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  3. Since culture is defined briefly as "the totality of beliefs and practices of a society," nothing is of greater strategic import

Since culture is defined briefly as "the totality of beliefs and practices of a society," nothing is of greater strategic import

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问题     Since culture is defined briefly as "the totality of beliefs and practices of a society," nothing is of greater strategic importance than the language through which its beliefs are expressed and transmitted and by which most interaction of its members takes place.
    【T1】The relation between language and culture would not constitute such serious difficulties for cross-cultural understanding if it were not for the numerous misconceptions about language and its function within a society. Perhaps the most serious misconception is the idea that each language more or less controls the way people think, sometimes expressed as "We think the way we think because we talk the way we talk." 【T2】It is true that the particular structures of a language may reflect to a certain degree the way people think and they may be said to form "the paths for thinking," but they do not determine what or how people must think. Languages are too open-ended and human imagination is too creative to ever be rigidly ruled by the regulations of any feature of language.
    Some people have thought that each language is so distinct that there is no valid way in which the discourses of one language can be translated into another. But at least ninety percent of the fundamental structures of all languages are quite similar, and language universals far outweigh the distinctions. All languages employ figurative expressions and have a great number of literary forms. 【T3】One language-culture may emphasize the development and use of particular genres, e.g. epic poetry or animal folktales, which another language-culture may seldom employ and may even strongly reject. But the people of any language-culture have sufficient imagination and experience to understand how the people of another language-culture may rightly differ in their behavior and values, since the behavioral differences within a single culture are usually greater than those which exist between cultures.
    【T4】The idea that some languages are far superior to other languages and that accordingly some cultures are far superior to other cultures is also a noted obstacle to understanding the relation between language and culture. When people speak about language superiority, they are usually talking about the literature which has been produced in such a language by creative writers. The oral and written literatures of different languages can differ considerably in quality, 【T5】but this is not the result of the formal structures of the language in question but of the ways in which the people of the society have invested creative talent in using the language as a medium for the production of valuable literary works. All languages have the potential for outstanding aesthetic expression. It is simply one of the "accidents" of history which determines the emergence of literary genius.
【T2】
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答案确实，一种语言的特定结构可能在一定程度上反映了人们的思维方式，也可以说形成了“思维的路径”，但它们并不能决定人们在思考时必然涉及的内容和必然采取的方式。
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