bnevin@CCH.BBN.COM (Bruce Nevin) (10/03/87)
> From: cugini@icst-ecf.arpa > I believe there have been anthropological studies, for instance, > showing that Indian classifications of animals and plants line > up reasonably well with the conventional Western taxonomy. I saw this go by in AIList, and here it comes again in NL-KR, and I just can't let you get away with it, John. Glib references to `Indian classifications of animals and plants' remind one of titles in the 17th century like `The Indian Language Reduced to Grammar'. `Indian classifications', indeed! Which of the hundreds of Amerindian languages? Which of the half-dozen or so linguistic families in North America alone? Linguistic families in the Americas are as diverse from each other as the Indo-European family is from the Sino-Tibetan family, and as Finno-Ugaritic is from both: there is no demonstrated genetic relationship whatsoever. If the claim is across all Amerindian languages, it seems preposterous on the face of it. In some languages, terms for animals and plants are composite, derived from or related to predicative compounds of the type `water-strider'. In a polysynthetic language, some of the elements underlying such a compound might be classificatory morphemes that imply a rather different taxonomy. Certain of these we might gloss e.g. `long, slender object' or `spherical object' or `flexible object'. Examining our glosses for words incorporating these elements as affixes or infixes, however, we always see abundant grounds for doubting that we have captured the Indian generalization in our English net. What do `both arms', `lips', `encircle', `sew' have in common? `Soft opposed forces' is the gloss given for Pomo bi-. How about `fire, heat, cold, light, emotions, mind'? Pomo mu- is glossed `nonlong object through the air', and the above are glosses for its contribution in just some of its occurrences. In other languages, such terms are (synchronically at least) primitive, of the type `cat'. What do `horse', `dog', and `slave' have in common? All are translations of caH:o'm in Achumawi, which appears to refer to a social role rather than anything like genus or species. Indeed, all such terms in Achumawi seem to imply place in a kind of `social' structure involving all beings, a mental system orthogonal to our Realist presumptions about `objective' `external' reality. Theories of animism begin to get at it, perhaps, and here you might begin to get at some cultural/religious commonality among peoples in the Americas. In Wappo and in Yana, the word for 'dog' and `horse' is again the same, but is the Spanish loanword chucho (cu:cu' in Wappo, su:su [pronounced something like shoo-shoo] in Yana). Why not the Spanish word for horse, cavallo? I don't have any information on the Wappo and Yana words for `slave', but suspect strongly that the same `taxonomy' has a role here. Compare Wappo ka'wa:yu?+ne'w `horse-yellowjacket', perhaps on the analogy of English `horsefly', where ?ne'w is `yellowjacket'. Achumawi, Pomo, and Yana are all Northern Hokan languages, b.t.w., and are (or were) in fairly close proximity in Northern California, whereas Wappo is an unrelated Yukian language a bit further south, between the Pomo languages/dialects and San Francisco Bay. The Achumawi word for `dog' optionally has a diminutive suffix (caHo'mak!a, `little slave/captive/subordinate one'), and there is another word ?a?la'?mugi? that means `dog' but not `horse' or `slave'. Before you get too excited, let me tell you that this appears to be a descriptive term for a dog whose ears hang down; similarly, Yana cahtumal?gu `dog', lit. `hang-ears'. In an Achumawi Prometheus myth, such a dog brings back fire concealed in his ear. A cognate term `dog-ear' is used for a basketry design, so it is well embedded in the culture. Utterly no basis for a taxonomy associating dogs with e.g. foxes, wolves, or coyotes, or them with one another. References, please. What were the claims, exactly? What was the claimed basis for them? Was the investigator comparing native taxonomies or translations thereof into English? With virtual certainty, the latter. Is your reference to original sources in the anthropological literature or to secondary or tertiary sources there, or to n-ary sources in the philosophical literature? This sort of philosophy strikes me as systematized ethnocentrism. Go ahead and claim that the world must be thus and so because every reasonable person you know sees it that way. But don't go dragging the Indians into it. God knows, they've suffered indignities enough! Bruce Nevin bn@cch.bbn.com (This is my own personal communication, and in no way expresses or implies anything about the opinions of my employer, its clients, etc.)