The Last Speakers

by K. David Harrison

  We live in a world regulated by mathematics and numbers, and we are drilled in arithmetic from an early age. Skill in algebra is a gateway to high SAT scores and higher education, so we can be forgiven for thinking that math is a kind of anchoring rock that we depend on and that does not change. But viewed through the lens of other cultures, numbers look very different. Indeed, the whole premise of our counting system, based on units of ten, turns out to be a cultural whim, a mere preference.

  Body counting is only the tip of the complexity iceberg, and New Guinea cultures hold many more mathematical surprises. We sat down in a small village on the Ambonwari River with the local schoolteacher, a man named Julius.5 He spoke excellent English and had worked over the years with a visiting anthropologist, so he had the patience needed to teach foreigners things that should be perfectly obvious. Greg Anderson and I set up our camera and recording equipment and sat in the village’s main house, with about a hundred people observing us. Much to their amusement, we were flummoxed by something they regard as utterly simple—counting to one!

  Here’s how our session unfolded. We started with a simple question, and learned that the word for the number one is mban—or so we thought. After a long detour through the number system, we found out that “mban” is just one manifestation of the chameleon-like word for “one” in this language. Like that colorful lizard, it changes its appearance continually, but unlike the chameleon, its changes are governed not just by the surroundings (e.g., what word it is modifying) but also by a complex system that divides all nouns up into special categories (e.g., living male things are different from living female things, which are different from inanimate objects that end in the letter n, and so on. Here’s how the dialogue unfolded:

  DAVID: And do you have a word for…one?

  JULIUS: One. Mban. Mban.

  DAVID: Mban.

  JULIUS: Mban is one. We have only ten counting numbers in the language. One is mban. Two is kripai, three is kriyen mau, four is samunung, five is suwam, six is sambaimbiyam, seven is samba kripai, eight is samba kriyen mau, nine is samba usanam, ten is sumbri.

  Greg, with his astounding language aptitude and love of numbers, counted right back: “So, mban, kripai, kriyen mau, samunung, suwam, sambaimbiyam, samba kripai, samba kriyen mau, samba usanam, sumbri.”

  I was still struggling with one, and I thought I had heard something ever so slightly different, so I asked, “One is mbang?”

  Julius replied, “Mbang.”

  So it seemed we had two words for one, “mbam” and “mbang.” Julius, patient as a schoolteacher, clarified: “All right, there is different ways in counting. Mbang we say for different things. Mbam also is the same as one. So, different items, we name them in different numbering systems.”

  Intrigued, we began trying to figure out when to say which form by asking him to count objects. “One banana” was mambaing mbang and “one coconut” was wurang mbang. This seemed clear: “one” is “mbang.” But sometimes it is pronounced “mban”: “one pig” is imbiyan mban and “one dog” is wiya mban.

  Then we were confounded yet again: “one house” was translated as yam mbo.

  Now it seemed like a simple three-way split. Words than end in -ng take the word “mbang,” words that end in a vowel or -n take “mban,” and some other set of words, which we hoped to identify, take “mbo.”

  We tested our hypothesis by finding another word that ended in -ng—pambang, “bow and arrow”—predicting that it would be modified by “mbang.” But we were wrong. Being wrong with your initial hypothesis is just where things start to get complex and interesting. So we kept asking for more examples.

  How about one man? Julius said: “Yermasanar mban.”

  And one woman, we asked? Yermasanma mbanma.

  So it seemed the word for woman had a special suffix-ma, to make it “mbanma.” We confirmed this with other words denoting female persons: “One daughter” is kiyawi mbanma, and “one sister” is mamiyang mbanma.

  I asked: “What else do you count with mbo? What about canoes?”

  JULIUS: So, for canoe, I would say kai mbai. And for one song? Siriya mbaiya.

  GREG: Okay, how about one crocodile?

  JULIUS: Manbo mban.

  GREG: Yeah, I’m catching that one. We’re trying to find another word that we can get mbo with. What’s the word for arrow, arrow you use on the bow?

  JULIUS: Arrow. Aring ganam mbam.

  GREG: Okay…

  JULIUS: Mbam.

  …

  GREG: And so, can you say mambaima mbanma?

  JULIUS: Yes, mambaima mbanma because it’s a female crocodile.

  GREG: Right, okay. Okay, I got some of the system here. So, you say, yam mbo, “one house.”

  JULIUS: Yam mbo.

  GREG: Can you say anything else with mbo?

  JULIUS: Yes, let me think first.

  I exclaimed: “How to count to one in this language!” and Greg agreed, “Yes, we’ll never get past one!”

  JULIUS: Okay, for coconut. For coconut, I say ip. So one coconut palm is ip mbo.

  DAVID: Ip mbo.

  JULIUS: Yes.

  GREG: And how about coconut fruit?

  JULIUS: Worung mbang.

  GREG: Okay, um, one tree?

  JULIUS: Iwan mbang.

  DAVID: We need another word that counts with mbaiya.…What else is counted with mbaiya?

  JULIUS: Mbaiya?

  GREG: How about river?

  JULIUS: Wangan mban, Kwonmei mbo, because we have these two different river names, the Wangan River and the Konmei River.

  DAVID: Kwonmei mbo.

  GREG: All right, I’m utterly confounded now. It’s partly phonological and partly not, as we thought, but…

  DAVID: What else counts with mbaiya? Saipa mbaiya?

  JULIUS: No, saipa will be saipa mbo.

  DAVID: What’s the word for a big meeting house like this?

  JULIUS: Iman.

  DAVID: One iman?

  JULIUS: Iman mbo.

  DAVID: There we go.

  GREG: Yeah, we have four mbo’s now. We have river, belly, house, coconut palm. Yeah, I mean those are perhaps semantically connected, in some way that makes sense for them.

  DAVID: Because its like a house.

  GREG: Yeah. So we still need another mbaiya.

  DAVID: Right, because we have mbo.

  GREG: What else would use mbaiya?

  JULIUS: All right, I would like to explain to you a little bit. So, like, we have planted something, but these things are not plentiful. So we say mbaiya. Not plentiful is mbaiya. If I say yangri, okay, “one hand” yangri mbaiya, and “one leg or foot” yamangos mbaiya.

  DAVID: It’s like small numbered things…things that come in pairs or small numbers?

  JULIUS: Yes, things that come in small numbers.

  GREG: We also have mbai, that’s another one we need. We have kai mbai [“one canoe”].

  JULIUS: Kai mbai.

  GREG: Is there another mbai? What other word can we use mbai with?

  JULIUS: Okay, let’s say sipi. Sipi mbai. For sago, sipi, we say for fried sago is sipi.

  GREG: So one sago palm is sipi mbai?

  JULIUS: Yes, sipi mbai.

  GREG: We could sit here all day and do this, but we don’t want to take up all your time.

  DAVID: Yes, thank you, schoolteacher.

  Throughout this baffling dialogue, we had deduced several general principles of the counting system, without fully grasping its complexity. How do you choose which form of “one”? It depends partly on the sounds contained in the word; if a word ends in -ng or -k, you use “mbang,” which matches it. If a word ends in -n, you use “mban.” Some words that end in -ai take “mbai.” But we uncovered multiple exceptions, where some special consideration overrides the expected choice. One special consideration has to do with the type of word—for example, whether it is a male or female person or animal. If it comes in small quantities or numbers, a body part for e
xample, then it takes “mbaiya.”

  A system like this requires speakers to keep track of multiple different categories: what sounds make up a word, what does the word refer to? Is it male or female, numerous or scarce, and so on? Each piece of information might lead you to use a different form, but not all information is equal. Some facts are more important than others, so they override, and that is another factor that must be learned by speakers. They seem to do it all effortlessly, as attested by the villagers’ delight and laughter in hearing us attempt to learn the system.

  As we left the village, we marveled at all the many different ways to say “one.” And we wondered how much of that complexity appears in the higher numbers, which might not only classify objects into different groups but also require the speaker to do mental mathematics.

  If you survey the world’s languages, you find radically different ways of counting, different ways of apprehending and framing mathematical relationships. Some of these, as discussed above, are based on using the human body as a living abacus. Others are more abstract and work with a number other than ten (which is our number base) to build larger numbers.

  One of our favorite eureka moments was captured in India for the documentary film The Linguists.6 A speaker of Sora, Oruncho Gamango, was teaching us the numbers: A-boy means one, BA-goo is two, and YA-gee is three. Each number had a unique name, all the way up past GEL-jee, ten. GEL-moy means 11, and 12 is MEE-gel.

  We dutifully wrote down the names, which were all unique labels up to 12. English also has unique names for numbers up to 12, and then it begins to build numbers 13 and above using ten as a base, so “eighteen” can be thought of as “eight” plus “ten,” and ten is a basic building block in English that builds the higher numbers.

  By this point, we thought Sora would be a straightforward system, even a bit routine. But when Oruncho reached 13, he repeated the word for 12, followed by the word for 1: “Twelve is MEE-gel, and 13 is MEE-gel BOY.”

  Greg and I burst into smiles at the discovery. Sora uses a base-12 system. This is unusual though not unique in the world, but we felt happy because we had not personally documented such a system before in the course of our fieldwork. Then, as the numbers became higher, another pattern emerged. Sora also uses 20 as a base to build numbers. In the higher numbers, you can combine 20, 12, and other numbers, so that the way to say 93 in Sora is actually “four twenty twelve one”! (This may remind some readers of French numbers.)

  Each language potentially has a unique way of counting, and mathematicians tell us that there is nothing sacred about using ten as a base—it is merely a convenience. We could have a sophisticated mathematics using 4 or 6 or 12 as a base. Yet these alternative ways of counting are rapidly vanishing, as the standard base-ten counting system continues to spread. Numbers and quantities are a deep property of the physical universe, and mankind has contemplated them for ages. But smaller languages, with their sometimes radically different ways of conceptualizing numbers, may hold some unique insights—if we can learn them before they vanish.

  Language is what makes society possible, by binding humans together into groups: village, tribe, ethnos, nation. It serves as a token of ethnic identity and belonging, as visible and obvious as ritual scarring. So potent is the need for identity that—as we saw in Papua New Guinea—one group may even claim their linguistic uniqueness to the exclusion of another group, even though that group understands everything they say. In each culture, language lays the foundation for the world as they (or we) may know it, whether by grouping and classifying items for counting or by providing a mythic ancestor to honor. Without it, people are adrift, unaccounted for, unnamed.

  Because it is so powerful in shaping our worldview and our self-view, I cannot regard people being coerced—no matter how subtly—into abandoning their languages as anything other than a form of violence. It represents an erasure of history, of creativity, of intellectual heritage. Keeping one’s heritage language is every person’s right. Happily, we can each contribute to sustaining this right by effecting a shift in attitudes. By learning to appreciate and celebrate the diversity—not only in places like Papua New Guinea, but equally in Paraguay or Pennsylvania—we ensure its survival.

  {CHAPTER SEVEN}

  HOW DO STORIES SURVIVE?

  Every story is us. That is who we are, From the beginning to no-matter-how-it-comes-out.

  —Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)

  STORIES are the most ancient and enduring of all human creations, older than the Great Wall of China, the pyramids of Giza, or even the prehistoric cave drawings at Lascaux, France. Yet stories survive as a living art only when they are verbally narrated, painstakingly passed from mouth to ear. They become memes, cultural creations that rely parasitically on humans to preserve and propagate them.

  Many ancient stories are still in circulation in remote cultures. Stories like that of the three brothers of Siberia in chapter 5 provide a portal into the deep past. Peering through it, we get an inkling of how humans thought 5,000, 20,000, or even 40,000 years ago. These durable works may well outlast any of today’s monuments built by human hands. But the life of a story is also fragile, and it can easily disintegrate under the weight of the technological forces now at work in our world.

  I set out to learn the secrets of storytelling from some of the last practitioners of the art of memory. My travels have taken me to remote cultures in Siberia, India, Australia, and elsewhere. In each place, I met storytellers who still practice their art, recognizing the potent enchantment of the spoken word. They have made great sacrifices to protect their powerful stories from being forgotten, from intellectual theft, and from the din of global media.

  These master tale-tellers are inheritors of a deep intellectual tradition. They have helped solve the greatest information challenge of our species: keeping all essential knowledge solely in human memory. They pass it on from generation to generation, mouth to ear, without ever writing it down. Writing is a wonderful (and fairly recent) technology, and it allows efficient transmission of a story to new audiences. But writing also ensures that a story will become fossilized, trapped on paper, no longer able to adapt, grow, or enchant listeners in the same way. If all our libraries disappeared today, it’s doubtful we could find any living person who could recite from memory Shakespeare’s plays, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the Grimm brothers’ folktales. All these are vulnerable, because they exist only in writing and could be lost.

  We’ll visit three storytellers in this chapter, each with a secret to share, a tradition to protect. Along the way, we’ll encounter a rainbow serpent swallowing people in Australia, a hero frozen in the ice caves of Siberia, and a drunken god in India’s jungles. These fierce creatures have survived the ages by the power of storytelling.

  At the center of Siberia, among the nomads, I met Shoydak-ool Khovalyg, a master teller of nearly lost epic tales. He told me the story of Bora, a shape-changing heroine who disguised herself as a man to complete a magical quest.

  In the remote Australian outback, Charlie Mangulda told a sacred Dreamtime story of the Rainbow Serpent, creator and devourer of life.

  In India, among the tribal people who call themselves the Ho, master orator K. C. Naik told me a creation myth—wonderfully inverted—in which God tricked the first man and woman into having sex by getting them drunk.

  These rich stories opened up worlds I had never imagined. As a scientist, I found they pointed to even greater mysteries. How had they survived and been retold and reshaped by countless minds and mouths across the eons? What secret patterns and rhythms had allowed these stories to be transferred from mind to mind? Did they have any use in our modern world? Would they survive the 21st century? And what could we learn from them before they vanished?

  Prior to the invention of writing, all stories survived only in human memory and by being retold orally. Tended carefully by campfires at night, whispered by mothers to infants, recited by fathers to young men as they set out for the hunt
, certain stories persisted, grew, and evolved. They became memes—powerful packages of cultural ideas that are passed by hearing, imitating, or other social contact. Over time, and as writing freed modern humans from the burden of memorizing, we’ve grown mentally lazy. Stories became locked in books, rarely remembered verbatim or recited by heart. Today we hear only the faintest echoes of that great oral tradition, in the world’s smaller languages that have never yet been written down.

  A WORLD BEFORE WRITING

  In our literate age, we like to imagine that all useful information is written down somewhere, that we can find it in a book, a library, a database, or a Google search. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, we face an immense knowledge gap between what is recorded anywhere and what is known. Most of what humans know today, and nearly everything they have known throughout history, exists purely in memory and is transmitted orally, from speaker to listener. From the profound to the fanciful, from creation myths to apple pie recipes, we have relied on memory to keep the record straight.

  Most of the world’s languages make no or little use of writing. For millennia, indigenous cultures have been solving the problem of organizing, distributing, and transmitting vast bodies of knowledge, all without the aid of writing. How did they accomplish this? In order to find out, we need to focus on languages that are still purely oral, never written, and see what kinds of knowledge structure and strategies for transmission they may contain. Orally transmitted knowledge is robust and has served as the only means of knowledge transfer for most of human history. Yet in our digital age, when we increasingly rely on artificial technologies, it is also a fragile device, easily lost.