Language and cultural scripts

Cultural scripts are representations of cultural norms which are widely held in a given society and are reflected in language. To be faithful to the ‘insider perspective’ and at the same time intelligible to the outsider, these representations are formulated in simple words and phrases which are cross-translatable between English (the main lingua franca of the globalizing world) and any other natural language. Such a mode of representation depends on the outcomes of the decade-long cross-linguistic semantic research conducted within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage programme (see Chapter 5 this volume). As discussed inChapter 5, theNatural SemanticMetalanguage (NSM) is believed to correspond to the ‘intersection of all languages’. As illustrated in the present chapter, cultural scripts articulate cultural norms, values, and practices using this metalanguage as a medium of description and interpretation. For a selection of NSM-based publications on cultural scripts, see, for example, Ameka (2006), Gladkova (2014a), Goddard (2010), Hasada (2006), Nicholls (2014), Peeters (2013), Priestley (2014), Travis (2006), Wong (2006), Ye (2006) and Yoon (2004). See also Goddard (2006), Wierzbicka (2006), Goddard and Wierzbicka (2004), and Levisen (2012). (For a broader perspective on the theme of this chapter, including a discussion of the historical perspectives, critical issues, and future directions, see Chapter 5 this volume.) The eminent Oxford historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin was an Englishman, a Russian, and a Jew. He was born in pre-revolutionary Riga (1909), moved with his family to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1916, and thence to London in 1921. For most of his life, Oxford was his geographical and intellectual home, but culturally and emotionally he lived in three worlds - and in two languages. He was a close friend of the Russian-born Jewish scientist and Zionist Chaim Weizmann (who became in 1949 the first President of the State of Israel), and of Weizmann’s Russian-born wife Vera. For many years Berlin kept up an intimate epistolary correspondence with the Weizmanns. As a recent book about Berlin (Dubnov 2012) puts it, in these conversations ‘Russian proved to be a powerful interpersonal glue’. Here is an extract from Berlin’s own testimony: [It] is our Russian conversations which I adore & look forward to & think about and remember the longest. .. I can never talk so. .. to anybody in England. .. Russian to me is more imaginative, intimate and poetical than any other [language] - & I feel a curious transformation of personality when I speak it - as if everything becomes easier to express, & the world brighter and more charming in every way.