T1 - Franz Boas, Language and Thought

PAROLA D AUTORE | T1 Franz Boas Introduction to Handbook of American Indian Languages, University of Nebraska Press, 1963, pp. 60-63 Language and Thought L Handbook of American Indian Languages del 1911 fu uno dei testi fondativi dell antropologia linguistica. Qui Boas attinge alla sua ricerca etnografica tra gli Indiani del Nordamerica per contrastare una concezione diffusa, che considerava le popolazioni primitive incapaci di pensiero astratto. Egli attribuisce il fatto che alcune lingue siano prive di termini specifici per esprimere concetti astratti a ragioni storiche e culturali, non a differenze cognitive. First of all, it may be well to discuss the relation between language and thought. It has been claimed that the conciseness and clearness of thought of a people depend to a great extent upon their language. The ease with which in our modern European languages we express wide abstract ideas by a single term, and the facility with which wide generalizations are cast into the frame of a simple sentence, have been claimed to be one of the fundamental conditions of the clearness of our concepts, the logical force of our thought [ ]. It seems very questionable in how far the restriction of the use of certain grammatical forms can really be conceived as a hindrance in the formulation of generalized ideas. It seems much more likely that the lack of these forms is due to the lack of their need. Primitive man, when conversing with his fellowman, is not in the habit of discussing abstract ideas. His interests center around the occupations of his daily life [ ]. Discourses on qualities without connection with the object to which the qualities belong, or of activities or states disconnected from the idea of the actor or the subject being in a certain state, will hardly occur in primitive speech. Thus the Indian will not speak of goodness as such, although he may very well speak of the goodness of a person. [ ] He will not refer to the power of seeing without designating an individual who has such power. [ ] I have made this experiment, for instance, with the Kwakiutl language of Vancouver Island, in which no abstract term ever occurs without its possessive elements. After some discussion, I found it perfectly easy to develop the idea of the abstract term in the mind of the Indian [ ]. I succeeded, for instance, in this manner, in isolating the terms for love and pity, which ordinarily occur only in the possessive form, like his love for him or my pity for you. [ ] There is also evidence that other specializing elements, which are so characteristic of many Indian languages, may be dispensed with when, for one reason or another, it seems desirable to generalize a term [ ]. The fact that generalized forms of expression are not used does not prove inability to form them, but it merely proves that the mode of life of the people is such that they are not required; that they would, however, develop as soon as needed. [ ] If we want to form a correct judgment of the influence that language exerts over thought, we ought to bear in mind that our European languages as found at the present time have been moulded to a great extent by the abstract thought of philosophers. Terms like unità 6 | Linguaggi e forme espressive | 249