Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 14:40:13 -0500 From: Ronald Kephart Subject: Re: The Power of Word Choice Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu To: anthro-l@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu Cc: linganth@cc.rochester.edu Reply-to: Ronald Kephart Precedence: bulk John, since you sent this to the list, I am responding publicly also. But I've had to be selective, so I've deleted portions I can't respond to right now. I'm also sharing this with the linguistic anthropology list.

In message <07044901905163@interacces.com.mx> writes:
>And these parents understood that base
>language can lead to base behavior. They knew that language can be dangerous.

John, when you talk about "base language" what do you mean, exactly? Where is the basesness located? In the phonology? The syntax? I think that usually, "base language" has nothing to do with the form of language itself, but rather with the people who speak it. If we view them as undesirable, then their language will be undesirable also. Linguists know this, but it's not an easy lesson to get across outside of linguistics, which is why I stubbornly keep hammering away on it; it's my moral duty.

I agree that language can be used dangerously, and I must say this leads to my disagreement with some philosphy colleagues re the "words can never hurt me" idea. Use of language can be a kind of assault, and in fact is sometimes treated as such by the law, right?

Still, we have to be careful here. A particular language, in terms of its structure (phonology, morphology, syntax, etc.), can not be more "dangerous" than any other. If this were true, the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would be totally rehabilitated. But language, as language, does not determine behavior.

Consider sexism and pronouns. English is spoken in what I think most on the list would agree is/has been a relatively sexist, male-dominated culture. And, as if in reinforcement, our language has distinct pronouns referring to third person singular female and male: she and he. One might hypothesize that having a sexually generic third person pronoun might imply a non-sexist society. Many West African languages have a single third person singular pronoun (often /a/ or /o/) meaning 'she/he/it'; these cultures are certainly no less male-dominated than our own, on the whole. On the other hand, Aymara, which has sex and number-generic /jupa/ meaning 'she/he/they' is a relatively non-sexist culture (before contamination by the dominant hispanic culture).

>They knew that when men go to war they are not chanting "live, live, live". They knew that, when men rape woman, it was after a long and deteriorating circumstance, in part, brought about by the rapists allowing themselves to indulge in "gutter" talk. And the more comfortable and easier it became to indulge in it, the more comfortable and easier it would become to act it out.

In these cases, language USE correlates with evil behaviors; but, this does not imply a cause-effect relationship. One can just as easily argue that the predisposition to the behavior causes the language use. Or that language is being used to reinforce the social bonds required for the soldiers to be able to go out and do things, under normal, sane conditions, they would be incapable of.

>When that jogger was gang-raped in Central Park -gang-raped into years of coma- does anyone here think that his or her parents would believe the rapists had just finished delivering dissertations in the King's English? [...] Is it really simply a "folk notion on racism" then, when people have to worry about the language that is being spoken, or at least its baser element, that the 80% of the violent crimes in the U.S.A is being perpetrated in?

John, by this logic we are going to have to abolish the German language for having committed the Holocaust; Russian for having been the language of Stalin's gulag; and (oops!) English for having been the language which destroyed all but a handful of the indigenous people of North America. The point is, that while these things were going on, other speakers of these languages were off NOT being compelled by their language to do these things. The same is true for Black English: most speakers of BE are not involved in violent crime, or any crime for that matter. They're just trying to be human in a society which does not make it easy for them to do that. And which, I might add, apparently does not want to, given the at times nearly hysterical response to the Oakland proposal.

>I do think Ron
>quite right to believe that educating people to understand that language incomprehensible to them does not necessarily mean that that language is an argot designed to breed suspicion, in Beverly Hills maybe, but in Oakland?

Do you really think that all Black English speakers living in Oakland speak Black English just to "breed suspicion" in the minds of whites? This is called paranoia, isn't it?

Ron Kephart University of North Florida