Date: Sat, 07 Nov 1998 11:34:10 +0100
From: Stefano Moretti <S.Moretti@agora.stm.it>
To: baidarka@lists.intelenet.net
Subject: baidarka vocabulary and techniques
Gene Smith wrote:
Another interesting
> point is that we have a quite developed language for talking about all this
> "engineering" sort of stuff, and yet quite incredible things were done by
> people without this very verbal approach, and with a vocabulary that we
> would find totally inadequate to express these levels of sophistication that
> they obviously very successfully dealt with.
You may be wrong on thois point Gene.. I just read an article where it
was said that Inuit had more than 20 words for snow (melting snow, hard
surface, thick, crushy etc).
They also had to choose the right type in order to build igloos that
were permeable to air.
I am no expert in linguistics, but many cultures around the world have a
similar mythology of things that were all together and with no
distinction and then were separated "baptizing" them with names.
Any body has read the "songlines" from B.Chatwin ?? Places and objects
were created by semi-god ancestors while walking and they took life and
were preserved as bits of oral tradition that were exchanged through
"walkabouts", just as if they were bits of genetic information in cross
mating.
I'm pretty sure that the "primitives" had words to describe the
complexity of their world.
The true primitives are probably today the urban settlers deprived of
words, thus incapacitated to describe the world around them.
Try asking the average teen ager what he sees while looking at an
object: very few attributes indeed. Then go take a look at some
traditional fcrafts museum, and find out how many names of things had to
be retained in order to describe objects, their use, maintenance,
origin, and processes to build/produce.
The urban tribe is really poor as it lacks words to describe the world.
In some cases it has a jargon - a vocabulary restricted to a certain
group of people or interest, just like us baidarkites.
Mr Brinck in his preface writes that he had to use words in english that
were missing to describe baidarka construction. Do you thing the aleuts
lacked those words ??
Stefano, missing english and mostly italian words to describe baidarkas,
not to say about my audience when I tell a few of my tales...
>
> Gene Smith