# Language and Culture History I · Anthropology · https://tryals.app/learn/history-i/language-and-culture ## The Instrument You Think With Every human language is a complete system: a small set of meaningless sounds (**phonemes**) combines into meaningful units (**morphemes**), which grammar (**syntax**) assembles into infinite sentences. No language is primitive. The **Sapir-Whorf hypothesis** explores how this system shapes thought: | Version | Claim | Verdict | | --- | --- | --- | | **Strong** | Language **determines** thought | Rejected | | **Weak** | Language **influences** attention | Supported | Supported cases are precise: absolute directions produce compass-like orientation. Language is a groove, not a prison. > **The snow-words legend:** Boas noted four lexical roots, inflated by journalism into hundreds. Treat dramatic anecdotes as unverified until tested. ## Language Has a History Languages change lawfully. Latin **pater** and English **father** differ by regular sound shifts (**Grimm's law**: p becomes f), which is how comparativists reconstructed **Proto-Indo-European**—a language with no texts, recovered by triangulation. An innovation spreads through a speech community along an **S-curve**: slowly at first, then explosively, then tailing off among holdouts. For the historian, loanwords are receipts: English **beef** (from French) beside **cow** (Germanic) records who raised the animal and who ate it after 1066. ## Practice questions 7 of this lesson's 14 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app. ### 1. Roughly what percentage of the world’s languages do linguists class as endangered? **Set the slider.** **Answer:** 40 (within ±12) **Why:** Around 40 percent. Every disappearance closes an archive: unwritten languages carry oral history, taxonomy, and kin systems that vanish with the last speaker, a preview of the source-loss problem all history faces. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/language-and-culture/roughly-what-percentage-of-the-worlds-languages-do-linguists-class ### 2. Which findings support the _weak_ version of linguistic relativity? A. Speakers of absolute-direction languages maintain compass-like orientation B. Color memory differs slightly at category boundaries between languages C. Speakers of some languages are unable to learn other languages’ concepts D. Grammatical gender nudges the adjectives speakers pick for objects **Answer:** A. Speakers of absolute-direction languages maintain compass-like orientation; B. Color memory differs slightly at category boundaries between languages; D. Grammatical gender nudges the adjectives speakers pick for objects **Why:** Boundary effects, dead-reckoning Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, and gender-tinted descriptions: real, replicated, modest. The "unable to learn" claim is strong determinism, the version translation refutes daily. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/language-and-culture/which-findings-support-the-weak-version-of-linguistic-relativity ### 3. Order the stages in the recorded history of English. **Answer:** 1. Proto-Indo-European: reconstructed, unwritten ancestor 2. Old English: Beowulf, heavy inflection 3. Middle English: Chaucer, French flood after 1066 4. Early Modern English: Shakespeare, the great vowel shift settling 5. Present-day English: global lingua franca **Why:** Each stage is legible in its texts, and the jump from Old to Middle English carries the Norman Conquest inside it, one loanword at a time. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/language-and-culture/order-the-stages-in-the-recorded-history-of-english ### 4. Match each unit of language to what it is. **Answer:** - Phoneme → Meaningless sound unit that distinguishes words - Morpheme → Smallest meaningful unit - Syntax → Rules assembling words into sentences - Lexicon → The vocabulary stock of a language **Why:** Duality of patterning, meaningless sounds building meaningful structure, is the design trick every human language shares and no animal call system has. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/language-and-culture/match-each-unit-of-language-to-what-it-is ### 5. Sort each statement about language: **descriptive** (how people speak) or **prescriptive** (how someone says they should)? **Answer:** - Descriptive: Many Londoners pronounce "th" as "f", Double negatives mark emphasis in this dialect, Younger speakers here are dropping the case endings - Prescriptive: Never end a sentence with a preposition, "Ain’t" is not a real word, Say "whom" wherever it is grammatically licensed **Why:** Linguistic anthropology is descriptive: dialects are data, not errors. Prescriptive rules are themselves data too, evidence about which groups hold the social power to define "correct." Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/language-and-culture/sort-each-statement-about-language-descriptive-how-people-speak-or ### 6. Why do linguists reject the claim that some languages are "primitive"? A. Politeness forbids saying so B. Every documented language has full grammar C. All languages have exactly the same number of words D. Primitive languages existed but all died out **Answer:** B. Every documented language has full grammar **Why:** Complexity is universal: languages of small foraging societies often carry richer inflection than the languages of empires. Vocabularies specialize where cultures do, grammar owes nothing to GDP. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/language-and-culture/why-do-linguists-reject-the-claim-that-some-languages-are-primitive ### 7. The strong Sapir–Whorf hypothesis says language determines thought; the weak version says it influences it. Why did evidence force the retreat to the weak version? A. Because the hypothesis was based on a mistranslation of Hopi grammar B. Because people think about things their language lacks words for C. Because all languages turned out to encode the same distinctions D. Because no experiment has ever found any effect of language on thought **Answer:** B. Because people think about things their language lacks words for **Why:** Translation and learning both work, which determination cannot allow, but colour categorisation, spatial reference and grammatical gender all show measurable effects on attention and memory. The weak version survives because the influence is real and the constraint is not absolute. Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/language-and-culture/the-strong-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-says-language-determines-thought