Questões de Concurso

         When it comes to the vocabulary of languages, is it true, as some suppose, that the vocabularies of so-called primitive languages are too small and inadequate to account for the nuances of the physical and social universes of their speakers? The answer is somewhat complicated. Because the vocabulary of a language serves only the members of the society who speak it, the question to be asked should be: Is a particular vocabulary sufficient to serve the sociocultural needs of those who use the language? When put like this, it follows that the language associated with a relatively simple culture would have a smaller vocabulary than the language of a complex society. Why, for example, should the Inuit people (often known by the pejorative term “Eskimo”) have words for chlorofluoromethane, dune buggy, or tae kwon do when these substances, objects, and concepts play no part in their culture? By the same token, however, the language of a tribal society would have elaborate lexical domains for prominent aspects of the culture although these do not exist in complex societies. The Agta of the Philippines, for example, are reported to have no fewer than thirty-one verbs referring to types of fishing, while in Munich, the terminology for the local varieties of beer is quite extensive, according to strength, color, fizziness, aging, and clarity, the full list exceeding seventy terms.

        However, even though no language spoken today may be labeled primitive, this does not mean that all languages do all things in the same way, or are equally influential in the modern transnational world. The linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes claims that languages are not functionally equivalent because the role of speech varies from one society to the next. According to Hymes, though all languages “are potentially equal and hence capable of adaptation to the needs of a complex industrial civilization”, only certain languages have actually done so (Hymes 1961:77). These languages are more successful than others not because they are structurally more advanced, but because they happen to be associated with societies in which language is the basis of literature, education, science, and commerce.

Zdenek SALZMANN, James M. STANLAW and Nobuko ADACHI. Language, culture, and society: an introduction to linguistic anthropology. Boulder (CO): Westview Press, 2012. p. 6-7 (adapted).