In Imprisoned in English, Anna Wierzbicka argues that in the present English-dominated world, millions of people - including academics, lawyers, diplomats, and writers - can become "prisoners of English", unable to think outside English. In particular, social sciences and the humanities are now increasingly locked in a conceptual framework grounded in English. To most scholars in these fields, treating English as a default language seems a natural thing to do. The book's approach is interdisciplinary, and its themes range over areas of central interest to anthropology, psychology, and sociology, among others. The linguistic material is drawn from languages of America, Australia, the Pacific, South-East Asia and Europe. Wierzbicka argues that it is time for human sciences to take advantage of English as a global lingua franca while at the same time transcending the limitations of the historically-shaped conceptual vocabulary of English. And she shows how this can be done.
Artykuł dotyczy wystaw i recepcji twórczości polsko-żydowskiego rzeźbiarza Eliego Nadelmana, dobrze znanego przede wszystkim w Stanach Zjednoczonych, gdzie mieszkał od 1914 r. oraz w Europie Zachodniej, a zwłaszcza we Francji, gdzie przebywał w latach 1904–1914. Punktem wyjścia rozważań autorki stanowi wystawa Elie Nadelman – polski prekursor Art Déco w warszawskiej Wejman Gallery (2022). Ekspozycja przypomniała nie tylko postać rzeźbiarza, ale także promotora jego twórczości działającego we Francji, a pochodzącego z Tarnowa krytyka sztuki oraz marszanda Adolfa Baslera, który odegrał niezwykle ważną rolę w zaznajomieniu publiczności polskiej, francuskiej i niemieckiej ze sztuką Nadelmana. Na temat sztuki Eliego Nadelmana wypowiadali się też inni współcześni mu krytycy, których teksty zostały również omówione.
Reading stories can be an exercise in cross-cultural communication-and it can involve miscommunication. When we read texts belonging to other epochs, lands, peoples, and traditions, we need to know something about the "cultural scripts" which shaped the ways of thinking and the ways of speaking reflected in those texts. If these cultural scripts are to be made intelligible to us they must be explained in terms that the culture alien to us shares with our own. The set of simple and universal human concepts which has been discovered in recent decades through empirical linguistic investigations (cf. e.g., Wierzbicka 1996c; Goddard 1998; Goddard and Wierzbicka eds. 1994 and 2002), can play a useful role in this regard, as a kind of a universal conceptual lingua franca or a universal "cultural notation" (Hall 1976), which can help to minimize miscommunication and build cross-cultural bridges between readers and writers. As Bakhtin (1979: 257) put it, in speaking "we 'pour' our speech into ready-made forms of speech genres (.) These forms are given to us in the same way in which our native language is given". Accordingly, to understand ways of speaking which belong to a culture alien to us we must learn to "hear" them in their proper cultural context and with some knowledge of this culture's ready-made speech forms; in other words, we must try to understand the underlying cultural scripts. Mainstream Anglo culture, with its cherished traditions of rationality and empiricism, and with its emphasis on science and scientific discourse, values consistency, accuracy, logical formulations, absence of contradictions (on any level), absence of exaggeration, dispassionate reasoning, and so on. As I have discussed in my book What Did Jesus Mean? (2001), these are not the values of the culture of Hosea, or the culture of Jesus, just as they are not the values of the culture reflected in the stories of Sholom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer. For the modern Anglo reader of the Bible, a cross-cultural commentary is not an optional extra, but a necessity. The cultural script model can be an effective tool for the purposes of cross-cultural understanding-in personal interaction, social life, business, politics, literature, and also in religion. In particular, it can be an effective tool for the interpretation of the Bible-as literature and as (for the believers) the Word of God.
Reading stories can be an exercise in cross-cultural communication-and it can involve miscommunication. When we read texts belonging to other epochs, lands, peoples, and traditions, we need to know something about the "cultural scripts" which shaped the ways of thinking and the ways of speaking reflected in those texts. If these cultural scripts are to be made intelligible to us they must be explained in terms that the culture alien to us shares with our own. The set of simple and universal human concepts which has been discovered in recent decades through empirical linguistic investigations (cf. e.g., Wierzbicka 1996c; Goddard 1998; Goddard and Wierzbicka eds. 1994 and 2002), can play a useful role in this regard, as a kind of a universal conceptual lingua franca or a universal "cultural notation" (Hall 1976), which can help to minimize miscommunication and build cross-cultural bridges between readers and writers. As Bakhtin (1979: 257) put it, in speaking "we 'pour' our speech into ready-made forms of speech genres (.) These forms are given to us in the same way in which our native language is given". Accordingly, to understand ways of speaking which belong to a culture alien to us we must learn to "hear" them in their proper cultural context and with some knowledge of this culture's ready-made speech forms; in other words, we must try to understand the underlying cultural scripts. Mainstream Anglo culture, with its cherished traditions of rationality and empiricism, and with its emphasis on science and scientific discourse, values consistency, accuracy, logical formulations, absence of contradictions (on any level), absence of exaggeration, dispassionate reasoning, and so on. As I have discussed in my book What Did Jesus Mean? (2001), these are not the values of the culture of Hosea, or the culture of Jesus, just as they are not the values of the culture reflected in the stories of Sholom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer. For the modern Anglo reader of the Bible, a cross-cultural commentary is not an optional extra, but a necessity. The cultural script model can be an effective tool for the purposes of cross-cultural understanding-in personal interaction, social life, business, politics, literature, and also in religion. In particular, it can be an effective tool for the interpretation of the Bible-as literature and as (for the believers) the Word of God.
This paper shows that story is an English cultural keyword and a key interpretive tool of modern Anglo culture and that it is linked with a family of concepts which have no semantic equivalents in other languages and are unique conceptual artefacts of Anglo culture. It argues that if we can pinpoint these concepts we can also pinpoint the shared values and assumptions reflected in them. It shows that this can be done with the help of the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) methodology developed over many years by the author and her colleague Cliff Goddard — a methodology which has been previously applied effectively to many other semantic domains, across a wide range of languages. Further, the paper argues that because the uniqueness and centrality of the English story has until now gone unnoticed, many semantic components associated with it have been projected onto other languages, which has lead to the positing of spurious human universals and to claims such as "story is a basic principle of mind". The paper draws attention to the fact that a unique English cultural keyword (story) has played a significant role in the "narrative turn" in the humanities and social sciences, and discusses some of the implications of this fact.
Do all people live in a world full of colours? Perceptually, yes (unless they are visually impaired), but conceptually, no: there are many languages which have no word for 'colour' and in which the question 'what colour is it?' cannot be asked and presumably does not arise. Yet the powerful and still immensely influential theory of Berlin and Kay assumes otherwise. While building on my earlier work on colour semantics, this article brings new evidence against the Berlin and Kay paradigm, and presents a fundamentally different approach. The new data on which the argument is based come from Australian languages. In particular, the article presents a detailed study of the visual world reflected in the Australian language Warlpiri and in Warlpiri ways of speaking, showing that while Warlpiri people have no 'colour‐talk' (and no 'colour‐practices'), they have a rich visual discourse of other kinds, linked with their own cultural practices. It also offers a methodology for identifying indigenous meanings without the grid of the English concept 'colour', and for revealing 'the native's point of view'.RésuméTout le monde vit‐il dans un monde plein de couleurs ? Du point de vue de la perception, la réponse est oui (sauf en cas de handicap visuel), mais au niveau des concepts, c'est non : dans de nombreuses langues, le mot « couleur » n'existe pas et la question « de quelle couleur est ceci ? » ne peut pas être posée, et ne se pose probablement même pas. Pourtant, théorie de Berlin et Kay, puissante et encore immensément influente, affirme le contraire. Tout en exploitant ses travaux antérieurs sur la sémantique des couleurs, l'auteur apporte de nouvelles preuves à l'encontre du paradigme de Berlin et Kay et présente une approche fondamentalement différente. Les nouvelles données sur lesquelles se base son argumentation proviennent des langues australiennes. L'article présente en particulier une étude détaillée du monde visuel tel qu'en rend compte la langue australienne warlpiri. Les expressions dans cette langue montrent que bien que les Warlpiri n'aient pas de « langage des couleurs » (ni de « pratique des couleurs »), ils ont un riche discours visuel à propos d'autres propriétés liées à leur propre pratique culturelle. L'article expose également une méthodologie pour identifier les significations indigènes en dehors de la grille du concept occidental de « couleur », et pour révéler « le point de vue indigène ».
Human communication relies largely on metaphors. This applies to literature, to politics, to everyday interaction, to religion and to ethics. Indeed we live by metaphors, as the title of the well-known book by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggests. Yet despite their vital importance the meaning of metaphors is often far from clear - even to those who use them. The problem is compounded in cross-cultural communication, because while the letter of the metaphor can often be translated, the translated version may be baffling or deceptive.
Human communication relies largely on metaphors. This applies to literature, to politics, to everyday interaction, to religion and to ethics. Indeed we live by metaphors, as the title of the well-known book by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggests. Yet despite their vital importance the meaning of metaphors is often far from clear - even to those who use them. The problem is compounded in cross-cultural communication, because while the letter of the metaphor can often be translated, the translated version may be baffling or deceptive.
