There is no definitive format or formula besides the maximum number of words except for the recommendation (which I’m adding now) not to write an “essay”. Think of your assignment as a short answer/report about the points made by Boas, Malinowski, and Whorf that could be used to argue that there are no primitive languages. It could be in the form of a conversation you are having with a friend when you say, “you know that there are no primitive languages?” and your friend says, “How do you know that?” and you say, “because I have been reading these (apparently famous) authors and what they say/show/ imply is that …”
If you have done the readings, listened to my lectures, and reviewed the pdf’s of the PowerPoint slides, you should be able to write down your answer without consulting the readings. It will just pour out of you, flow, like a river of ideas, words, and clever observations. After you have done that (and only after that), you could go and check the readings to make sure that you remember correctly (and, for instance, you are not attributing something to one author and in fact it was written by another one). You might even show off and insert the page number of where a given point was made (that’s extra, by the way, to show your progress in your anthropological socialization). If you haven’t done the readings, well, then all kinds of thoughts are going to come to your mind to distract you from the task and you are going to promise yourself, “I will never again wait till the last moment to do the readings!” It’s a funny speech act to promise yourself because you are the only one who can check on yourself and if yourself was the problem, well, then yourself could do it again. So you better monitory yourself yourself.
Answer the following question:
Which of the observations, generalizations, or hypothesis made by Boas, Malinowski, and Whorf can you use to support the claim that there are no “primitive” languages? (Make sure to cover all three authors in your answer and be as specific as possible – but do not fill out your answer with lengthy quotes from the readings, see below about number of words).
Hints: The exercise is to look through (or go back to) the readings and find statements that can be used to show that a particular author presupposed, discovered, or tried to demonstrate that “there are no primitive languages.” The difficulty is that the point about the absence of primitive languages (or the statement that the language being investigated should not be thought of as “primitive”) might have been made in explicit or implicit ways. For example, it might be entailed by the way in which an author made comparison between the language of the “primitive” and the language of the “civilized.” An author might have speculated about whether there was something fundamentally different in the ways in which the “natives” spoke as opposed to the way “civilized” (read “European” or “North American”) speakers used language. You can answer this question by focusing on the highlighted portions of the chapters as well as my PowerPoint slides, and my recorded lectures. You might also want to consider whether one or more of these authors explicitly or implicitly reversed the terms of the comparison and showed or hinted at the fact that the “primitive” languages were more “complex” than the languages of the so-called “civilized” (spelled “civilized”) people.