The Leech and the Earthworm

Originally posted 11/20/07
Marc Silver directed a documentary about indigneous people's views on genetic engineering. This is the title sequence based on a folktale. What do you think about the emic vs. etic view of such a tale? What assumptions come up for the outsider who is white, from a colonial nation, from the US, or for the native Australian seeing this tale in a film for the first time?

Check out Marc's cool website.
http://www.marcsilver.net/#

Kottak Ch. 4: Language and Communication

NOTE: Post a comment once a week to one of any of the posts made since the previous Friday by Prof. Gaunt. Be sure to "surf" through any links. Strongly suggest composing your response in MS Word, then cut and paste as a comment. Avoid grammar and spelling mistakes; use spell and grammar check. Also rewrite your post at least once and don't forget to read other comments first so you all are not saying the same thing 30 times. Differentiate your thoughts or concur with someone early (i.e., @Paul: I agree with your thinking here and...).

Chapter 4 introduces the study of language, communication and linguistics.
Revised, Originally posted 2/24/08 2:40pm
It discusses the basic categories and definitions used to study language, and the many ways in which linguistic, cultural, and social variables are interrelated. It also presents how language uses reflect differences among groups. Language is amazing and it can be used to debilitate and malign. Yes, socio-linguistics, as it could be called, can be both adaptive and maladaptive.

You will love checking out the enculturation process of a 1 year old in the following video who has learned a significant sign language vocabulary:



Since BEV or Black English Vernacular is a topic in the chapter, here's segment from "Why Ebonics is No Joke," which aired on ABC Radio National's Lingua Franca October 17, 1998:

The Economist picked it up and printed a brief story headed 'The Ebonics Virus', a tasteless reference to the then recent outbreak of the horrible Ebola fever in Zaire. The subliminal link there is clear enough: nasty things out of Africa!...

I don't know how you measure poverty in a language. But on the bit about grammatical mistakes... There is a difference between making grammatical blunders in Standard English and speaking correctly in a different variety of the language, one that has a slightly different grammar. And that's the case here. African-American Vernacular English has a regular, systematic grammar of its own.

People who don't know [Black English vernacular] talk about how the word 'be' is used in the wrong places. They think black Americans say, 'He be laughin'.' When they should say 'He is laughing', and that's treated as one of the many amusing pieces of evidence that they don't speak English correctly. It's not true. The African-American Vernacular English usage they're referring to is in fact a device for expressing what's called 'habitual aspect'. 'He be laughin' is grammatical in African-American Vernacular English but it doesn't mean 'He is laughing', it means 'He habitually laughs.' If you want to say 'He is laughing' right now, in this language, you say 'He laughin'.'

In the 4:10 section we also analyzed the uses of language in the video The Leech and the Earthworm about how an indigeneous people tell a story about colonialization and exploitation by the white man. Check it out! You'll notice the use of storytelling, visual, oral, musical and other kinds of language in this TITLE sequence from the documentary.

You might also get something from this splicing of routines by comedians Richard Pryor and George Carlin. You may have to Google each to get a better grasp of their style of comedy. Carlin does "black" comedy--meaning it's intellectual as well as vernacularly (is that a word) straight and to the point. This clip supports the argument that signs, like the word "nigger", are inherently devoid of any natural meaning.