Writing is a new technology, and while it is incredibly useful, it has not been around all that long. Literacy allows us to rely on external sources like books to store much of the information we need. Once we come to rely on writing, we can stop remembering things—for example, I no longer memorize my friends’ telephone numbers or my appointment calendar.
Today we face an information crisis as the bulk of human knowledge, never recorded or written down, begins to erode. As a scientist, I have spent the last decade on a quest to recover and record bits of the knowledge base before it vanishes. I’ve identified as an urgent conservation priority the knowledge contained in our planet’s 3,500 vanishing languages, hoping to record a portion of it before the last speakers die.
Historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote: “Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.”1 I would revise Tuchman’s statement, suspending for a moment the literacy bias we all share. Without books, humans remembered and passed on their histories and creation myths. They created vast poetic works like the Manas, the Kyrgyz epic tale comprising over a million lines. They performed sophisticated scientific experiments to discover the medical uses of thousands of plants and learned how to navigate the vast Pacific Ocean without instruments. They engaged in deep thought and composed fanciful songs. Without books, great civilizations such as the Inca and Aztec, Nuer and Mongol, arose and flourished. As Pablo Neruda observed, “On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.”2 We could substitute “knowledge” for Neruda’s “poetry,” and the statement would still hold true.
Humans have accomplished remarkable feats by force of memory alone, without the use of writing. As a civilization, we will never give up writing, but we can learn a lot from societies that have not yet adopted writing, or have done so only recently. What kinds of mental techniques do they use to remember and transmit vast bodies of knowledge? Do they think and organize information differently? Are they smarter than us? How have they solved the information bottleneck, the problem of finite minds containing potentially infinite knowledge?
From the Arctic to the high Andes, from the grasslands of Mongolia to the swamps of Oregon, and nearly everywhere in between, we can still see traces of the stunning intellectual accomplishments humans achieved without the aid of writing, through language and memory alone. How they did so remains mostly a mystery, and the window of opportunity for us to unravel that mystery is rapidly closing.
Dying languages are often hidden in plain sight, spoken in private or in whispers, concealed. The knowledge they possess is valuable to all of humanity, but is exclusively owned and safeguarded by the speakers. For reasons they alone decide, many of these last speakers have chosen to share some of their wisdom before it vanishes. What do the “last speakers” want to tell us, the “last listeners”? And how can this simple act of knowledge transmission lead to a global rebirth of language diversity, a process we can all take part in?
RAINBOW SERPENTS AND LAST WHISPERERS
The Rainbow Serpent is described as a fierce creature that lived in the billabongs, small lakes that dot Australia’s “top end.” Perhaps a hundred feet long, it was multicolored, with gaping jaws and jagged teeth. This Dreamtime myth has many versions, and Charlie Mangulda’s version was narrated to me and Greg Anderson, sitting in an ancient cave at Awunbarna—what maps call Mount Borradaile. This was Charlie’s ancestral land, the place where his father grew up and heard this story.
As Charlie told it, the Rainbow Serpent was awakened one day by the crying of a child. The child was crying because he wanted a water lily. But when the flower was brought to him, he was unsatisfied and cried even louder. As the child cried day and night, the Rainbow Serpent, aroused from his slumber in the billabong, went out preying on people. As he crossed the outback, in his wake he created new billabongs, freshwater ponds, each full of life. Eventually the serpent came to Croker Island, a sliver of land where Charlie lives now, and there he devoured people. The serpent is thus a bringer of life and death simultaneously, a cosmic creator and destroyer, to be respected and feared. An ancient rock-art drawing of the serpent, with its jaws wide open and teeth protruding, dominates the sacred cave where Charlie told the story (see chapter 4). Its jaws gaped just overhead as he brought it to life in a reverential whisper.
Charlie clearly expended great effort to bring up from memory words he may not have spoken aloud in years: un beriberi, “crocodile” nyaru, “rock wallaby” and wayo, “child.” The Rainbow Serpent story is sacred, and the version Charlie knows is the intellectual property of his people. To both protect and share this knowledge, Charlie decided not to tell us the story directly. Instead, he whispered it into the ear of our local guide, Charlie Bush, who belongs to another Aboriginal group. Freddie then retold it to us, while Charlie sat nearby nodding approval and making the occasional correction.
After the Rainbow Serpent tale, Charlie told us directly and in English a version of the Turkey Dreaming. In it, he identified the land we were sitting on as the very place where his people were created, marking it as sacred landscape. The story connects them to the Dreamtime, a complex web of beliefs, places, and myths. The Dreamtime—and the stories that weave it—has ancient origins in this place, dating back to a time perhaps as long as 40,000 years ago, long before humans inhabited Europe. What is truly ancient in Australia is not something you can see, not buildings or monuments, but something you can hear: stories whispered in a cave, syllables on the breeze, songs to the desert. Forty millennia or more of creative vision now hang by a thread, as these stories are assailed by the cacophony of the modern world.
MYSTERIES OF MEMORY
Human memory is at the same time our greatest intellectual accomplishment and our greatest weakness. Why does the brain insist on filing away millions of irrelevant facts (I remember that I wore a blue shirt to my first day of school at age six), yet forget crucial ones (like where I parked my car today at the supermarket)? And why is it so hard to memorize even a 14-line sonnet (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…”), yet so easy to recall gigabytes of useless sensory memories? Scientists are still very far from understanding how memory works or how we may enhance it or prevent its deterioration. But while the scientific study of human memory in laboratories is at best a few centuries old, humans have been experimenting with and perfecting the art of memory forever. Storytelling is the crucible in which human memory has undergone its most rigorous testing, and has reached its purest form.
Stories thus provide insights into how memory (and our brain) functions. In our so-called information age, knowledge tends to be shallow and diffuse. We no longer memorize long texts (except in the early grades of school, where we may have to recite poems), and we write down anything we really want remembered, from phone numbers to last wills. We possess massive tools and technologies that allow us to outsource work that our memory used to perform. Surrounded by a cocoon of memory aids, we rely on them as a kind of mechanical brain. Thus, we suffer from the illusion that any information we need is stored in some book or database. We imagine that anything can be Googled, retrieved, or transmitted on the Internet. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, asks us to “imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”
With due respect to the mountain of knowledge that is Wikipedia, I view Wales’s claim as exaggerated. With 10.7 million articles across 250 languages, Wikipedia samples a paltry 3.6 percent of the world’s 7,000 languages.3 The vast bulk of all human knowledge, our common intellectual legacy, has never been written down anywhere. So it is not captured in any blog, ’zine, or ’pedia. The true “sum of all human knowledge” resides in hum
an memory, mostly in small languages, many of which are endangered. Up to 80 percent of the world’s languages have not yet adopted writing at all or have done so only on a very limited scale. Most human knowledge thus exists solely in memory and is transmitted only verbally. This fact should give us a radically different perspective on information, knowledge, and culture. It ejects us out of our information cocoon, forcing us to contemplate our ignorance of the vast unknown.
The Internet is full of ads for mind tools that claim to improve memory. They promise enhanced ability to recite long numbers, connect names and faces, and do mentally onerous tasks. People work on sudoku puzzles for their touted cognitive benefits. Yet even with enhanced capacity and all the technologies to support us, we are flooded with information we cannot retain. Memory deteriorates across our life span, and we do not always manage to transmit crucial facts to the next generation.
Indigenous cultures, with their millennia of intense memorization, have successfully solved the information-to-memory problem many times over. They’ve managed to retain, transmit, and distribute vast bodies of knowledge—for example, the knowledge of thousands of medicinal plants possessed by the Kallawaya people. They’ve done so mentally, without the aid of writing or recording devices. What are their secrets? How do people in these societies distribute knowledge? How do they recruit entire social networks of people to act like a giant parallel processor, storing and sharing complementary bits of information? Some of the answers can be found in the ancient stories that people still tell in places like Siberia.
GIRL-HERO AND THE SIBERIAN BARD
I arrived in the dusty Siberian village of Aryg-Üzüü on a hot August day in 1998, looking for a splendidly talented Tuvan orator I’d heard rumors of. I found Shoydak-ool, a vigorous, cheerful man in his late 70s, living in a small log house with his wife and a dog and a milk cow out in the shed. Shoydak had retired from driving a combine on a collective farm to practice his avocation—storytelling. In recent years, opportunities had become scarce. “People are not interested in the old stories,” he remarked. “Our kids just want to watch Jackie Chan movies nowadays.” Not an inappropriate analogy, I thought to myself: heroes of Tuvan myths often represent the same archetypal character found so often in Hong Kong action flicks.
Shoydak-ool Khovalyg, Tuvan epic storyteller
Shoydak-ool refused to tell his story without a proper audience, so we set out at seven o’clock the next morning to visit the nomadic summer camp of his relatives. He roused the family out of bed by announcing loudly: “I’m here to tell you a story.”
Once morning chores were completed and some milky, salty tea boiled, Shoydak-ool donned a bright pink robe with a sash and a red, pointed, Santa Claus–like hat. Taking a wooden ceremonial spoon, he sprinkled tea as an offering to the spirits. Then he began his story, and it was a real cliff-hanger.
In Shoydak-ool’s story, a girl-hero, Bora, lacks any obvious advantages or clear goal in life, but possesses wit, persistence, and strength of character. These traits are tested as she sets off on a quest to vanquish evil forces and revive her dead brother. Along the way, she suffers moments of self-doubt and receives sage advice from her clever talking horse. She must use magical powers, perform feats of strength, disguise her sex, and change her shape to become a rabbit. The horse advises her that she must win the hand of a magical princess in marriage. To do so, Bora disguises herself as a man. Her horse helps her perfect the disguise by gluing bear fur over her breasts and attaching a goose’s head as a fake penis. Now passing as a (somewhat freakish) man, Bora dominates the archery, wrestling, and horse-racing competitions.
To give readers the flavor of this tale, here is the passage describing the wrestling match, when four fighters attack the heroine. In a scene reminiscent of the World Wrestling Federation, Bora dispatches each opponent with animal-inspired agility and acrobatics.
A fairly strong wrestler came up, flapping his arms in an eagle dance.
Bora knocked him with the speed of a kine,
and dropped him upside down on top of his head.
Then another super strong wrestler strutted up to her.
Bora gripped his ankle with the courage of an eagle,
flipped him over her shoulder, and flung him down.
Then a really strong wrestler ran up to her.
Bora flew toward him with the agility of a falcon,
and laid him flat in a flash.
Another fairly strong wrestler feinted, to frighten her.
Bora hopped between his legs with the agility of a hare,
and tackled him painfully on his tailbone on bare ground.
In the end, Bora wins the hand of the princess, who uses magic to revive the dead brother. The princess marries the brother, Bora changes back into a girl and marries her own suitor, and they live happily on the high grassy plains herding sheep and camels.4
The memory secrets that I found in the Bora story were so deep that the storyteller himself was not aware of their existence. Even though he relied on complex sound structures to fix the lines in his memory, he had no ability to describe or explain them. A corollary would be the ancient Nazca lines in Peru. These gigantic drawings of animals were etched into vast expanses of the desert. The paradox is that these fanciful figures, hummingbirds and jaguars, can be viewed only from high up in the air, a vantage point never available to the lowly desert diggers. They created gargantuan works of art, without ever seeing them as a whole.
In the Bora tale, vast, extended patterns stretch across hundreds of lines. These mathematically exact repetitions of certain sounds are not perceptible to the individual storyteller. Unless he or she were to set the entire tale down on paper and then tabulate all the examples of certain vowels and consonants across the many pages, the storyteller would remain unaware that the pattern even existed. For example, in the wrestling passage above, the reader will have noticed that each line has some words in italics. In the original Tuvan, but not in English, all the words in italics within each stanza begin with the same sound. For example, in stanza 1, the words “fairly,” “flapping,” “knocked,” “kine” (a type of bird), “dropped,” and “top” all begin with a “d” sound in Tuvan. This creates a strong cluster of alliteration, making the passage more dramatic for listeners and more memorable for the tale-teller. The second, third, and fourth stanzas do the same, but with different sounds. For a full 12 lines, we get a barrage of alliterative gut punches to make the fight scene come alive. And this is just one small passage! Similar patterns play out across the entire epic. No one author composed the tale, and each teller was free to make his own changes. Yet the structure emerged over countless tellings as a solid, intricate framework, aiding memorization and shaping the tale into a grand work of verbal art.
As Shoydak-ool told his tale, the family greeted the ribald parts with laughter and the suspenseful parts with anticipation. This entire family of nomads, ages 7 to 75, and I, an American linguist, were together experiencing something quite rare. Most Tuvans have never heard a traditional epic performed live. What made this encounter even more poignant was a feeling that such stories could soon be lost to history. I was determined to wrest every bit of meaning from this story, and to bring it to a wide audience.
Coming back from the plains of Siberia to the ivory tower of Yale was quite a shock. I had a little basement office where I would spend hours poring over my field notes and transcribing my recordings. The Post-it note became my best friend, and I tabulated and cross-indexed my hundreds of pages of notes in a very low-tech way. While some linguists key all their data into a sophisticated relational database, I was a bit of a Luddite, preferring the serendipitous connections to the powered search queries. Bit by bit, in my basement corner, I put together the pieces of an immense puzzle of the sounds and structures of Tuvan, hoping that some sense, some pattern, would emerge. Writing a dissertation (“dissertating,” as graduate students like to say) is a lonely business and puts a real crimp in your social life. T
he light at the end of the tunnel came in the form of careful comments on the margins contributed by the three professors on my thesis committee…and I was grateful for every little typo or large theoretical issue they pointed out. Many students get bogged down and never finish their thesis, and so I was particularly grateful for the advice: “There are two types of dissertations: brilliant ones and finished ones.” I aimed for the latter type, and still managed to make a few discoveries along the way.
One element in the grammar of Tuvan really excited me, and I’ll share it here in a nontechnical way. This was vowel harmony, a Zen-sounding phenomenon but actually a concept that might excite mathematicians more than Buddhists. Vowel harmony is a kind of statistical perfection, a strictly regulated pattern that shapes the way speakers speak in a language. Just as a sonnet must be precisely 14 lines and a haiku seven syllables (depending on who’s counting), vowel harmony is a stringent template for an entire language, governing how sounds are arranged.
Tuvans have eight vowels to choose from (in English, we have between 12 and 14 vowels, depending on the dialect one speaks, even though we have just 5 symbols for writing vowels). From this set of eight vowels, they can use only half of them in any given word. Vowels “harmonize,” meaning that certain vowels repel each other and thus can never ever appear in the same word, while other vowels attract each other. So a word as simple as inu or emo is simply impossible for a Tuvan to pronounce or perceive, given the filter imposed by vowel harmony, because i and u belong to different vowel classes, as do e and o. Meanwhile, words like ona or edi are perfectly harmonic—though they are not real words of Tuvan, they could be easily perceived and pronounced by a Tuvan speaker. A great deal of scientific study has been conducted on vowel harmony languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian, and Manchu, but Tuvan was a relatively little-studied example, and its system proved to be very complex and novel to science. So as I sat in my basement office, manipulating symbols on the page, I had a sense that a new discovery was being made. Just as when you examine snowflakes—though no two are identical, you may discern some basic patterns—I was delighted to pull tiny sound patterns out of an entire landscape of speech and display them in the pages of my dissertation.
The Last Speakers Page 17