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Saturday, October 17, 2009
Afroasiatic and Proto-Indo-European languages
I am confident that ideas are transmitted through language and that ideas follow language. So it follows that as a language spreads across a population, then so will the ideas that are represented by that language. Semitic is of the afroasiatic family of languages, yet Hittite is of the Indo-Eurpopean family, yet it seems that Judaism was developed in Asia Minor/Anatollia/Modern Turkey or "Hittite Land". When did Persia and Greece (which share a common language family) dominate the Levant where Israel and Judah are located? When do we start seeing ideas that are typically contained in the indo-eurpoean language start creeping into Judaism? When did Egypt start to lose its dominance? To be continued...
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4 comments:
I have often wondered if societies whose language has specific genders assigned to things via their language show more gender bias and less gender equality than societies whose language is more gender nuetral. This would be a concrete specific way that language could shape a culture.
I've lived in quite few places in the world, and i have to say that in the places where the language is of the latin family, my impression was that women were second class citizens. Just my opinion. However, i dont think cantonese has a gender, but their women seem to rank lower as well. You know how men are....;-)
I doubt that grammatical gender has much to do with gender bias. Almost all Indo-European languages have grammatical gender, including those spoken in Scandinavia and the Netherlands.
On the other hand, one of the few IE languages without gender is modern Persian.
okay so that's two languages that don't have a gender and there seems to be gender bias in the culture.
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