In a book hilarious and brilliant, Jean-Pierre Minaudier defends cultural diversity endangered by the standardization. You want to receive automatically
In a book hilarious and brilliant, Jean-Pierre Minaudier defends cultural diversity endangered by the standardization.
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once is not custom : I adventure this week outside the territory of France. I is provided by the reading of a book really special (I weigh my words) published in 2017, but which one just sent me this (thanks in to be made to the donor). A book devoted to all the languages of the world, brilliant not only for his scholarship, but especially by the depth and originality of thought, all served up by a humour that is worthy of the guilty child would have been able to have entire Raymond Devos, Monty Python and Groucho Marx (pantheon staff totally subjective). I said that Jean-Pierre Minaudier is not my childhood friend or my partner of squash, and my office colleague – I had not suspected its existence. But I take that bet : with Poetry of the gerund (1), this lover of words will make you laugh – yes, laugh – while talking of linguistics – evidence of the genius infinite of the human race.
An example, among a thousand. Page 63, we learn that some languages do not distinguish between be and have, which seems very surprising for a French. How do the speakers manage to make themselves understood, you ask ? “No problem in the vast majority of cases, responds Jean-Pierre Minaudier. In the sentence, “My brother-in-law X is a moron”, it is obvious that X is the verb “to be” ; in the sentence “My brother-in-law Is a computer”, it is obvious, except in science fiction the more uncontrolled, that There is the verb “to have”. The twist, he continues, is ambiguous in rare circumstances, such as : “My neighbour Z a big cow” – still it is necessary that the context makes it plausible that it is exercising the profession of farmer (otherwise, Z is necessarily the verb “to be”) and that, furthermore, it has not been mentioned that she has the sex appeal of Marilyn Monroe, the humor of Woody Allen, the conversation of Voltaire and a PhD in quantum physics (if there is a reference to this order, Z is necessarily the verb “to have”).”
The tariana (Amazonian) has seven imperatives, different
So, you laugh, but you learn also. Did you know, for example, that the language of Christ, the western aramaic, is still spoken in three villages of Syria ; that the !xoon, spoken in Botswana and Namibia, there are 44 vowels and 117 consonants ; that bantu languages distinguish 20 kinds ; that the tariana (Amazonian) has seven imperatives are different ; that there are two distinct languages for men and for women in the japanese and thouktche (Siberia) ; or that it meets the six degrees of politeness in Korean ?
By multiplying the examples, Minaudier is not trying to impress. What he demonstrates with mastery, is that a language serves not only to communicate, but still represents a different way of seeing the world. And that, from this point of view, to know that at least a third of them are in danger of extinction should we all be alert to. “A language, he argues, is a phenomenon that is primarily cultural, an inexhaustible reservoir, and never the same associations, logical or illogical, means of expressions unequally developed, metaphors, imagery, attention or inattention to various aspects of the reality.”
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It also shows that the complexity of the grammar is not reserved for “major languages”, as it is often believed on the banks of the Seine. This note precisely Minaudier, it is simply and stupidly of the occidentalo-centrism. Some languages of Amazonia as the puinave or the galibi thus combine the verbs, but also the names ! As to the Estonian, it is more precise than the French for the notation of the time.
I will not be news to anyone by saying that, like him, “I am one of those that are passionate about not what that looks like but that was different, not the drive, the centres, the cities, the scheduling of regular avenues symmetric and the palace classic, purity and geometric transparent crystal, but the peripheries and the minorities, the streets twisted and plots that no one architect has drawn, the infinite variety of shapes of the coral” (because in addition, the guy writes very well). And I find myself dreaming that the France that I love so much, broken finally with his parisianisme customary and defender as he is worthy of his formidable linguistic heritage.
(1) Poetry of the gerund, Jean-Pierre Minaudier. The Tripod, 11 €.
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Date Of Update: 27 May 2020, 03:58
Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: newstars.edu.vn