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根据下列材料,请回答题Culture is the sum total of all the traditions, customs, beliefs, and ways of life of a given group of humanbeings. In this sense, every group has a culture, however savage, undeveloped, or uncivilized it may seem to us.To the professional anthropologist (人类学家), there is no intrinsic superiority of one culture over another, just as to the professional linguist there is no intrinsic hierarchy (等级制度) among languages.
People once thought of the languages of backward groups as savage undeveloped forms of speech, consistinglargely of grunts and groans. While it is possible that language in general began as a series of grunts and groans, it is afact established by the study of "backward" languages that no spoken tongue answers that description today. Mostlanguages of uncivilized groups are, by our most severe standards, extremely complex, delicate, and ingenious piecesof machinery for the transfer of ideas. They fall behind our Western languages not in their sound patterns orgrammatical structures, which usually are fully adequate for all language needs, but only in their vocabularies, whichreflect the objects and activities known to their speakers. Even in this department, however, two things are to benoted:
All languages seem to possess the machinery for vocabulary expansion, either by putting together wordsalready in existence or by borrowing them from other languages and adapting them to their own system.
Theobjects and activities requiring names and distinctions in "backward" languages, while different from ours, are often surprisingly numerous and complicated, A Western language distinguishes merely between two degrees ofremoteness ("this"and "that"); some languages of the American Indians distinguish between what is close to thespeaker, or to the person addressed, or removed from both, or out of sight, or in the past, or in the future.
This study of language, in turn, casts a new light upon the claim of the anthropologists that all cultures are to be viewed independently, and without ideas of rank or hierarchy.
According to the author, one culture or language has no________
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