ABSTRACT
It has already been said that languages are not mere collections of labels or nomenclatures attached to preexisting bits and pieces of the human world , but that each speech community lives in a somewhat different world from that of others, and that these differences are both realized in parts of their cultures and revealed and maintained in parts of their languages (1.4.2, 2-4.3). Apart from the fact that anthropological investigations into a culture remote from European influence may well require some command of the language of the community on the part of the investigator, many of the most significant details of a people's way of life are likely to be verbalized in certain key words belonging to different spheres (religion, ethics, kinship, social hierarchy, etc), for which one-word translation equivalents are not readily available, and are certainly unlikely to be known to a speaker merely because he happens to be partially bilingual. Indeed, part of the linguist's task is to translate and explain the uses of such words in the language.
