Language World Picture and National-Cultural Specificities in Oral and Written Text

Language and culture are interconnected: 1) in communicative processes; 2) in ontogenesis (formation of language abilities of the person); 3) in phylogenesis (formation of the patrimonial, public person).

These two essences differ in following: 1) language as a phenomenon installation on the mass addressee while in culture the elitism is prevailed; 2) though culture is a sign system (like language), but it is incapable for self realization; 3) as it was already marked by us, language and culture are different semiotics systems.

These reasoning allow drawing a conclusion that culture is not isomorphic (absolutely corresponds), and homomorphic to language (is structurally similar). The picture which shows a language and culture parity, is extremely difficult and multidimensional. For today some approaches were outlined in the decision of this problem.

Other approaches were developed basically by Russian philosophers - S.A.Atanovskim, G.A.Brutjanom, E.I.Kukushkinym, E.S.Markarjanom. The meaning of this approach in the following: the interrelation of language and culture appears movement in the same side; as language reflects the reality, and culture is the integral component of this reality which faces the person, also language is a simple reflection of culture. Reality changes, cultural-national stereotypes vary also, language changes also. One of the attempts to answer a question on influence of separate fragments (or spheres) cultures on language functioning was issued in functional stylistics of the Prague school and modern sociolinguistics.

Thus, if culture influence on language quite obviously (it is studied in the first approach) the question on return influence of language on culture while remains opened. It makes essence of the second approach to a problem of a parity of language and culture.

     There are many ways in which the phenomena of language and culture are intimately related. Both phenomena are unique to humans and have therefore been the subject of a great deal of anthropological, sociological, and even memetic study. Language, of course, is determined by culture, though the extent to which this is true is now under debate. The converse is also true to some degree: culture is determined by language - or rather, by the replicators that created both, memes.

     In this vein, anthropologist Verne Ray conducted a study in the 1950's, giving color samples to different American Indian tribes and asking them to give the names of the colors. He concluded that the spectrum we see as "green", "yellow", etc. was an entirely arbitrary division, and each culture divided the spectrum separately. According to this hypothesis, the divisions seen between colors are a consequence of the language we learn, and do not correspond to divisions in the natural world. A similar hypothesis is upheld in the extremely popular meme of Eskimo words for snow - common stories vary from fifty to upwards of two hundred.

Extreme cultural relativism of this type has now been clearly refuted. Eskimos use at most twelve different words for snow, which is not many more than English speakers and should be expected since they exist in a cold climate. The color-relativity hypothesis has now been completely debunked by more careful, thorough, and systematic studies which show a remarkable similarity between the ways in which different cultures divide the spectrum.

Of course, there are ways in which culture really does determine language, or at least certain facets thereof. Obviously, the ancient Romans did not have words for radios, televisions, or computers because these items were simply not part of their cultural context. In the same vein, uncivilized tribes living in Europe in the time of the Romans did not have words for tribunes, praetors, or any other trapping of Roman government because Roman law was not part of their culture.

Our culture does, sometimes, restrict what we can think about efficiently in our own language. For example, some languages have only three color terms equivalent to black, white, and red; a native speaker of this language would have a difficult time expressing the concept of "purple" efficiently. Some languages are also more expressive about certain topics. For example, it is commonly acknowledged that Yiddish is a linguistic champion, with an amazing number of words referring to the simplemind.

We carry the further reasoning on interrelation of language and culture to the third approach.

Language is the fact of the culture because: 1) it a component of culture which we inherit from our ancestors; 2) language is the basic tool by means of which we acquire culture; 3) language is major of all phenomena of a cultural order, if we wish to understand essence of culture - a science, religion, the literature we should consider these phenomena as the codes developed model. Therefore the conceptual judgment of culture can occur only by means of a natural language.

According to our concept, as far as each native speaker is simultaneously the culture bearer and language, signs get ability to carry out function of signs on culture and by that serve as means of representation of the basic installations of culture. For this reason language is capable to display cultural-national mentality of its speaker. The culture is correlated with language through the concept of spaces.

So, language is a component of culture and its tool is the reality of our spirit, a culture face; it expresses bared specific lines of national mentality. Language is the mechanism which has opened before area of consciousness before the person (N.I.Zhinkin).  
 

1.3. Folklore as the most important and well-acclaimed component of the cultural heritage of a nation

     Folklore is the traditional art, literature, knowledge, and practice that is disseminated largely through oral communication and behavioral example. Every group with a sense of its own identity shares, as a central part of that identity, folk traditions–the things that people traditionally believe (planting practices, family traditions, and other elements of worldview), do (dance, make music, sew clothing), know (how to build an irrigation dam, how to nurse an ailment, how to prepare barbecue), make (architecture, art, craft), and say (personal experience stories, riddles, song lyrics). As these examples indicate, in most instances there is no hard-and-fast separation of these categories, whether in everyday life or in folklorists’ work.

The word "folklore" names an enormous and deeply significant dimension of culture. Considering how large and complex this subject is, it is no wonder that folklorists define and describe folklore in so many different ways. Try asking dance historians for a definition of "dance," for instance, or anthropologists for a definition of "culture." No one definition will suffice–nor should it.

In part, this is also because particular folklorists emphasize particular parts or characteristics of the world of folklore as a result of their own work, their own interests, or the particular audience they’re trying to reach. And for folklorists, as for the members of any group who share a strong interest, disagreeing with one another is part of the work–and the enjoyment–of the field, and is one of the best ways to learn.

But to begin, below we have cited several folklorists’ definitions and descriptions of folklore, given in the order in which they were written and published. (One of them uses the word "folklife" instead, which American folklorists, following their European colleagues, have used more frequently of late.) None of these definitions answers every question by itself, and certainly none of them is the American Folklore Society’s official definition (we don’t have one), but each offers a good place to start. From time to time we’ll add the views of other folklorists to this page.

One thing you’ll note about these definitions and descriptions is that they challenge the notion of folklore as something that is simply "old," "old-fashioned," "exotic," "rural," "peasant," "uneducated," "untrue," or "dying out." Though folklore connects people to their past, it is a central part of life in the present, and is at the heart of all cultures–including our own–throughout the world.

For more information about folklore and about what folklorists do, please see the other sections of this "About Folklore" chapter, as well as the other chapters of this AFSNet web site.

Folklore is a body of traditional belief, custom, and expression, handed down largely by word of mouth and circulating chiefly outside of commercial and academic means of communication and instruction. Every group bound together by common interests and purposes, whether educated or uneducated, rural or urban, possesses a body of traditions which may be called its folklore. Into these traditions enter many elements, individual, popular, and even "literary," but all are absorbed and assimilated through repetition and variation into a pattern which has value and continuity for the group as a whole.

Dan Ben-Amos. Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context, in Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman, eds. Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press for the American Folklore Society, 1972.

…folklore is artistic communication in small groups.

Dell Hymes. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.

Folklore study is” the study of communicative behavior with an esthetic, expressive, or stylistic dimension.”

Jan Brunvand. The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction, 2^nd edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.

Folklore comprises the unrecorded traditions of a people; it includes both the form and content of these traditions and their style or technique of communication from person to person.

Folklore is the traditional, unofficial, non-institutional part of culture. It encompasses all knowledge, understandings, values, attitudes, assumptions, feelings, and beliefs transmitted in traditional forms by word of mouth or by customary examples.

Edward D. Ives. Joe Scott, the Woodsman-Songmaker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

No song, no performance, no act of creation can be properly understood apart from the culture or subculture in which it is found and of which it is a part; nor should any "work of art" be looked on as a thing in itself apart from the continuum of creation-consumption.

Barre Toelken. The Dynamics of Folklore. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.

Tradition [means] not some static, immutable force from the past, but those pre-existing culture-specific materials and options that bear upon the performer more heavily than do his or her own personal tastes and talents. We recognize in the use of tradition that such matters as content and style have been for the most part passed on but not invented by the performer.

Dynamic recognizes, on the other hand, that in the processing of these contents and styles in performance, the artist’s own unique talents of inventiveness within the tradition are highly valued and are expected to operate strongly. Time and space dimensions remind us that the resulting variations may spread geographically with great rapidity (as jokes do) as well as down through time (good luck beliefs). Folklore is made up of informal expressions passed around long enough to have become recurrent in form and context, but changeable in performance.

…modern American folklorists do not limit their attention to the rural, quaint, or "backward" elements of the culture. Rather, they will study and discuss any expressive phenomena–urban or rural–that seem to act like other previously recognized folk traditions. This has led to the development of a field of inquiry with few formal boundaries, one with lots of feel but little definition, one both engaging and frustrating

Surely no other discipline is more concerned with linking us to the cultural heritage from the past than is folklore; no other discipline is more concerned with revealing the interrelationships of different cultural expressions than is folklore; and no other discipline is so concerned …with discovering what it is to be human. It is this attempt to discover the basis of our common humanity, the imperatives of our human existence that puts folklore study at the very center of humanistic study.

"Folklore," though coined as recently as 1846, is the old word, the parental concept to the adjective "folk." Customarily folklorists refer to the host of published definitions, add their own, and then get on with their work, leaving the impression that definitions of folklore are as numberless as insects. But all the definitions bring into dynamic association the ideas of individual creativity and collective order.

Folklore is traditional. Its center holds. Changes are slow and steady. Folklore is variable. The tradition remains wholly within the control of its practitioners. It is theirs to remember, change, or forget. Answering the needs of the collective for continuity and of the individual for active participation, folklore…is that which is at once traditional and variable.

Like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, folklife is often hidden in full view, lodged in the various ways we have of discovering and expressing who we are and how we fit into the world. Folklife is reflected in the names we bear from birth, invoking affinities with saints, ancestors, or cultural heroes. Folklife is the secret languages of children, the codenames of CB operators, and the working slang of watermen and doctors. It is the shaping of everyday experiences in stories swapped around kitchen tables or parables told from pulpits. It is the African American rhythms embedded in gospel hymns, bluegrass music, and hip hop, and the Lakota flutist rendering anew his people’s ancient courtship songs.

Folklife is the sung parodies of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the variety of ways there are to skin a muskrat, preserve string beans, or join two pieces of wood. Folklife is the society welcoming new members at bris and christening, and keeping the dead incorporated on All Saints Day. It is the marking of the Jewish New Year at Rosh Hashanah and the Turkic New Year at Nauruz. It is the evolution of vaqueros into buckaroos, and the riderless horse, its stirrups backward, in the funeral processions of high military commanders.

Folklife is the thundering of foxhunters across the rolling Rappahannock countryside and the listening of hill toppers to hounds crying fox in the Tennessee mountains. It is the twirling of lariats at western rodeos, and the spinning of double-dutch jumpropes in West Philadelphia. It is scattered across the landscape in Finnish saunas and Italian vineyards; engraved in the split-rail boundaries of Appalachian "hollers" and the stone fences around Catskill "cloves"; scrawled on urban streetscapes by graffiti artists; and projected onto skylines by the tapering steeples of churches, mosques, and temples.

Folklife is community life and values, artfully expressed in myriad forms and interactions. Universal, diverse, and enduring, it enriches the nation and makes us a commonwealth of cultures.

Every group bound together or by common interests and purposes, whether educated or uneducated, rural or urban, possesses a body of traditions which may be called its folklore. Into these traditions enter many elements, individual, popular, and even "literary," but all are absorbed and assimilated through repetition and variation into a pattern which has value and continuity for the group as a whole. 

1.3.1 EXPRESSIONS OF FOLKLORE IN WRITTEN AND ORAL FORMS OF TEXT

     “Expressions of folklore” means productions consisting of characteristic elements of the traditional artistic heritage developed and maintained by a community of (name of the country) or by individuals reflecting the traditional artistic expectations of such a community, in particular:

(i) verbal expressions, such as folk tales, folk poetry and riddles;

(ii) musical expressions, such as folk songs and instrumental music;

(iii) expressions by action, such as folk dances, plays and artistic forms of rituals whether or not reduced to a material form; and

(iv) tangible expressions such as:

(a) productions of folk art, in particular, drawings, paintings, carvings, sculptures, pottery, terracotta, mosaic, woodwork, metalware, jewelry, basket weaving, needlework, textiles, carpets, costumes;

(b) musical instruments;

[(c) architectural forms.]

The term ‘folklore’ was first coined by William Thoms in 1846. He referred to folklore in his letter to the The Athenaeum to replace ‘popular antiquities’ and ‘popular literature.’ Initially the word had been used in hyphenated form ‘folk-lore,’ but later on the hyphen was discarded. William Thoms meant to include manners, customs, observations, superstitions, ballads, proverbs and so on, in the term ‘folklore,’ which he summarized as the lore of the people. Indeed, the pioneering work done by Thoms did lead to increasing awareness about the characteristics of folklore and the second half of the 19th century witnessed a large interest shown by eminent scholars in understanding the fundamentals of the vast subject. Since the introduction of the term ‘folklore,’ scholars all over the world put their head together to offer a rational definition of the word. The controversy that emerged in satisfactorily defining the term was so intense that in the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, edited by Maria Leach, there are twenty-one definitions given by different scholars. While going through the definitions one can attribute the reasons for the dispute mainly to the oral tradition of folklore. In a society where the masses are illiterate, the oral tradition is the means through which propagation of the necessary elements of culture takes place. In such a society, scholars used the term ‘folklore’ to refer to the language of the people, the system of their livelihood like hunting, agriculture, customs relating to marriages, deaths, etc., and the basic code of conduct, all of which are transmitted orally. According to scholars, all elements of learning that are passed through an oral tradition from generation to generation in a society belong to the domain of folklore. However, it may not be wise to consider all that is passed on orally as folklore. It is, perhaps, more reasonable to limit folklore to the creative aspects of a society, as reflected in its day-to-day life and expressed in material or non-material forms, rather than referring purely to the form of transmission, whether written or oral. Alan Dundes observes rightly when he states:

Since materials other than folklore are also orally transmitted, the criterion of oral transmission by itself is not sufficient to distinguish folklore from non-folklore.

While upholding the fact that not all that is transmitted orally is folklore one must also try to analyze whether the reverse of this position can be accepted as a base for the purpose of argument, that is, whether it is correct to interpret that only those elements of learning which are transmitted orally form part of folklore. If this thesis is correct, most of those parts of folklore, which have evolved through the written method, fall outside the pasture of folklore. An English literature has a sizeable share of folk songs, folk tales, poems, riddles and even many stories forming part of great epic like Beowulf stories, all of which form part of the rich heritage of folklore, but are still essentially expressed and communicated in written form. It is only preposterous to deny the status of folklore to these manifestations solely on the ground that they are in written form. Again a quote from Alan Dundes proves this point beyond doubt:

There are some forms of folklore which are manifested and communicated almost exclusively in the written as opposed to oral form, such as autograph-book verse, book marginalia, epitaphs, and traditional letters. In actual practice a professional folklorist does not go so far as to say that a folktale or a ballad is not folklore, simply because it has at some time in its life history been transmitted by script or print. But he would argue that if a folktale or a ballad had never been in the oral tradition, it is not folklore. It might be a literary production based upon a folk model.

As in the case of other parts of the world, in Kazakhstan too ballads, folktales and folk music have passed through the oral and written traditions. Even though some of these forms of folklore are authored by famous personalities they were accepted by the folk and have become part of the folklore. Yet another category of folklore is that which is neither oral nor written. Folk dances, folk arts and crafts, folk paintings, sculptures, etc., are transmitted not orally or through written medium, but through visual tradition, imitations, observations, through training and performances. As such, the attempt to define folklore purely on the basis of the form in which it is transmitted or passed from generation to generation is also not a satisfactory or foolproof solution for arriving at a rational definition of the term of folklore.

There are some social scientists who hold the view that folklore is the creation of a group of people who belong to the same contiguity of dwelling place and culture regardless of whether the location of residence is city, town or village. These scholars are of the view that folklore is the creative product of a community sharing similar habitat and culture. Their customs and beliefs, the language spoken and the traditional patterns of livelihood share certain common characteristics. Their folklore is reflected in their creative ideas and is the common property of the community.

Folklore, thus, is the product of human creativity, creation of people who live in a particular geographical area, sharing the same language, culture, mechanism of livelihood and living conditions. The life styles and traditions of the folk are characterized by a common identity. Folklore is the product of the creative ideas of the people who express such creativity through verbal, artistic or material forms, and this in turn is transmitted orally or in written form or through some other medium from one generation to another, belonging to a literate or nonliterate society, tribal or non-tribal, rural or urban people. In order to fully understand the depth and width of the term ‘folklore’, one must analyze the elements that constitute folklore. Those who view folklore as ‘verbal art’ confine the term to art forms which are transmitted orally, and folk arts like dance forms, painting or sculpture fall outside of the purview of such a term. Folk beliefs, customs, chants and charms are verbal and not art. Similarly, we have elements of folklore, which are neither art nor verbal namely, folk games, folk technology and folk medicine.

Based on the characteristics that have been identified as essential attributes of folklore it may be possible to categorize the following elements of folklore:

Folk Literature