Papers by Anna Wierzbicka
Journal of the History of Ideas, 1976
International Affairs, 2017
This thesis attempts to describe the main areas and the main ways in which population trends affe... more This thesis attempts to describe the main areas and the main ways in which population trends affect politics in the USSR, Poland and Yugoslavia. Discussion is concentrated on the domestic rather than the international aspects of the problems involved, and special attention is devoted to the fields of ethnic relations and populat ion policy-making. While a loosely comparative framework has been adopted, each of the three main countries is treated as an individual case study. Special endeavours have been made to avoid the repetition and the lack of regional colour and authenticity that comparative studies are sometimes apt to fall into. While considerations of space have prevented extending the analysis to the remaining countries of Socialist Europe, comparative references to them are frequent; and the general chapters 2 & 6 are partly devoted to them. In this way, it is hoped that some of the contrasts and similarities between the three main countries in the study and the other countries in the area will be brought out. A rather fuller statement of the problems tackled in the thesis can be found in the Introduction. 5. 2 approach not adopted is overwhelming. Commentators from the socialist countries themselves naturally are at pains to avoid direct discussion of the politics of population issues. Many Western observers for whatever reasons, tend to pursue the same course. Hence a politics-rather than policy-oriented approach seems opportune. Broadly speaking, from the vantage-point just outlined, the points of intersection between population and politics in Socialist Europe can be schematized as follows: 2 See, e.g., Henry P.
Population and Development Review, 1982
Minimal English for a Global World, 2018
Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2018
In a book entitled The Sermon on the Mount: The modern Quest for its meaning, theologian Clarence... 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.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2019
David Chalmers appears to assume that we can meaningfully discuss what goes on in human heads wit... 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.
Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2020
All European languages have a word for God, and this word means exactly the same in all of them. ... 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.
Journal of Pragmatics, 2004
Reading stories can be an exercise in cross-cultural communication-and it can involve miscommunic... 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.
Epistemology for the rest of the world , 2018
Wierzbicka, Anna (2018). I know: A human universal. In Stephen Stich, Masaharu Mizumoto, & Eric M... more 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.
Typological Studies in Language, 2009
Emotions across Languages and Cultures, 1999
Langages, 1988
La sémantique vise essentiellement à décrire et à mettre en rapport les significations. Toute lan... 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 ...
Language in Society, 1991
ABSTRACTEvery language has its own key words, which reflect the core values of the culture. Conse... 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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Papers by Anna Wierzbicka
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.