【B1】 What is the relation between the code and culture which creates it, and which it transmits to the next generation? Linguist

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问题     【B1】 What is the relation between the code and culture which creates it, and which it transmits to the next generation? Linguists in the anthropological tradition had tried to establish links with meanings expressed lexically: Eskimo words for "snow", Arabic words for "camel and so on". Yet vocabulary only "reflects" culture by courtesy of its internal organization as a whole; and the assertion that because "camels" are important to the Arabs, therefore they have a lot of different words for "them" is a statement as much about English as about Arabic. 【B2】 Presumably nothing is more important than rice to the Chinese; yet Chinese has a single word for rice--and it means various other things besides. Chinese happens to be a language of type that favors general nouns.
    【B3】 As the essential medium for people to organize and convey their ideas, language is no longer what it seemed to be for the traditional linguists who used to think of language as simple formal codes. It is also closely related to the context, social or anthropological, in which the communication takes place. 【B4】 Today most linguists come to realize that language is an important component of culture. It determines not only the form in which ideas are transmitted, but also the method with which the content of the ideas are organized. In this perspective, language is also a communicative base on which members of a speech community form their ideas in a way that is readily comprehensible to other members of that community. It is also regarded as part of culture that is related to other fields of humanity studies.
     But what is merely comic when applied to lexis becomes seriously misleading when applied to grammar. As Whorl pointed 50 years ago, it is naive and dangerous to take isolated grammatical phenomena and try to relate them to features of a culture. When linguists recognized this, their response was to avoid the language/culture issue altogether, thus closing the door on an important area of research. 【B5】 That there is a relationship between a code and the culture that engenders it is beyond question; but it is an extremely complex and abstract one.

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答案作为人们组织和传递思想的基本媒介,语言已不再是那些传统的语言学家曾经认为的一种简单的形式代号了。

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