CRUZAMENTO DE LÍNGUAS: A VISÃO DE AUTORES REFERENCIAIS

Este artigo visa a investigar a literatura sobre o cruzamento de línguas, com o propósito de compreender a maneira pela qual as línguas exercem influência umas sobre as outras. Com esse objetivo, foram selecionadas obras de três autores referenciais no estudo da linguística, Hermann Paul, Edward Sapir e Mikhail Bakhtin. A partir da revisão dessa literatura foi possível constatar que a influência ocorre normalmente por meio da importação de vocábulos e muito mais raramente na forma de alterações fonéticas ou estruturais. Também foi possível dentificar fatores que estabelecem a profundidade e extensão dessa influência, relacionados a características intrínsecas dos próprios vocábulos e das línguas envolvidas no processo de cruzamento, bem como a aspectos culturais, políticos, econômicos e tecnológicos relativos aos povos falantes dessas línguas.

A. Irving Hallowell’s research on the Ojibwe animism

Alfred Irving Hallowell (1892–1974), a seasoned researcher of the Ojibwe culture, is known today primarily as a precursor of the anthropological theory of the “new animism”. A student of Franz Boas and a friend of Edward Sapir, he was not only a prominent figure of the culture and personality school, but also proved to be one of the most interesting psychological anthropologists of the 20th century. His works on the Ojibwe indigenous taxonomy prefigured the achievements of ethnoscience, and those on the evolution ofhuman behaviour adumbrated the development of sociobiology. Conducted in the 1930s, Hallowell’s fieldwork among the Berens River Ojibwe resulted in numerous academicpapers, one of which – the 1960 Ojibwa Ontology, Behaviour, and World View – years later became particularly influential in anthropological research on animism. This article presents Hallowell’s intellectual biography and discusses his research on the Ojibwe culture along with the concepts he used or developed, concepts that for many researchers became the key to unlocking new conceptualizations of the problem of animism.

Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict

Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives re-examines the poetry and scholarship of three of the foremost figures in the twentieth-century history of U.S.-American anthropology: Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. While they are widely renowned for their contributions to Franz Boas’s early twentieth-century school of cultural relativism, what is far less known is their shared interest in probing the representational potential of different media and forms of writing. This dimension of their work is manifest in Sapir’s critical writing on music and literature and Mead’s groundbreaking work with photography and film. Sapir, Mead, and Benedict together also wrote more than one thousand poems, which in turn negotiate their own media status and rivalry with other forms of representation. A. Elisabeth Reichel presents the first sustained study of the published and unpublished poetry of Sapir, Mead, and Benedict, charting this largely unexplored body of work and relevant selections of the writers’ scholarship. In addition to its expansion of early twentieth-century literary canons, Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives contributes to current debates about the relations between different media, sign systems, and modes of sense perception in literature and other media. Reichel offers a unique contribution to the history of anthropology by synthesizing and applying insights from the history of writing, sound studies, and intermediality studies to poetry and scholarship produced by noted early twentieth-century U.S.-American cultural anthropologists.

Analyzing the Role of English ‘Loan Lexis’ in the Process of Language Change in Contemporary Bodo Linguistic Community

Language grows, evolves and develops over a period of time. Reading through old English writings even the native speakers of today would struggle understanding them. No language (including Bodo) is exempt from this fact. According to Edward Sapir an American Linguist, Language contact is one of the main reasons behind such change in a particular linguistic community. Darwin says that ‘languages tended to change in the direction of having shorter easier forms, and that it could be explained by natural selection.’ My close observation lead me to discover that there are numerous English ‘loan words that the ‘Bodos’ use in their conversations. This is a case not only of one linguistic community but of most North East Indian linguistic communities; we can’t deny the fact that English Loan words have found great usage in our conversations, TV shows, songs, films and functions. This practice has to a certain extent ushered in some changes in contemporary Bodo linguistic community. Edward Sapir talks about how one linguistic community borrows vocabulary from another in the process of cultural and social interaction; this he says has been a common phenomenon among linguistic communities in the history and continues to prevail as a common practice till today. In my paper I discuss the causes of such a practice and their possible pros and cons with special reference to Contemporary Bodo linguistic community.

Sonic Others in Early Sound Studies and the Poetry of Edward Sapir

Characteristically, early research in soundscapes is suffused with a sense of sonophilia; that is, a fascination with auditory perception and sound as the inferiorized Other of sight. Soundscape scholars have thus often conceived of their work as a salvage operation, which is conducted to save what would otherwise be irretrievably lost to a visual regime. This moral impetus to redeem the "sonic Other" is at the center of this article, in which I investigate how notions of sonic alterity interweave with treatments of social and cultural alterity. To explore and interrogate the nexus of social, cultural, and sonic alterity for its political and ethical ramifications, I analyze the acoustics of the poetry of Edward Sapir. Sapir played a key role in the formation of cultural anthropology and the early development of linguistic anthropology. What is far less known is that he is also the author of over six hundred poems, some of which were published in such renowned magazines as Poetry and The Dial. Focusing on the poems "To a Street Violinist" and "Harvest," I probe the dynamics of an anthropo-literary project that sets out to salvage both non-visual sense perceptions and other-than-modern, Western ways of life.

Un acercamiento neurocientífico a la relatividad lingüística

Entre los años veinte y los años cincuenta, los lingüistas Benjamin Whorf y Edward Sapir dieron forma a una hipótesis que propone que el mundo que percibimos está distorsionado por el lenguaje que hablamos: vemos el mundo a través de un filtro lingüístico. Esta hipótesis ha sido retomada, interpretada y discutida incontables veces en los últimos cincuenta años desde la antropología, la sociología, la lingüística y la ciencia cognitiva. Para Whorf, las palabras de nuestro lenguaje determinan la forma en que vemos el mundo: en el caso del arcoíris, las bandas de distintos colores que emergen del continuo de luz serían en realidad un producto de la forma en que hemos subdividido y nombrado el espectro. Los colores son un mal ejemplo de esta teoría, puesto que no son resultado de filtros lingüísticos sino innatos –producto de mecanismos biológicos en nuestras retinas y cerebros. Pero el fenómeno “arcoíris” es relevante porque es un ejemplo de Percepción Categórica, en que las categorías determinan o distorsionan nuestra percepción más allá de meras diferencias físicas: vemos dos tonos de rojo que están a 100 nm de distancia como más similares que un tono de rojo y un tono de amarillo que están a la misma distancia en el espectro. Aunque los colores son categorías innatas, la mayoría de las palabras de nuestro lenguaje son nombres de categorías que aprendemos a través de la experiencia. La pregunta es entonces si el aprendizaje de estas categorías genera cambios en nuestra percepción similares a los que suceden en el caso de los colores del arcoíris. Apoyada en métodos que miden la actividad cerebral antes, durante y después del aprendizaje de nuevas categorías y sus nombres, la neurociencia cognitiva aporta nuevos elementos para estudiar la relatividad lingüística desde el método científico. Este ensayo relata estos acercamientos con el fin de estimular un diálogo multidisciplinario alrededor de esta controvertida hipótesis.

Speaking Jewish: The Talmudy blues of semantic and Semitic environments

With shout outs to Edward Sapir, Benjamin Whorf, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Wex and Ludwig Wittgenstein, this paper will explore both the structures of Yiddish and Kabbalistic hermeneutics. Focusing on the aphoristic nature of Yiddish as a series of media ecological probes, and how thirteenth-century Kabbalah offers multiperspectival strategies for negotiating truth, it will expose how both through its form and presentation, speaking ‘Jewish’ reshapes culture and provides a model for survival.

李方桂先生調查西南少數民族語言的足跡

提要 李方桂在美國跟 Edward Sapir 做過美洲印地安語言的調查研究，他回國後做中國境內少數民族語言的調查研究，方法上就能駕輕就熟了。他把重點擺在西南少數民族語言的調查研究，包括屬於傣語的武鳴土語、龍州土語、剝隘土語，和侗水語言的侗語、水家、莫話、羊黃，這些語言都在廣西、雲南、貴州，路途遙遠，交通極為不便。他陸續發表了六部專書和數十篇重要論文。他當年所調查的語種，都是先做傣語系的語言，然後做侗水語言，可見他事先已經做了充分的準備，對那些語言的關係已有初步的瞭解。他還訓練並協助年輕助理馬學良調查彝族撒尼語，邢公畹調查布依語，張琨調查苗語和藏語。如此，學術工作才有傳承，影響深遠。他的研究成果顯示，少數民族語言的現象可以提供解決漢語音韻史的若干問題。地圖一顯示李方桂五次田野調查的途程，地圖二侗傣語族的祖居地和擴散。