A whole cloud of culture condensed into a drop of semantics

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Wierzbicka
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
German Word ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Functional Aspects ◽  
The World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Mental Worlds ◽  
Semantic Evolution

This paper investigates the meaning and use of the German word Herr as a form of address, in a historical and cross-linguistic perspective. The paper argues that despite their apparent insignificance, generic titles used daily across Europe, and in all the parts of the world to which European languages have travelled, can reveal complex and intricate webs of cultural assumptions, attitudes, and values, as well as how these assumptions, attitudes, and values change across time and space. Terms of address available for everyday use in a particular language can provide keys to the inmost recesses of the speakers’ cultural and mental worlds. But if we are to use these keys effectively, we need some basic locksmith skills. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) semantics, with its stock of primes and molecules and its mini-grammar for combining these into semantic texts, provides both the necessary tools and the necessary techniques. It allows us to practice semantic microanalysis with rigor and accountability, while at the same time exploring big questions of values, history, and culture. There has been an upsurge of interest in nominal terms of address in recent years, but as illustrated by the rich and valuable recent volume S’adresser à autrui (2014), edited by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni, research of this kind focuses on frequencies, forms, and functions, with virtually no mention of meaning — as if basic titles such as Monsieur and Madame, Signore and Signora, or Herr and Frau had no meaning at all. As a result, while formal and functional aspects are carefully examined, the secrets hidden in the meanings of such words (and in their semantic evolution) escape scholars’ attention. To uncover these secrets and to bring to light their cultural significance, we need an appropriate methodology. By putting the German word Herr under the microscope, this paper demonstrates that NSM is a methodology that allows it to be done in illuminating and empirically verifiable ways.

scholarly journals The Soft Embodiment of Culture

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (9) ◽  
pp. 824-830 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela K.-y. Leung ◽  
Dov Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Cultural assumptions about one's relation to others and one's place in the world can be literally embodied in the way one cognitively maps out one's position and motion in time and space. In three experiments, we examined the psychological perspective that Asian American and Euro-American participants embodied as they both comprehended and produced narratives and mapped out metaphors of time and space. In social situations, Euro-American participants were more likely to embody their own perspective and a sense of their own motion (rather than those of a friend), whereas Asian American participants were more likely to embody a friend's perspective and sense of motion (rather than their own). We discuss how these psychological perspectives represent the soft embodiment of culture by implicitly instantiating cultural injunctions (a) to think about how you look to others and to harmonize with them or (b) to know yourself, trust yourself, and act with confidence.

scholarly journals Global Language Politics: Eurasia versus the Rest

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-151
Author(s):  
Tomasz Kamusella
Keyword(s):  
State Building ◽  
Indigenous Languages ◽  
Language Politics ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Linguistic Imperialism ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Global Language

AbstractGlobalization in the early 21st century can be considered as the age of inequality that splits the world into the rich North and the poor South. From the perspective of language politics, only very few discussed the division across the globe, especially, between Eurasia and the “Rest of the world.” In Eurasia, indigenous languages and scripts are used in official capacity, while the same function is fulfilled almost exclusively by non-indigenous (post/colonial) European languages in the Rest of the world. In the countries where they are spoken, non-Eurasian languages have limited presence in the mass media, education, or in cyberspace. This linguistic imperialism par excellence is a long-lasting and pernicious legacy of European (western) colonialism. The aforementioned divide is strongly associated to the use of ethnolinguistic nationalism in state building across many areas of Eurasia, while this ideology is not employed for this purpose outside the region.

scholarly journals Czas kolejowy

2021 ◽  
pp. 61-84
Author(s):  
Michał Jerczyński
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Traffic Safety ◽  
Local Times ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Central European ◽  
The World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Way

Railway Time The inventions of the electromagnetic telegraph and the railroads significantly accelerated communication in time and space. It greatly influenced the way time was expressed and forced a change of centuries-old patterns and habits. It became necessary to gradually move away from local times (the average solar times of individual places) to the uniform time in the scale of entire countries, and then to the zone time. This process began in the 1830s on the railway and a few years later in the telegraph service, developing in parallel and in conjunction with the railroads. Initially, individual railway authorities adopted the same railway time on their networks (usually the capital time of a given country or the directorate’s headquarters). From 1884 until the first decade of the 20th century, culminating in the early 1990s, they gradually switched to zone time. Its introduction improved the work of railways, increased traffic safety, and made it easier for passengers to find their way around train timetables. Almost in parallel, since the mid-1860s, the process of switching from a twelve-hour count to a 24-hour count of time on the railways took place. In the rich literature devoted to time in its various aspects, few studies focus on the issues of organizing the measurement and expression of time on railways, and there are virtually no studies relating to railways in the present-day Polish lands which at the time operated under three different state authorities. The work aims to collect and systematize the facts that contributed to the process of introducing the 24-hour zone time on Central European railways and to present this process in the context of the world railways.

Apartheid Aesthetics and Insignificant Art

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Stephanus Muller
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
South African ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Art Songs ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Small House ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Selection Of

Stephanus Le Roux Marais (1896−1979) lived in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, for nearly a quarter of a century. He taught music at the local secondary school, composed most of his extended output of Afrikaans art songs, and painted a number of small landscapes in the garden of his small house, nestled in the bend of the Sunday’s River. Marais’s music earned him a position of cultural significance in the decades of Afrikaner dominance of South Africa. His best-known songs (“Heimwee,” “Kom dans, Klaradyn,” and “Oktobermaand”) earned him the local appellation of “the Afrikaans Schubert” and were famously sung all over the world by the soprano Mimi Coertse. The role his ouevre played in the construction of a so-called European culture in Africa is uncontested. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the rich evocations of landscape encountered in Marais’s work. Contextualized by a selection of Marais’s paintings, this article glosses the index of landscape in this body of cultural production. The prevalence of landscape in Marais’s work and the range of its expression contribute novel perspectives to understanding colonial constructions of the twentieth-century South African landscape. Like the vast, empty, and ancient landscape of the Karoo, where Marais lived during the last decades of his life, his music assumes specificity not through efforts to prioritize individual expression, but through the distinct absence of such efforts. Listening for landscape in Marais’s songs, one encounters the embrace of generic musical conventions as a condition for the construction of a particular national identity. Colonial white landscape, Marais’s work seems to suggest, is deprived of a compelling musical aesthetic by its very embrace and desired possession of that landscape.

Sandra Ramos Revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
Silvia Spitta
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Graphic Arts ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Political Choices ◽  
The Rich

Sandra Ramos (b. 1969) is one of the few artists to reflect critically on both sides of the Cuban di-lemma, fully embodying the etymological origins of the word in ancient Greek: di-, meaning twice, and lemma, denoting a form of argument involving a choice between equally unfavorable alternatives. Throughout her works she shines a light on the dilemmas faced by Cubans whether in Cuba or the United States, underlining the bad personal and political choices people face in both countries. During the hard 1990s, while still in Havana, the artist focused on the traumatic one-way journey into exile by thousands, as well as the experience of profound abandonment experienced by those who were left behind on the island. Today she lives in Miami and operates a studio there as well as one in Havana. Her initial disorientation in the USA has morphed into an acerbic representation and critique of the current administration and a deep concern with the environmental collapse we face. A buffoonlike Trumpito has joined el Bobo de Abela and Liborio in her gallery of comic characters derived from the rich Cuban graphic arts tradition where she was formed. While Cuba is now represented as a rotten cake with menacing flies hovering over it ready to pounce, a bombastic Trumpito marches across the world stage, trampling everything underfoot, a dollar sign for a face.

PSYCHOLOGICAL FEATURES OF EDUCATION AND TOLERANCE IN STUDENTS

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-119
Author(s):  
VLADIMIR GLEB NAYDONOV
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Training Program ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
Interethnic Differences ◽  
The World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Correct Understanding ◽  
Psychological Features ◽  
Different Levels

The article considers the students’ tolerance as a spectrum of personal manifestations of respect, acceptance and correct understanding of the rich diversity of cultures of the world, values of others’ personality. The purpose of the study is to investgate education and the formation of tolerance among the students. We have compiled a training program to improve the level of tolerance for interethnic differences. Based on the statistical analysis of the data obtained, the most important values that are significant for different levels of tolerance were identified.

The Unified World Order

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-100
Author(s):  
Bakare Adewale Muteeu
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
World Peace ◽  
Technological Determinism ◽  
Open World ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Rich

In pursuit of a capitalist world configuration, the causal phenomenon of globalization spread its cultural values in the built international system, as evidenced by the dichotomy between the rich North and the poor South. This era of cultural globalization is predominantly characterized by social inequality, economic inequality and instability, political instability, social injustice, and environmental change. Consequently, the world is empirically infected by divergent global inequalities among nations and people, as evidenced by the numerous problems plaguing humanity. This article seeks to understand Islam from the viewpoint of technological determinism in attempt to offset these diverging global inequalities for its “sociopolitical economy”1existence, as well as the stabilization of the interconnected world. Based upon the unifying view of microIslamics, the meaning of Islam and its globalizing perspectives are deciphered on a built micro-religious platform. Finally, the world is rebuilt via the Open World Peace (OWP) paradigm, from which the fluidity of open globalization is derived as a future causal phenomenon for seamlessly bridging (or contracting) the gaps between the rich-rich, rich-poor, poor-rich and poor-poor nations and people based on common civilization fronts.

Delving into Horror

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 135-150
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
Definition Of

The springboard for this essay is the author’s encounter with the feeling of horror and her attempts to understand what place horror has in philosophy. The inquiry relies upon Leonid Lipavsky’s “Investigation of Horror” and on various textual plunges into the fanged and clawed (and possibly noumenal) abyss of Nick Land’s work. Various experiences of horror are examined in order to build something of a typology, while also distilling the elements characteristic of the experience of horror in general. The essay’s overall hypothesis is that horror arises from a disruption of the usual ways of determining the boundaries between external things and the self, and this leads to a distinction between three subtypes of horror. In the first subtype, horror begins with the indeterminacy at the boundaries of things, a confrontation with something that defeats attempts to define it and thereby calls into question the definition of the self. In the second subtype, horror springs from the inability to determine one’s own boundaries, a process opposed by the crushing determinacy of the world. In the third subtype, horror unfolds by means of a substitution of one determinacy by another which is unexpected and ungrounded. In all three subtypes of horror, the disturbance of determinacy deprives the subject, the thinking entity, of its customary foundation for thought, and even of an explanation of how that foundation was lost; at times this can lead to impairment of the perception of time and space. Understood this way, horror comes within a hair’s breadth of madness - and may well cross over into it.

Translation as Resistance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Rzepa
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Cultural Transfer ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Complex Modes ◽  
The World ◽  
The Rich

This chapter offers a historical account of the presence of Paradise Lost in translation and Polish literature, especially how the poem’s reception in Poland has been shaped by complex modes of linguistic and cultural transfer. The chapter explores the historical and political contexts in which Paradise Lost was translated into Polish, discusses the most important actors involved in its publication, and analyses the strategies employed by the translators. It demonstrates that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translators of Milton, who worked at a time when Poland had lost its political sovereignty, focused specifically on the form of the poem, presenting models for a modern Polish epic poem that could help sustain Polish cultural identity. The focus of the twentieth-century translators, who lived through the world wars, shifted from the form to the rich imagery of Milton’s poem, in particular his exploration of the themes of vanity, destruction, and exile.

Materialities of Political Commitment?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fearn
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives

Eschewing historicist certainties, this chapter reassesses the political salience of Alcaeus’ lyric poetry by investigating his literary contribution to sympotic culture. Placing Alcaeus’ politically engaged voices within recent theoretical perspectives on deixis, ecphrasis, and the distinctiveness of lyric as a literary mode, the chapter argues that Alcaeus makes a systematic issue of the question of the accessibility of the contexts gestured towards, and in so doing opens up as an alluring prospect the idea of political engagement through literature. The literary and cultural significance of proverbial statements in Alcaeus is also discussed. Alcaeus’ lyric claims are felt across time and space via their special foregrounding of both material culture and political engagement, through performance and reception.

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