Aesthetic elements in temiar grammar

Abstract

Introduction: Temiar is a Mon-Khmer (Austroasiatic) language of the Central Aslian division, spoken by almost 30,000 people in the interior of northern Peninsular Malaysia (Map 2). Until recently, the Temiars were living in relatively autonomous tribal circumstances. Currently, their lifeways are changing rapidly, involving a shift from their former subsistence-based existence to a cash-based one. For younger Temiars, this has been associated with almost universal primary education, resulting in basic literacy in Malay, the (unrelated) national language, as well as with shifts in their social and religious orientations. The Temiar language, however, is still employed in all domains of daily life except those that require formal literacy, and it therefore remains essentially unwritten. Aesthesis and iconicity in language:People who lack writing necessarily have a different sense of what a language is than do literate people. Roy Harris (1987: 51ff.) relates this difference to what he calls ‘ scriptism ’ – the tyranny of the written word. For non-literate people, a language consists primarily in the sounds and/or oral (articulatory) gestures of speech. Approaches to linguistic analysis that commence by declaring any connection between sounds and meanings to be arbitrary are therefore methodologically questionable. On the contrary, such iconicity should be searched for and, if found, incorporated into the analysis, along with an investigation of its relation to the social circumstances of the language ’ s speakers.