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cientifically valid knowledge. Emic knowledge is essential for an intuitive and empathic understanding of a culture, and it is essential for conducting effective ethnographic fieldwork. Furthermore, emic knowledge is often a valuable source of inspiration for etic hypotheses. Etic knowledge, on the other hand, is essential for cross-cultural comparison, the sine qua non of ethnology, because such comparison necessarily demands standard unit and categories.

 

Language are sets of words tied by rules, and learning a foreign language or second language is the simple but tiresome process of replacing words and rules to get the similar meaning with a different tool. Language is a “system of representation” for perception and thinking and it also serve as a tool for communication. Language also provides us with verbal categories and prototypes that guide our formation of concepts and categorization of objects. Not only that, language directs the way we experience reality. The most critical component of language is the linguistic structure. For example, Japanese and Trukese(a Micronesian language) have many different counting systems while American English has only one way to count things(one, two, three,etc).In Trukese, one(long) thing is counted with different words from one(flat) thing or one(round) thing in Trukese. In general, experience of objects is much richer in cultures where language gives meaning to subtle differences in shape. Appreciation of objects among Japanese is more developed when compared with of Americans whereby the English language has relatively simple linguistic structures to represent shapes. Another critical component of language is the grammatical representation of space.

In American English, things can be either “here” or “there,” with a colloquial attempt to place them further out “over there.” In the Trukese language, references to objects and people must be accompanied by a “location marker” that specifies their position relative to both the speaker and listener. A pen, for instance, must be called this (close to me but away from you) pen, this (midway between us) pen, that (far away from both of us but in sight) pen, or that (out of sight of both of us) pen. We may assume that Trukese people, who live on islands, experience “richer” space than do Americans, whose language does not provide so many spatial boundary markers and for whom space is therefore more abstract. Language syntax also guides our social experience. The best known example is the “status markers.” Thai, Japanese, and some other Asian languages have elaborate systems of second-person singular (you) words that indicate the status of the speaker relative to the listener. In Thai, there are also variable forms of I to indicate relative status. Thus, I (relatively lower in status) may be speaking to you (somewhat higher in status) or to you (much higher in status), using a different form of I and you in each case. As for American culture, the English provides only one form of you.

European cultures, most of whose languages have two forms of you, indicating both status distinctions and familiarity, may repre本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。