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In a book entitled The Sermon on the Mount: The modern Quest for its meaning, theologian Clarence Bauman (1985) discusses, inter alia, Jesus' teaching on "anger". The book opens with a chapter on Tolstoy: "Leo Tolstoy: The moral... more
In a book entitled The Sermon on the Mount: The modern Quest for its meaning, theologian Clarence Bauman (1985) discusses, inter alia, Jesus' teaching on "anger". The book opens with a chapter on Tolstoy: "Leo Tolstoy: The moral challenges of literal interpretation": "Christ's first commandment is "Do not be angry" (Matthew 5: 22-25). Tolstoy noted that the text had been tampered with by redactors. By the fifth century the word εικη, meaning "needlessly" or "without cause," had been inserted into the initial unconditional statement: "Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause...". But what did Jesus really teach about "anger"? The term used in Matthew's Gospel (5:22) is of course not the English word anger but the Greek word orgizomai-and the two don't mean the same. The term used by Tolstoy-the Russian word gnevat'sja-is different in meaning from both anger and orgizomai. But the word used by Jesus was neither English, nor Greek, nor Russian, but Aramaic. So what did that Aramaic word mean-and what did Jesus intend to say with it? Tolstoy's impulse to look for the "literal interpretation" is understandable, but as this chapter shows, the idea that we can pinpoint what Jesus meant with one word, from a particular language (be it Russian, English, Greek or Aramaic) is simplistic. The paper argues that in order to fully understand Jesus' teaching about "anger" in a precise and unbiased way, we need to go beyond single words of this or that language, and to try to articulate it through simple sentences couched in universal (i.e. universally-contestable) words. Furthermore, the paper shows that what applies to Jesus' teaching about emotions applies also to Jesus' "emotional practice". What did he feel when he saw someone doing something very bad, or someone to whom something very bad was happening? As the paper demonstrates, the "Natural Semantic Metalanguage" (NSM) developed by the author and colleagues allows us to replace crude formulations such as "Did Jesus feel angry?" or "What did Jesus teach about anger?" with questions which are far more fine-grained, and which enable us to reach far more fine-grained, and more meaningful answers.
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David Chalmers appears to assume that we can meaningfully discuss what goes on in human heads without paying any attention to the words in which we couch our statements. This paper challenges this assumption and argues that the initial... more
David Chalmers appears to assume that we can meaningfully discuss what goes on in human heads without paying any attention to the words in which we couch our statements. This paper challenges this assumption and argues that the initial problem is that of metalanguage: if we want to say something clear and valid about us humans, we must think about ourselves outside conceptual English created by one particular history and culture and try to think from a global, panhuman point of view. This means that instead of relying on untranslatable English words such as 'consciousness' and 'experi-ence' we must try to rely on panhuman concepts expressed in cross-translatable words such as THINK, KNOW, and FEEL (Wierzbicka, 2018). The paper argues that after 'a hundred years of consciousness studies' it is time to try to say something about us (humans), about how we think and how we differ from cats and bats, in words that are clear, stable, and human rather than parochially English.
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All European languages have a word for God, and this word means exactly the same in all of them. However, speakers of different European languages tend to relate to God in different ways. Each group has its own characteristic ways of... more
All European languages have a word for God, and this word means exactly the same in all of them. However, speakers of different European languages tend to relate to God in different ways. Each group has its own characteristic ways of addressing God, encoded in certain words, phrases and grammatical forms, which both reflect and shape the speakers’ habitual ways of thinking about God and relating to God. Often, they also reflect some other aspects of their cultural memory and historical experience. In this paper I will compare the meanings of the vocative expressions used for addressing God in several European languages, including “Gospodi” in Russian, “O God” in English, “Mon Dieu” in French, “Herr” in German, and “Boże” in Polish. But to compare those meanings, we need a common measure. I believe such a common measure is available in the “NSM” framework, from Natural Semantic Metalanguage (see e.g. Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2014; Wierzbicka 2014a and 2018a; Gladkova and Larina 2018a, b). The data is taken mainly from well-known works of literature, such as Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Boris Pasternak’s poem “V bol’nice” (“In Hospital”) for Russian, Charles Peguy’s Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc and its English translation by Julien Green for French and English, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison poems and Heinrich Böll’s novel Billard um halbzehn for German. The results have shown that each European language offers its users a range of options for addressing God. Some of these options are shared, others appear to be unique to the language. All are underpinned by broader historical phenomena. The exact nature of all these links remains to be investigated.
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Reading stories can be an exercise in cross-cultural communication-and it can involve miscommunication. When we read texts belonging to other epochs, lands, peoples, and traditions, we need to know something about the ''cultural scripts''... more
Reading stories can be an exercise in cross-cultural communication-and it can involve miscommunication. When we read texts belonging to other epochs, lands, peoples, and traditions, we need to know something about the ''cultural scripts'' which shaped the ways of thinking and the ways of speaking reflected in those texts. If these cultural scripts are to be made intelligible to us they must be explained in terms that the culture alien to us shares with our own. The set of simple and universal human concepts which has been discovered in recent decades through empirical linguistic investigations (cf. e.g. Wierzbicka 1996c; Goddard 1998; Goddard and Wierzbicka eds. 1994 and 2002), can play a useful role in this regard, as a kind of a universal conceptual lingua franca or a universal ‘‘cultural notation’’ (Hall 1976), which can help to minimize miscommunication and build cross-cultural bridges between readers and writers. As Bakhtin (1979: 257) put it, in speaking ‘‘we ‘pour’ our speech into ready-made forms of speech genres (. . .) These forms are given to us in the same way in which our native language is given’’. Accordingly, to understand ways of speaking which belong to a culture alien to us we must learn to ‘‘hear’’ them in their proper cultural context and with some knowledge of this culture’s ready-made speech forms; in other words, we must try to understand the underlying cultural scripts. Mainstream Anglo culture, with its cherished traditions of rationality and empiricism, and with its emphasis on science and scientific discourse, values consistency, accuracy, logical formulations, absence of contradictions (on any level), absence of exaggeration, dispassionate reasoning, and so on. As I have discussed in my book What Did Jesus Mean? (2001), these are not the values of the culture of Hosea, or the culture of Jesus, just as they are not the values of the culture reflected in the stories of Sholom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer. For the modern Anglo reader of the Bible, a cross-cultural commentary is not an optional extra, but a necessity. The cultural script model can be an effective tool for the purposes of cross-cultural understanding—in personal interaction, social life, business, politics, literature, and also in religion. In particular, it can be an effective tool for the interpretation of the Bible—as literature and as (for the believers) the Word of God.
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Wierzbicka, Anna (2018). I know: A human universal. In Stephen Stich, Masaharu Mizumoto, & Eric McCready (Eds.), Epistemology for the rest of the world (pp. 215-250). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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La sémantique vise essentiellement à décrire et à mettre en rapport les significations. Toute langue constitue un système de significations moulées dans les mots et les constructions grammaticales. Comprendre ces significations est... more
La sémantique vise essentiellement à décrire et à mettre en rapport les significations. Toute langue constitue un système de significations moulées dans les mots et les constructions grammaticales. Comprendre ces significations est d'une importance fondamentale pour ...
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ABSTRACTEvery language has its own key words, which reflect the core values of the culture. Consequently, cultures can be revealingly studied, compared, and explained to outsiders through their key words. But to be able to study, compare,... more
ABSTRACTEvery language has its own key words, which reflect the core values of the culture. Consequently, cultures can be revealingly studied, compared, and explained to outsiders through their key words. But to be able to study, compare, and explain cultures in terms of their key words, we need a culture-independent analytical framework. A framework of this kind is provided by the natural semantic metalanguage developed by the author and colleagues over the last two decades. In the present article, the author explores and analyzes six Japanese concepts widely regarded as being almost more that any others culture-specific and culturally revealing – amae, enryo, wa, on, giri, and seishin – and shows how the use of the natural semantic metalanguage (based on universal semantic primitives) helps to make these concepts clear and how it facilitates better insight into Japanese culture and society (Japanese language, Japanese culture, cross-cultural semantics, key words, core values)
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Response to comments by Fabrega, Fernandez, and Hinton.
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The semantics of grammar presents a radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology. It offers a methodology which makes it possible to demonstrate, on an empirical basis, that syntax is neither autonomous nor arbitrary, but... more
The semantics of grammar presents a radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology. It offers a methodology which makes it possible to demonstrate, on an empirical basis, that syntax is neither autonomous nor arbitrary, but that it follows from ...
Can animals think? How does the cognition of humans differ from that of (other) primates and how does the cognition of primates differ from that of other animals?This paper argues that to explore questions of this kind fruitfully we need... more
Can animals think? How does the cognition of humans differ from that of (other) primates and how does the cognition of primates differ from that of other animals?This paper argues that to explore questions of this kind fruitfully we need a unified conceptual framework within which the cognition of humans and animals could be jointly considered and compared in clear and precise terms. The paper draws attention to the conceptual issues involved in current socio-biological debates and shows that these debates can be clarified by the use of the “natural semantic metalanguage” (“NSM”) developed by the author and colleagues for the investigation and description of meaning.The central idea of the “NSM” theory of language and thought, supported by extensive empirical investigations by a number of researchers, is that despite their enormous diversity, all natural languages share a common core: a small vocabulary of 60 or so “conceptual primes” and a “universal grammar” (the combinatory prope...
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Anthropologists and linguists have long been aware that the body is explicitly referred to in conventional description of emotion in languages around the world. There is abundant linguistic data showing expression of emotions in terms of... more
Anthropologists and linguists have long been aware that the body is explicitly referred to in conventional description of emotion in languages around the world. There is abundant linguistic data showing expression of emotions in terms of their imagined ‘locus’ in the physical body. The most important methodological issue in the study of emotions is language, for the ways people talk give us access to ‘folk descriptions’ of the emotions. ‘Technical terminology’, whether based on English or otherwise, is not excluded from this ‘folk’ status. It may appear to be safely ‘scientific’ and thus culturally neutral, but in fact it is not: technical English is a variety of English and reflects, to some extent, culture-specific ways of thinking (and categorising) associated with the English language. People — as researchers studying other people, or as people in real-life social association — cannot directly access the emotional experience of others, and language is the usual mode of ‘packagin...
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ABSTRACTThis paper attempts to demonstrate direct links between Australian language and other aspects of Australian culture. The existence of such links – intuitively obvious and yet notoriously hard to prove – is often rejected in the... more
ABSTRACTThis paper attempts to demonstrate direct links between Australian language and other aspects of Australian culture. The existence of such links – intuitively obvious and yet notoriously hard to prove – is often rejected in the name of scientific rigor (“if they can't be proved then it is better either to assume that they don't exist or at least not to talk about them”). Nonetheless, the problem continues to exercise fascination over scholars, as it does over the general public. The author proposes ways in which the linguist's methodological tools can be sharpened so that the apparently untractable and yet fundamental issues of “language as a guide to social reality” can be studied in ways which are both linguistically precise and culturally revealing. Linguistic phenomena such as expressive derivation, illocutionary devices, and speech act verbs are related to the literature on the Australian society, “national character,” history, and culture. (Ethnolinguistics...
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ABSTRACTThis paper discusses a number of speech acts and speech genres from English, Polish, and Japanese, approaching them through the words which name them. It is claimed that folk names of speech acts and speech genres are... more
ABSTRACTThis paper discusses a number of speech acts and speech genres from English, Polish, and Japanese, approaching them through the words which name them. It is claimed that folk names of speech acts and speech genres are culture-specific and provide an important source of insight into communicative routines most characteristic of a given society; and that to fully exploit this source one must carry Out a rigorous semantic analysis of such names and express the results of this analysis in a culture-independent semantic metalanguage. The author proposes such a metalanguage and illustrates her approach with numerous detailed semantic analyses. She suggests that analyses of speech acts and speech genres carried out in terms of English folk labels are ethnocentric and unsuitable for crosscultural comparison. She tries to show how folk labels of speech acts and speech genres characteristic of a given language reflect salient features of the culture associated with that language, and ...
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Research Interests: Archaeology, Anthropology, Perception, Semantics, Theory, and 6 moreLanguage, Colour, Universality, Thought, Expression, and Concept
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This paper discusses a number of differences between English and Polish in the area of speech acts, and links them with different cultural norms and cultural assumptions. It is shown that English, as compared with Polish, places heavy... more
This paper discusses a number of differences between English and Polish in the area of speech acts, and links them with different cultural norms and cultural assumptions. It is shown that English, as compared with Polish, places heavy restrictions on the use of the imperative ...
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This paper argues that interjections like any other linguistic elements have their meaning, and that this meaning can be identified and captured in the natural semantic metalanguage developed by the author and her colleagues. A number... more
This paper argues that interjections like any other linguistic elements have their meaning, and that this meaning can be identified and captured in the natural semantic metalanguage developed by the author and her colleagues. A number of interjections from English, ...
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Research Interests: Anthropology and Ethos
Research Interests: Anthropology and Ethos
Research Interests: Anthropology and Ethos
Research Interests: Anthropology and Ethos
... ARTICLE 225 Right and wrong: from philosophy to everyday discourse ANNA WIERZBICKA AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, CANBERRA Discourse Studies Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications. (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 4(2):... more
... ARTICLE 225 Right and wrong: from philosophy to everyday discourse ANNA WIERZBICKA AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, CANBERRA Discourse Studies Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications. (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 4(2): 225–252. ...
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... For example, in their abstract presented at the 'pre-conference' entitled A Dialogue on Dialogue of the 2005 ICA Conference mentioned above, two prominent scholars and the authors of a book entitled The Martin... more
... For example, in their abstract presented at the 'pre-conference' entitled A Dialogue on Dialogue of the 2005 ICA Conference mentioned above, two prominent scholars and the authors of a book entitled The Martin BuberCarl Rogers Dialogue: A New Transcript with ...
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242 DISCOURSE & SOCIETY 9(2) 1. INTRODUCING CULTURAL SCRIPTS This paper is based on a set of assumptions which can be formulated as follows (Wierzbicka, 1991): (1) In different societies and different com-munities, people speak... more
242 DISCOURSE & SOCIETY 9(2) 1. INTRODUCING CULTURAL SCRIPTS This paper is based on a set of assumptions which can be formulated as follows (Wierzbicka, 1991): (1) In different societies and different com-munities, people speak differently, and not just in terms of ...
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Culture and Emotions Abstract This paper addresses some basic conceptual issues which, as the author argues, must be clarified before the real controversies about the nature and universality of emotions and their expression can be clearly... more
Culture and Emotions Abstract This paper addresses some basic conceptual issues which, as the author argues, must be clarified before the real controversies about the nature and universality of emotions and their expression can be clearly stated. To begin with, it argues that ...
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This paper argues that few words have caused so many misunderstandings and have done so much harm as the English word “hell”. Jesus’ teaching was focussed on “the kingdom of God” — a phrase which occurs in the New Testament 120 time (with... more
This paper argues that few words have caused so many misunderstandings and have done so much harm as the English word “hell”. Jesus’ teaching was focussed on “the kingdom of God” — a phrase which occurs in the New Testament 120 time (with the variant “the kingdom of heaven”). The word “Gehenna” — a symbol of the possibility of excluding oneself from that kingdom — occurs only 12 times. A word like “hell”, with its current English sense, does not occur in the New Testament at all.
Building on many years of research in cross-cultural semantics and pragmatics, the paper seeks to grasp what Jesus meant by “the kingdom of God” and “Gehenna”. It articulates this by means of very simple words which, as linguistic evidence shows, have counterparts in all languages of the world and which often allow a more fine-grained conceptual analysis than complex or technical concepts of theology.
The use of this approach for re-thinking Christian faith, pioneered in the author’s books What Did Jesus Mean? (OUP 2001) and What Christians Believe: The Story of God and People in Minimal English (OUP 2019) allows her to achieve a clarity and transparency in her presentation of Jesus’ teaching which cannot be attained through more complex and English-specific words typically used in this field (Cf. Durie 2021; Bauerlein 2021).
The paper also builds on the author’s earlier work on “Jewish Cultural Scripts and the Interpretation of the Bible” (2004), which identifies the widespread lack of cross-cultural awareness in modern Anglophone writings on Christianity as a major source of misunderstandings around Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God.
Building on many years of research in cross-cultural semantics and pragmatics, the paper seeks to grasp what Jesus meant by “the kingdom of God” and “Gehenna”. It articulates this by means of very simple words which, as linguistic evidence shows, have counterparts in all languages of the world and which often allow a more fine-grained conceptual analysis than complex or technical concepts of theology.
The use of this approach for re-thinking Christian faith, pioneered in the author’s books What Did Jesus Mean? (OUP 2001) and What Christians Believe: The Story of God and People in Minimal English (OUP 2019) allows her to achieve a clarity and transparency in her presentation of Jesus’ teaching which cannot be attained through more complex and English-specific words typically used in this field (Cf. Durie 2021; Bauerlein 2021).
The paper also builds on the author’s earlier work on “Jewish Cultural Scripts and the Interpretation of the Bible” (2004), which identifies the widespread lack of cross-cultural awareness in modern Anglophone writings on Christianity as a major source of misunderstandings around Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God.
