The Mongush family indulged my naive desire to help out by assigning me simple tasks I could not flub. Under Aylana’s watchful eye, I was given the task of collecting frozen yak manure patties. On my back, I wore a square wicker basket, and I had a special forked stick. Stacking the collected patties into orderly piles about eight feet high, I would bring them into the house in small batches and chuck them into the stove. Yurts heat up fast when manure is burned, then cool quickly due to the large smoke hole in the roof. I fell into a rhythm: two manure patties on the stove translated into ten minutes of heat, so I would seize the moment to remove my gloves, write notes on what I was hearing, and sip tea.
Dung is precious, and so Eres and his family had words for describing it at various stages. Miyak is what plops out steaming onto the ground. After being mashed, dried, flipped, collected, and stacked (special words exist for each of these activities), miyak becomes argazin. To the outsider’s eye, this is exactly the same substance (manure), except dry. But to Tuvans, it has been magically transformed from something unclean, smelly, and belonging outdoors to something sanitary, safe to handle, and good for boiling tea. Each stage in the metamorphosis of shit, from drying to stacking to kindling, is named and well described in the language. As I jotted down the “shizzle lexicon” in my notebook, the flaming manure warmed my fingertips, the smell permeated my clothing, and I felt closer to nature than I had ever wanted to be. The fire flared when someone came in with a gust of air, the yurt chilled again, and my manure routine would begin anew.
Over the following days, my duties expanded, though goat-herding proved far more challenging. I worked hard to perfect the art of strategic stone-throwing needed to keep goats moving compactly in one direction. Tuvans make special sounds to different animals to induce different mental states and make them compliant. In fact, they have an entire psychology of the domesticate mind—a special repertoire of songs sung to camels when they will not nurse their young, to yaks when calving, to sheep when shearing, and so on. Their animal domestication songs, plaintive and tuneful, combine a stylized mimicry of the animal’s own vocalizations with a kind of coded command. Oddly, the animals seem to obey, falling into a kind of trance or pacified state as the song carries on the wind. I was able to learn the songs easily, because they had no meaningful words, only vocables, meaningless syllables that followed a different tune for each animal. For sheep, tot-pa tot-pa tot-pa; for goats, che-che-che-che; for mares, huree-salsal-sal-huree; and for the skittish yaks, hoar-hoar-hoar-hoar (more on this in chapter 8).
Every evening, the Mongush family and I would huddle around the back of the stove for salty tea and pieces of dried mutton. Some days we’d share a baked flatbread. I usually managed to scrounge up a few pieces of candy for the boys, though my gift of a menthol cough drop sent them sputtering and teary-eyed out of the yurt, unused to the pungent flavor.
I already knew that my hosts were reticent and spoke very little, but on the second night, when the grandparents appeared from the neighboring yurt, an animated conversation broke out between them and Aylana. Trouble was, it was entirely in a sign language. Aylana’s mother was Deaf, and the family used a system of what linguists call “home sign”: a repertoire of meaningful gestures that allow a family to carry on a simple conversation. Home sign is an early step on the way to developing a full sign language, but the full form arises only if children learn it as their first language.
They seemed to have a repertoire of several dozen signs, if not more, and these were often combined into longer strings of five or six gestures. Seeking a way to understand, I watched the two boys to see what they signed. Their sign utterances were simple and short: TEA (a bowl shape with both hands), AXE (chopping one flat hand across the opposite wrist), YURT (one palm held flat, facing upward, while the other hand formed a curved cuplike shape upside-down above it), and GO (pointing a finger in one direction). Marat and Murat also made sentences, but the largest ones had just two elements: GO HOME, BRING AXE, GIVE TEA. The children’s simplicity at the sentence level meant that the Tuvan home sign was not yet a full-fledged language.
The mother and daughter had more signs, and they carried on lengthy conversations, seeming to discuss persons, places, and events removed in time and space. Whether they also had signs for abstract concepts—love, uncertainty, forgetfulness—I did not discover. I was never able to crack the code, fixated as I was on learning spoken Tuvan. I did verify later, from Deaf Tuvans, that a native sign language exists, in scattered locations where there are small numbers of Deaf Tuvans. But it is not taught in any school, and Deaf Tuvans are instead schooled in Russian Sign Language. Tuvan sign and home sign are surely among the world’s uncounted and undocumented indigenous sign languages, meriting urgent study. I should point out that many traditional cultures also use hand signs not because of deafness, but to communicate in special circumstances to express things that should not be spoken.
DISCOVERING WORDS
My daily sessions spent huddled by the fire, interspersed with forays outdoors to perform chores, began to yield a small treasure trove of new words in my notebook. The first verb I learned among Tuvan yak herders was “fetch water.” The noun for water is soog, and soog-la is a command, “Fetch water!” Linguists call it a “denominal,” a verb built from a noun, “water,” plus a simple suffix, -la, that says, “Now I’m a verb.” But although -la was an easy suffix to memorize, it turned out to have multiple possible meanings. When attached to shay, the word for tea, it did not mean “Fetch tea,” but rather “Drink tea.” And when attached to hem, meaning “river,” it did not mean to fetch or drink a river, but rather to travel along or across a river. When attached to Moskva, the capital of Russia, it meant to travel via Moscow.
Not only was the -la suffix variable in its meaning, but it also had a chameleon-like quality of constantly changing its pronunciation under the influence of the sounds that surrounded it. This process, called “allomorphy” by linguists, is one of the fundamental mechanisms of grammar we expect to find in all kinds of languages, even English. In Tuvan, verbs look like this:
soog-LA
fetch water
hem-NE
travel along or across a river
moskva-LA
travel via Moscow
is-TE
follow the tracks of an animal
Upon collecting many examples, I found that this chameleon morpheme had a total of eight completely different manifestations: -la, -le, -na, -ne, -ta, -te, -da, and -de. The first consonant changed under the influence of the sound that immediately preceded it. The vowel of the suffix was always a or e, obeying vowel harmony, a topic I will discuss later.
For scientists, these chameleon morphemes present a learn-ability puzzle. Children learning the language are not observed making mistakes about which form to use. They also manage to figure out, with no explicit instruction, that all eight of these variants are in fact the same entity. Other chameleon morphemes in Tuvan, I would learn, have as many as 16 forms. How children master such complexity, while making few or no errors, is one of the unsolved mysteries of linguistics. Rival theories posit different possibilities, yet the brain remains sufficiently mysterious that we do not know how it accomplishes this task at the age of five or six.
Languages are so much more than just words—they are seed-beds for poetry, semantic networks of possibility. But words are the most graspable entities, and the ones we most commonly think of as making up languages. And so I began by collecting words. This process led to many funny misunderstandings along the way. Once I was pointing to a tree but my speaker gave me the word for “finger,” thinking that’s what I wanted. And there’s the famous problem of segmentation: Tuvan, like many languages, does not divide the arm and the hand into separate entities, so I might think I was getting the word for hand, but actually it meant the arm and hand together. Conversely, many languages have finer distinctions than English. For example, they might have a single word that means “left hand” and
another word that means “right hand,” but no word that simply means “hand” (since any given hand is always left or right). Days or weeks later, or even never, the linguist may realize what he had written down in his notebook as simply “hand” meant precisely “left hand.”
At Swarthmore College, I teach a course called “Field Methods,” where we sit down with a speaker of a language that no one in the class, including me, has any knowledge of. The goal is to discover as much as possible of the grammar of the language by asking the right kinds of questions. Though I try to replicate a real field environment, the process is much easier and more efficient in a classroom, with a speaker who knows English. My students and I fill up many pages of notebooks, write examples on the blackboard, and morpheme by morpheme build up a descriptive grammar.
In a real field setting, the challenges are multiplied many times over. No one speaks English, curious neighbors come by to help, dogs bark, chickens cluck, and the whole village gathers around to hear and laugh at the foreigner mispronouncing the language.
Extracting the grammar of a language is like solving a multidimensional jigsaw puzzle, of which some of the pieces may be missing and others you have to carve as you go along. Native speakers of any language can almost never explain why something sounds the way it does or is said the way it is. They rely on what we call intuition, or “grammaticality judgment.” They just know what sounds right and what doesn’t, without knowing why. Grammar is what cognitive scientists call tacit knowledge: you know it, but you don’t know that you know it and you can’t really articulate it. The kinds of so-called English grammar rules we are taught in school (“Never end a sentence with a preposition”) are, quite simply, boring and not to be put up with. (The preceding sentence ending with a preposition is fully grammatical.) Such dicta are not grammar, the stuff of deeper thought, but merely style, the artifice of writing.
So how do you plumb the depths of a speaker’s mind to retrieve the grammar of Tuvan, Igbo, Inuit, or Sora? And once you’ve “discovered” the grammar, what use is it to anyone?
In the field, we often start with body parts: ear, eye, nose, hand (oops, right hand). Things you can easily point to. But when you are living in a village, in a local environment, it very quickly becomes apparent why you can never figure out the whole grammar sitting in a classroom. Grammars are diffuse: they grow in gardens, flow along rivers, and float on air. One of the most fascinating sentences I ever collected in the nearly extinct Chulym language was “Worms have eaten our cabbage.” Though it was an entirely novel sentence, I understood it immediately. “Worms” was a totally new word to me, “eaten” was familiar, and “cabbage” was recognizable as a loanword from Russian. Never in a hundred hours of classroom work would I have asked for or heard such a sentence. It emerged spontaneously during a walk through the vegetable patch with last speaker Anna Baydasheva, as she thrust a worm-eaten cabbage under my nose for inspection.
Living with the Mongush family in Tuva, I collected such wonderful (and unasked-for) sentences as “The yaks pooped a lot yesterday—go and collect it,” or “The crooked-horned yak is licking salt.” In rural villages where I conduct much of my fieldwork, I always enjoy doing a photo-shoot walk. I may take a hundred images of local objects—cat, broom, canoe, locust, pebble—and play these on my laptop as a slide show. Each image elicits names for local, culturally relevant objects, as well as the stories behind them. A round pebble I picked up in the forest was not merely a pebble but an omen of good luck from the local spirits. A tiny purple flower was the sign for the sixth lunar month. Two-day-old dried yak poop had a different name than fresh poop.
I began to think of language as existing not only in the head, or perhaps not entirely in the heads of speakers, but in local landscapes, objects, and lifeways. Languages animate objects by giving them names, making them noticeable when we might not otherwise be aware of them. Tuvan has a word iy (pronounced like the letter e), which indicates the short side of a hill. I had never noticed that hills had a short side. But once I learned the word, I began to study the contours of hills, trying to identify the iy. It turns out that hills are asymmetrical, never perfectly conical, and indeed one of their sides tends to be steeper and shorter than the others. If you are riding a horse, carrying firewood, or herding goats on foot, this is a highly salient concept. You never want to mount a hill from the iy side, as it takes more energy to ascend, and an iy descent is more treacherous, as well. Once you know about the iy, you see it in every hill and identify it automatically, directing your horse, sheep, or footsteps accordingly. This is a perfect example of how language adapts to local environment, by packaging knowledge into ecologically relevant bits. Once you know that there is an iy, you don’t really have to be told to notice it or to avoid it. You just do. The language has taught you useful information in a covert fashion, without explicit instruction.
Fieldwork is a constant string of “Oh my gosh, they actually have a word for that” moments. Standing on a high ridge in the Altai Mountains, my host Eres pointed down to the valley below, in which I could see numerous perfectly round circles etched into the brown landscape. UFO landings? Crop circles? No, these brown, round depressions, called honash, are the footprints of yurts that had been moved when families migrated. They may remain for several seasons or even years. Tuvans feel a great sentiment toward them, even extolling them in song. If they return to the same campsite, they never construct the yurt directly on an old honash, but impress a new one beside it.
So, language’s proliferation doesn’t stop with just having a word for something. Once in the lexicon, the “mental dictionary,” a named concept takes on a life of its own. It contributes to organizing thought and perception. We have no idea how deep this effect goes. If it goes deeper than we suspect, these unique words would render perfect communication among different languages impossible. Each language would remain a singularity of conceptual possibilities. At present, we have no idea how deeply (or shallowly) language may influence thought and perception. But we never will know if we allow most of the world’s small tongues to pass into oblivion before they can be studied in their natural habitats.
HOW TO SAY “GO” IN TUVAN
One of the crucial parts of speech to learn in a language, after basic nouns, is a set of common verbs. I thought nothing could be simpler. I had learned to say “water” and “fetch water,” since I spent part of every day fetching water. But I also wanted to learn to say simply “go.” Yet every time I moved, pantomimed, or pointed to indicate “go,” I seemed to elicit a different word. It turned out that learning to say “go” in Tuvan is much more complex than I’d imagined. It requires not only an internal compass but also an acute awareness of the local landscape, even parts of it that may not be visible.
How does one acquire landscape awareness? Nomads are connoisseurs of geographic gossip, which they pass on in casual conversation, songs, stories, and their choice of “go” verbs. They talk frequently about where they have been, where the yaks are roaming, and where the neighbors are. I was amazed to find that my hosts always seemed to know the exact locations of migrating friends and relatives many miles distant.
With tools no more advanced than horses, binoculars, and gossip, the nomads in the community where I stayed managed to keep track of dozens of families, herd movements, and migration schedules. People would answer me with absolute confidence anytime I inquired as to the location or migration date of almost any member of the community. By daily observations through binoculars, talking about landscapes, and distributing bits of knowledge across domains (religious, aesthetic, acoustic), they kept track of a complex and dynamic system of multiple moving parts.
A young Tuvan in his familiar landscape, western Mongolia.
Tuvans live in a land where level spaces are unusual. Nearly every patch of ground slopes in one direction or another. This provides a framework for orientation—the directions of watersheds and river currents. Though Tuvan does have a general word for go, it
is less often used. Most of the time, Tuvans use, as appropriate, verbs meaning “go upstream” (còkta), “go downstream” (bàt), or “go cross-stream” (kes). You’d rarely hear, “I’m going to Mugur-Aksy” (the nearest town to the Mongush family camp), but rather, “I’m upstreaming [or downstreaming] to Mugur-Aksy.” Being a visitor rather than a lifelong resident, I was clueless as to what rivers were nearby and in which directions they flowed, so I could never confidently select the correct “go” verb. The Mongushes, on the other hand, could not explain to me the invisible orientation framework that was all around them and underfoot. No one ever said to me, “To say ‘go,’ you must locate the nearest river, ascertain its direction of flow, then locate your path relative to the current.” They simply knew all this information without knowing that they did.
River-based systems are strictly local, leading to confusion. In one village, I got completely conflicting directions from two local ladies. One said (pointing due west), “Go upstream a bit more.” Farther along, another lady pointed west again, but told me to go downstream. I realized later that each was referring to a different river as her point of orientation. The Yenisei River, located several miles north of the village over a mountain ridge, was well known to all and served as a general axis of orientation. A much smaller stream, the Khüüls, flowed eastward just south of the village, and could also be used, depending on which way the speaker was facing. My ignorance lay in not knowing the local river systems and (even if I had known them) failing to pick up subtle cues about which river system was being referenced.
The Last Speakers Page 4