This is one in a series of reports on projects funded through the
Fund for Innovative Teaching, a program designed to foster new ideas
in University instruction.



Linguistics, the scientific study of language, has become, in many
ways, a highly technical, if not abstruse, subject, and writings by
linguists for other linguists are often presented in a technical
jargon that is all but impenetrable to the uninitiated. Yet there are
some basic insights in linguistics that can be communicated quite
readily to non-specialists. One of our aims in undergraduate courses
in linguistics, especially General Education courses, is to provide
students with some of these basic insights.

Unfortunately, much of the literature is unsuitable for this purpose.
It is written quite explicitly by linguists for other linguists, and
while the basic insights might be readily apparent to a reader with
linguistic training, they often remain quite opaque to those who lack
this training, while not being necessarily difficult concepts in and
of themselves. So one thing that undergraduate teachers of
linguistics often have to do, especially in working with non-majors,
is to write original materials that make concepts accessible. This
year, the Center for Excellence in Teaching awarded me a grant to
produce some materials of this kind.

The materials relate to a new General Education course that I am
teaching for the first time this semester, "Languages of the World"
(LING 380). The course satisfies a General Education requirement in
non-Western cultures, and given this, concentrates on relations
between language and culture in a number of selected non-Western
cultures - with one Western culture, Russia, included for comparative
purposes. What I try to do in each segment is to show how, in two or
three aspects, particular properties of the language in question cast
light on the culture.

The languages that I chose this semester are Russian, Arabic,
Japanese, Swahili, Haruai (a language of the New Guinea highlands on
which I did fieldwork myself), Dyirbal (an Australian aboriginal
language), and Jacaltec (an American Indian language of the Mayan
family, spoken in Guatemala). The teaching materials that I have
written relate to Russian, Arabic, and Haruai.



In Russian, nouns referring to human beings typically end in a
consonant if they refer to a man, e.g. "Ivan, student," (male)
student, but in "-a" if they refer to a woman, e.g. "Vera,
studentka," (female) student. As can be seen from the words for
"student," there are typically ways of creating pairs of words
referring one to a male, the other to a female. For some names of
occupations, this gender distinction is indeed made, for instance, a
teacher is "uchitel" (male), "uchitelnitsa" (female); a weaver is
"tkach" (male) or "tkachikha" (female); an actor is "aktyor" or
"aktrisa." For other professions, it is usual to use the masculine
form whether referring to a man or a woman, for instance "professor"
for male or female professor, "vrach" for male or female physician.

What factors govern whether a word has a distinct feminine form or
not? Among the relevant factors are a number of social ones: a word
is more likely to have a separate feminine form if it refers to an
occupation that was traditionally (say, in the late 19th century)
considered open to women (e.g. school teaching), if it refers to an
occupation where distinction of male and female terms is considered
necessary (e.g. actors and actresses, given that actors are usually
cast for male roles, actresses for female roles), or if it refers to
an occupation of relatively low status (e.g. weaver).

Perhaps the most noteworthy contrast is with respect to status;
higher-status professions, like professor and physician, do not
normally use separate feminine forms, even though nowadays most
physicians in Russia are women. What is especially interesting in
the way the Russian language has maintained and even extended these
linguistic reflections of social distinctions is that this took place
during a period when the official ideology of the Soviet state
promulgated equality of men and women, including in the workplace.
Here language provides a window on people's thinking that the
authorities, at least, would rather have avoided.



Perhaps the most obvious difference between English and Arabic, at
least in their written form, is the radically different writing
systems used for the two languages. English is printed as separate
letters running from left to right, while Arabic is written from
right to left and most letters are joined together, even in printing.
In Arabic, many vowels are normally not written, so that instead,
for instance, of writing "kataba" (he wrote), one simply writes
"ktb." How did these differences come about? Why has Arab society
resisted changing its writing system, even though the Latin alphabet
is nowadays by far the most widespread across the world? The basic
features of the Arabic writing system, which were already present in
the earliest efforts in writing down the Qur'an (Koran), the holy
book of Islam, are simply features that were current in the writing
systems of most Near Eastern languages around the middle of the first
millennium CE - in particular, writing from right to left and
omitting some vowels - while the cursive nature of the script simply
reflects its origin as a manuscript, rather than a printed, form.

The conservatism of the writing system stems from the importance of
the Qur'an in the life of Muslims, and the fact that most speakers of
Arabic are Muslim; although the spoken language has undergone many
changes since Mohammed's time, it is still written in essentially the
same way as it was 13 centuries ago, because this is the way of
writing that has the authority not only of centuries of secular
writing but also of religious tradition. And lest we think that this
is a peculiar fact about the relation between Arabic script and
Islam, we should note that the reason the Latin alphabet became
dominant in Western Europe is not all that different: The alphabet
was originally used for Latin, indeed the upper-case letters in use
today are virtually identical with those found on Latin inscriptions
of two thousand years ago; Latin became the language of the Roman
Catholic Church, and writing in nearly all Western European cultures
arose originally directly under the influence of the adoption and
spread of Christianity, whence it naturally based itself on the Latin
model. I consider it important to draw parallels like this between
non-Western and Western cultures: things that strike us as strange in
foreign cultures often have surprisingly close parallels in our own
culture, once we start to think about it.



This brings me to the three topics I'm writing about this year,
namely, the way the Haruai language classifies animals that differs
from scientific classifications. I restrict myself here to medium-
and small-sized mammals, of which there are, biologically, three
kinds indigenous to the area where the Haruai live: rodents (gnawing
animals, like rats but including larger, beaver-like animals),
marsupials (pouched animals, like possums and tree kangaroos), and
monotremes (mammals that lay eggs, like the echidna or spiny
anteater). As far as Haruai animal classification is concerned, this
three-way distinction is completely irrelevant. Rather, a distinction
is made between two terms, "uraf" for medium-sized mammals, and
"doeyu" for small-sized mammals. But on closer inspection, it turns
out that what is really important is not size, but rather social
function. "Uraf" refers to those animals that are considered
appropriate for men to hunt; "doeyu" refers to those animals that can
appropriately be foraged for by women and children. This distinction
happens to correspond to one of size.

Gender and age distinctions are very important in Haruai society,
perhaps especially so given its generally egalitarian nature, for
instance, in economic aspects: traditionally, and still in general
today, there are no marked distinctions of wealth.

This classification of animals does not, incidentally, reflect
ignorance on the part of the Haruai: as hunters and foragers, they
know a lot about the animals of their area. They can readily answer
questions such as whether a particular animal species has a pouch,
lays eggs, or neither. It is just that these features are less
important to them than the distinction between "uraf" and "doeyu."
Members of our own culture should not be too quick to scoff at this
nonscientific classification. The students in my class were
surprised when I told them, by way of analogy, that a peanut is not,
scientifically speaking, a nut. It's actually biologically closer to
a pea, although I suspect that supermarkets will continue to shelve
peanuts with the nuts rather than with their relatives the peas and
beans.



Bernard Comrie, professor and chair of linguistics, joined USC in
1978. He has written five books, edited five volumes of essays and
published numerous journal articles on languages of the Soviet
Union, Slavic languages and language typology. He holds a bachelor's
degree in modern and medieval languages and a Ph.D. in linguistics
from the University of Cambridge in England.