But although languages certainly contain abstract structures, they evolve and exist to convey information, and that function permeates and influences every level of language. To its critics, including this author, the Chomskyan program has been unduly narrow, overly focused on large global languages, and preoccupied with structure at the expense of content. Linguists’ preoccupation with these abstract structures (collectively termed “grammar”) has led to a microscopic approach that treats languages like laboratory specimens, utterly divorced from their natural environments, the people who speak them, and the content of those people’s thoughts. Like the Tuvan ways of saying “go,” the internal grammar requires explicit reference to the external world, and dynamically adapts to it. These words arise in the context of rich feedback loops and interactions among themselves, with other brains, and with the external environment.
What’s missing in the Chomskyan view of language as a mechanism in the individual brain is the distributed, social nature of language. If only one speaker of a language remains, that language essentially does not exist, because it is missing the fundamental condition: conversation. Grammar is a distributed system of knowledge. Nobody’s brain can hold all of English, or Chamacoco, or any other tongue. Language spills out into the world, residing in multiple brains, embedding itself in the local environment, shaped by cultural values and beliefs. It takes on its own mysterious trajectory of change with no one leading it. Such complexities can be thought of as products of emergence, like insect swarming patterns, fireflies flashing in unison, or geese flying in a V-formation, where no rule or leader coordinates the activity, yet a distinct pattern emerges, unplanned. When looking at migrating geese, we may immediately notice the V-formation, since the geese are few in number. But languages are made up of many thousands (in fact an infinite number) of possible forms. Ideally what we would need to collect is every utterance out of the mouth of every speaker, in order to appreciate the full range of possibilities. Of course, that is not possible, but as responsible scientists, we must at least make an effort to encounter as many speakers as possible and to hear as much as they will tell us. That sense of constant discovery is what makes the task of mapping the world’s linguistic diversity so exciting. Never knowing what I might hear next keeps pulling me to some of the most remote places on Earth.
MONGOLIA’S HIDDEN PEOPLE
I arrived in Mongolia in the summer of 2000 with high hopes. I was participating in a National Geographic–sponsored expedition led by musicologist Ted Levin, and as our expedition moved farther west from Ulaanbaatar, we left the Mongolian-language area of dominance and approached places where some of Mongolia’s tiny and endangered minority languages were spoken. I looked eagerly for small signs of cultural difference: the style of the cloth coverings on the yurts, the brands on horses’ flanks. Ted had invited me along on the expedition because I would be able to communicate with one of the smallest minority peoples we expected to encounter—in their own language.
After five or six days of driving along the dusty tracks in Land Rovers, at last we reached what was reported to be the territory of the Monchak people, a tiny minority of 1,200 in the western part of the country. The Monchak are not even officially recognized as one of Mongolia’s minority people; they are so few as to escape official notice almost entirely. To find them, I had our impatient city guides make multiple stops at encampments along the way, where we asked the residents, “Where can we find the Monchak people?” Of course, the Monchak were migratory, like everyone else, but locals knew their movements, and eventually we arrived at an impoverished encampment with a straw stockade, a few dozen goats, and four cows.
This would be my home for the next week. I bade farewell to our caravan of Land Rovers and our city drivers with their bad manners, and I settled into the hospitable embrace of a local family, consisting of a 33-year-old man, Nedmit; his wife Nyaama; and their 12-year-old son, “Brave,” and 10-year-old daughter, “Golden New Year.” I knew I needed to spend time alone with a local family in order to build the kind of trust and communication that would lead to a deeper understanding of the language. As much as I appreciated the efficiency of our caravan and the ability to cook our own food, I also needed to experience daily life with the local people.
Hardly anyplace could be considered more completely off the grid than the far west provinces of Mongolia, or a people more steadily grounded in ancient lifeways than these nomads. Yes, they are aware of the outside world. Some of them have traveled to cities and seen airplanes and computers and cell phones. But they have many reasons for preferring their own traditional way of life, and strong feelings about the security and comfort they find in basing their living on yaks, sheep, and camels in the high mountain passes.
The first way Nedmit’s family made me feel welcome was to slaughter a sheep. Few events in the life of the Monchak are so highly ritualized, so full of protocol and traditional meaning, as the slaughter of a goat or sheep. The entire life of the nomads is centered around the welfare of the sheep. It may seem odd to a western mind that people who cuddle a tiny lamb next to the stove in February can dispassionately slaughter the mother of that same lamb in September. Yet the killing of sheep is done with care, with honor, and with feeling. The sheep is the livelihood of the people. It dies to sustain them, and the Monchak show in their ritual of slaughter how they value and respect that sacrifice as they do life itself.
Nedmit demonstrates for me how to make a horse hobble.
Nedmit performed the slaughter with a quiet intensity. No one joked, sang, or talked loudly during it. After all, this was a sheep they had raised by hand and cared for since birth and even bestowed a pet name upon. Preparations included filling a bucket with fresh water and sharpening a knife against stone, a rasping that sent the family dogs into a state of agitated expectation. The sheep seemed to know something was afoot as well, and they bolted into the security of their fenced enclosure.
One of the fatter sheep suddenly found itself detained, its hind leg grasped firmly and pulled upward. In vain, it dug in its other three legs to resist being pulled backward out of the pen. A clean spot on the ground was chosen, as usual quite close to the door of the yurt in order to be close to the stove.
Nedmit then flopped the sheep onto its back and bound its front legs with a short cord. He held a back leg under his left knee and had his son hold the head down by its horns. An experienced man can do the entire job solo, but teaching the skill to his son (for sheep can be slaughtered only by men among the Monchak) was part of the routine.
Parting the sheep’s wool just to the left of the breastbone, Nedmit made a careful four-inch vertical incision through the hide, exposing the inner lining of fat that contains the internal organs. The whitish-pink fat bulged out slightly through the incision, but no blood spilled out. The sheep lay still, making no sound. Nedmit formed his right hand into a point by pressing the tips of his five fingers together and drove this point, spearlike, deep into the sheep’s abdomen, not through the middle, but down along the inside of the rib cage to the spine, where he felt out the main artery with his forefinger and plucked it once, severing it. He removed his hand slowly, again taking care not to spill a single drop of blood. The sheep passed into a coma within seconds. Being both Buddhists and animists, the Monchak take great care not to inflict unnecessary suffering on any living being, and this was evident in the way they slaughtered the sheep. Before proceeding, they waited for the sheep to expire fully. Within a minute, the sheep’s eyelids no longer twitched when Nedmit flicked his finger against them: the definitive sign of death.
The first stage of cutting up the carcass began. The legs were snapped off at the knee joints, making loud, snapping sounds. The legs would not be eaten, but set aside for the sheep’s head soup. Nedmit expanded the original incision in four directions, again cutting only the outer hide, not nicking the layer of fat and flesh beneath it and spilling not a drop of blood. He then stripped the hide back in four directions and weight
ed it down at the corners with rocks, creating a clean space on which the rest of the carving was performed. The sheep was now shed of its skin, lying belly up and glistening white and fatty. Only a tiny patch of wool remained on the sheep, a piece about three inches wide and eight inches long covering the sternum. The removal of this piece marks an important symbolic moment in the process and is done with the greatest reverence. It must not be touched with the hands. Instead Nedmit leaned carefully over the sheep and grasped the end of the strip of wooly hide with his teeth. He then rocked backward slowly, pulling the strip away from the carcass. Only then could he touch it with his hands, and he handed it carefully to Nyaama, his wife. She would either offer it to the fire or keep it inside the yurt in a neat little pile along with the head and feet until after the sheep was consumed.
Demdi, a Monchak Tuvan, slaughters a sheep in the traditional way.
Now the second stage of the carving could begin. Nedmit cut into the abdomen, making a larger opening in the center and two smaller slits along the bottom. Into these slits he inserted the ends of the sheep’s lower leg stumps—which act as natural springs, stretching the abdominal opening wide so that there is sufficient space to work. With the internal organs fully exposed, a number of strategic cuts were made in a particular order. These allowed the various organs to be removed, again in a particular order and with surgical precision.
I grabbed my field notebook and began asking questions. I wanted to know the name for each internal organ and part, as well as the verbs that described the actions. I scribbled Monchak words in my notebook, learning their terms for liver, kidneys, gallbladder. The latter contains poisonous bile and must not contaminate the meat. It is a taboo object and must be hung up to dry inside the yurt near the ceiling, where it serves to propitiate the spirits. I felt a bit queasy at the smell of fresh sheep guts, but at the same time I was mesmerized by the ritual. By the end, I would collect more than 50 new words in my notebook. At the same time, I felt like an adopted son who had been taught one of the most important activities in Monchak life.
The stomach was carefully lifted out. It was full of rank-smelling half-digested grass, and I recoiled at the stench. A critical moment came when the stomach was severed; at that instant, it had to be handed over to Nyaama, and from then on could only be handled by women. Nyaama and Golden New Year took it to down the riverbank, where they emptied it, turned it inside out, and washed it thoroughly.
Next came the large and small intestines, carefully uncoiled and placed on a specific type of flat rectangular wooden tray. They too had to be prepared by the women, methodically turned inside out, emptied of the little balls of dung they contained, and washed thoroughly.
The end result, about an hour later, was a large bubbling cauldron of what the Monchak call “hot blood,” a stew of all the carefully prepared internal organs. The cleaned stomach became a bag into which blood was poured (it would congeal into a blood pudding). The meat was not eaten yet; it would be hung on the walls to dry and consumed over the next two weeks. The sheep’s massive fatty tail, weighing at least five pounds, was the dish that would be consumed first—and it was offered to me, the guest of honor. I was given a knife and sliced off a small wedge of fat to present to each family member, in descending order of age, as protocol demands.
Afterward, as I lay in my sleeping bag in the yurt, my stomach full of sheep organs and fat, I was amazed at how much I had experienced in just one day. I’d been befriended by an entire extended family, participated in a sheep slaughter, helped collect dung for the fire, and helped herd, corral, and milk the goats. Above all, my brain was buzzing with information, new words for dozens of objects that only yesterday I had not known existed—for example, the sheep’s bile sac or the chunk of fat on the sheep’s tail. I had a new appreciation for the intricacies of naming objects in a culture where knowledge means survival. Collecting words during a sheep slaughter could not have been further from a dry academic discussion of how a grammar is constructed. Yet it revealed a richness and precision about the Monchak way of talking, indeed of how they apprehend the world.
THE LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT DEBATE
My time among the Tuvans, the Tofa, and the Monchak made me realize just how many important concepts they possess that have no exact counterpart in any other language. This reminded me of a long-standing debate among scientists about the relation between language and perceived reality. As biologist Brendon Larson has noted: “There are multiple challenges in examining this linguistic link between ourselves and the natural world because such reflection is akin to a fish reflecting on the water in which it has lived its entire life. We cannot escape language to look at it.”4
Scientists and philosophers have long speculated: Does the language we speak impose certain categories, pathways of thought, or filters that affect the way we perceive the world? Or is the language we speak irrelevant, exerting no effect upon the way we think? This thesis was classically formulated in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as described by Benjamin Lee Whorf:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic system in our minds.5
Taken in its strong form, linguistic determinism effectively means that language determines reality—that it determines what we can think and therefore what we can say.
The strong form of the thesis has been largely discredited, though a weaker form—the theory of linguistic relativity, which holds that language influences our experience of reality—has been mostly accepted.6 Another way to formulate this is that language doesn’t tell us what we can say, rather it tells us what we must say.7 Instead of thinking of language as a kind of blinder that prevents us from seeing or saying certain things, we can think of it as a magnifying glass that focuses our attention, requiring us to pay attention to certain details. So, for a Tuvan speaker, because he must know the direction of the river current in order to say “go,” the language is forcing him to pay attention to river flow and to be aware of it at all times.
Languages may focus or channel our thoughts in particular ways. A speaker of the Carrier language must know the tactile properties of an object in order to say “give.” What is being given? Is it small and granular? Fluffy? Mushy? Liquid? Each type of material requires a different verb form for “give.” And so speakers must talk about tactile properties of objects. In many small ways, languages focus thought rather than limiting it.
No better example can be found than the controversial subject of how many words the Eskimo have for “snow.” A Google search for “Eskimo snow words” yields more than 10,000 hits. Deriding this as an example of bad science run amok has become somewhat of a game among linguists. A leading academic in his book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax stated unequivocally that the Inuit people of Alaska do not have many words for snow, and in fact have only about a dozen basic ones. The debunkers rely on this count to show that Inuit snow words are neither prolific nor special. This stance feeds into a more general agenda of asserting that all languages are equal and equally interesting to science.
Proponents of this view became so intent on debunking it that they spawned a new term—“snow clones”—to mock all such statements that “The so-and-so people have x number of words for y.” Entire Web pages are devoted to listing mock Eskimo snow words that have imaginary meanings like “snow mixed with husky shit” or “snow burger.” Even Steven Pinker took up the issue in his book The Language Instinct, stating: “Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such sta
ndards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston’s WBZ-TV meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling.”8
Sadly, the snow-cloners have missed the point. They have grossly underestimated the number of words by relying on very limited modern accounts and thinking that just because the number was inflated in the past by people who should have known better, the true count must be unimpressively low. As we will see, the number of snow/ice/wind/weather terms in some Arctic languages is impressively vast, rich, and complex. Furthermore, they have missed the forest for the trees, failing to see the importance of how words encode knowledge. Beyond the sheer numbers of words for natural phenomena like snow and ice, these languages demonstrate the complex ways in which words package information efficiently.
The Yupik people have one of the most amazing survival technologies known to mankind, one that has allowed them to thrive in the world’s harshest environment, the Arctic, for over 6,000 years. A tiny fraction of their knowledge of snow and ice is beautifully captured in a brilliant book called Watching Ice and Weather Our Way, one the snow naysayers should read. As Dr. Igor Krupnik, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s Arctic expert, notes in his book The Earth Is Faster Now: 9
The use of wind directions,…allows Yupik observers to collect and pass on information by highly meaningful environmental packages…. Hence, it is not the observation itself that makes an impression of Native knowledge being holistic, intuitive, and multifaceted, but rather the whole cultural “package” that is associated with each specific ice and weather term it uses.
The Last Speakers Page 6