don and put an end to his decades-long pining for a woman, Janet, who's given him mixed signals through the years but never returned his love and devotion. Throughout the book, there are lots of interesting insights about communal living - Freya the wife, for example, takes on the role of the community's butcher because no one else on the farm where they live, including her husband, has the guts to slaughter their livestock. The only drawback, at least initially, is that there are few sympathetic characters with a real dilemma that makes you want to keep turning the pages. At the outset, it's perfectly understandable why everyone wants to escape Don - he's controlling and full of himself. But, ironically, over the pages, Don becomes the most sympathetic character. His wife and daughter's attempts to separate are somewhat cruel and unfeeling, and over the course of the marvelous closing pages, when Don throws a blow-out party, hoping to lure everyone back, his attempts to win everyone over and then control his young son, Albert, who's gone a little crazy over this end-of-the-world idea and the separation from his sister, make Don the character you root for the most.
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Elementary Korean Second Edition Review

Elementary Korean Second Edition
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Elementary Korean Second Edition ReviewElementary Korean is simple and has a very easy and honest approach to learning korean.
Although I am using it by myself (without the support system of classes and a teacher)I have found that it is increasingly easy to read and speak the language.
It has a lot of exercises (with the answers included) and also a great audio cd so you can pick up the correct wording.
I recomend it to anyone how wants to learn korean, by yourself (as I do) or as a support book for classes.Elementary Korean Second Edition Overview

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Cultural Contact and Linguistic Relativity among the Indians of Northwestern California Review

Cultural Contact and Linguistic Relativity among the Indians of Northwestern California
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Cultural Contact and Linguistic Relativity among the Indians of Northwestern California ReviewOne of the most perplexing problems in the field of anthropology over the last hundred years has been the relationship between language and culture. Does language shape culture? Does culture shape language? Further, and perhaps more interesting, does language shape our cognition, effecting the very way that we see the world? Similarly, does culture shape our language in such a way that the very words, concepts, and semantic structures within a language are the direct result of the culture's physical manifestation? These questions and many others have been the subject of debate within anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and other fields of inquiry for well over a century. Out of this interdisciplinary debate, however, one theory has been of particular interest to all parties - the theory of linguistic relativity.
Developed primarily by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf (Sapir 1949; Whorf 1956), linguistic relativity originally focused on controlled comparisons between contrasting linguistic traditions and related patterns of behavior in a culture, often with an emphasis on the historical impact of cultural categories on the evolution of language. The reason that the theory has been the subject of debate for so long, however, is because of the lack of good, solid evidence to support it. Although anthropologists, indigenous scholars, and a few psychologists have long recognized the deep interconnection between language, culture, and cosmology, in-depth studies of indigenous languages and their grammatical and semantic differences has been lacking. Likewise, comparisons of different indigenous languages across similar cultural patterns has been hard to achieve. Contributing to the debate, and adding much needed data and evidence, is the recent book by Sean O'Neill: Cultural Contact and Linguistic Relativity Among the Indians of Northwestern California.
Approaching the principle of linguistic relativity via the works of Boas (1896/1948), Sapir (1949), and Whorf (1956), who all argued for the role of language in guiding human perception, especially in the culturally charged settings of everyday life, O'Neill's book is a data-rich, theoretically expanding contribution.
Despite centuries of intertribal contact, the Native American peoples of northwestern California have continued to speak a variety of distinct languages. At the same time, they have come to embrace a common way of life based on salmon fishing and shared religious practices. In this thought-provoking re-examination of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, Sean O'Neill looks closely at the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk indigenous peoples to explore the striking juxtaposition between linguistic diversity and relative cultural uniformity among their communities.
"That is, neither the language nor the culture of the region holds altogether constant as one passes from one village to the next. Instead, the variables of language and culture achieve a nearly kaleidoscopic variability throughout the area's many speech communities. Taken together, the staggering linguistic diversity and often sweeping cultural variability found throughout this area allow the variables of language, culture, and worldview to be nearly isolated as one passes from one village to another" (p. 19).
It is through this process of comparing the variables of language, culture, and worldview that O'Neill makes some interesting and important contributions. By closely examining the spatial world and the realm of time among the Karuk, Hupa, and Yurok indigenous Native Americans of northwestern California, one is able to see the subtleties associated with language and culture in a geographically close, but culturally and linguistically diverse setting.
O'Neill examines intertribal contact, multilingualism, storytelling, and historical change among the three tribes, focusing on the traditional culture of the region as it existed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He asks important historical questions at the heart of the linguistic relativity hypothesis: Have the languages in fact grown more similar as a result of contact, multilingualism, and cultural convergence? Or have they instead maintained some of their striking grammatical and semantic differences? Through comparison of the three languages, O'Neill shows that long-term contact among the tribes intensified their linguistic differences, creating unique Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk identities, including linguistic categories and cognitive processes.
If language encapsulates worldview, as the principle of linguistic relativity suggests, then this region's indigenous peoples are testament to the theory. Analyzing patterns of linguistic accommodation as seen in the semantics of space and time, grammatical classification, and specialized cultural vocabularies, O'Neill offers solid evidence in support of the theory. What is even more exciting, however, is that Cultural Contact and Linguistic Relativity Among the Indians of Northwestern California lends support to the inclusion of indigenous peoples and their worldview within contemporary scientific research, resource management, and policy agendas.
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Peter N. Jones
Editor
http://indigenouspeoplesissues.com
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