Native Tongue - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Suzette Haden Elgin (ч. notes)

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Elgin’s nonfictions series has grown quite extensive. In addition to the original Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, it includes The Last Word on the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1987), The Gentle Art of Written Self-Defense: Letters in Response to Triple-F Situations (1993), Genderspeak: Men, Women, and the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1993), and The Gentle Art of Communicating With Kids (1996), among others.

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While linguists have, for the most part, discarded this theory in favor of the school of thought pioneered by Noam Chomsky — which contends that the capacity for language is wired into our brains by evolution, rather than developed as a result of our environment — the idea survives in many other disciplines. All the same, there is some confusion about the actual meaning of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The “strong” version, which Elgin claims no one has ever advocated, says that our language determines our perception of reality (Language Imperative 52). It is this version that is often discredited. The “weak” version, to which Elgin subscribes, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, says only that our language structures and constrains our perception of reality. For a discussion of all these competing theories, see Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, especially pages 55–82.

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Gödel’s theorem argues that within any fixed system, there are truths that exist, but are not provable within the system (Hofstadter 101). In other words, no system is complete, and in any attempt to include new things, the system necessarily changes. In the case of Native Tongue, the fixed system is a masculine, violent, hierarchical culture and language. Elgin’s experiment was to see what would happen if she tried to “prove” the truth of a women’s language. For a detailed discussion of Gödel’s theorem, see Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach.

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This theme appears in Earthsong: Native Tongue III, which has as its central character a linguist woman who communicates with the spirit of one of the oldest old who has just died — a linguist woman who helped to create Láadan.