by Laurenc Devita

Created on: December 06, 2008

The question, "which came first, language or culture" assumes there is a meaningful division between culture and language, and there is not such a clear division. Likewise, there is not such a nice distinction between "communication" and "language".

Sometimes it is useful to break things up to understand them, but when we define "culture" and "language" in a way that makes them seem like separate things, we exclude most of what we really want to know about, which is how they work in our lives. Instead, let's ask, "what is the relationship between language and culture", though of course it is difficult to "debate" this question.

By "language" we mean "symbols that imply*". For example, we could argue that a picture of a chair is not language, but a pictograph meaning "chair" is, even if it might look a little like a chair looks. Words are symbols in any form, but Wittgenstein, later in his life, said essentially "the meaning of a word is in the way people use it." In other words, "cool" can have many meanings, depending on context. By "context" we mean "culture"! Is there a "language of roses"? There is, in that a gift of a red rose implies something different from a yellow rose, depending on the circumstances, all of which are determined by culture.

By "culture" we literally mean how people live. More broadly, culture refers to the acts of a being which are not directly innate. More simply "what people and animals learn from their kind". If we look for the simplest examples of culture, we go to less vocal animals like crows or monkeys. These animals learn tricks from each other. So, for example, it is pretty much innate for a crow to peck at something, but less innate for a crow to bring a clam from a beach to a busy intersection, drop it, wait on the stop light for a car to run over the clam, then yummy it down. It is a simple but important kind of technology the crow uses, and when mama crow teaches her babies and they teach theirs, and if crows from out of town don't know how to do it, you have a very simple culture.

However, crows also "talk". By "talk" we mean communicate with words, "a symbol that implies", and they might well differ from group to group of crows. What do the crow sounds mean? They mean what they mean in use, according to Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein said something else that is important to the discussion of culture and language: "If a lion could speak, it could tell you nothing about being a lion*." There are many interpretations of this quotation,

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