Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

  Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

  Pilgrim in the

  Palace of Words

  A Journey Through the

  6,000 Languages of Earth

  Glenn Dixon

  Copyright © Glenn Dixon, 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Editor: Michael Carroll

  Design: Courtney Horner

  Printer: Webcom

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Dixon, Glenn, 1957-

  Pilgrim in the palace of words : a journey through the 6,000 languages of earth / by Glenn Dixon.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-55488-433-9

  1. Dixon, Glenn, 1957---Travel. 2. Sociolinguistics. 3. Language and languages--Philosophy. 4. Voyages and travels. I. Title.

  P40.D59 2009 306.44 C2009-903002-0

  1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  The Sappho translation is reprinted by permission of the publisher and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from Greek Lyric Poetry: Volume 1, Sappho and Alcaeus. Loeb Classical Library Volume 142, translated by David A. Campbell, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard University.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Published by The Dundurn Group

  Printed and bound in Canada.

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  The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Photograph Captions

  All photographs were taken by Glenn Dixon.

  Part One: Prayers at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

  Part Two: A temple in the Monkey Forest Sanctuary in Ubud, Bali.

  Part Three: Bora Bora, the most beautiful island on Earth.

  Part Four: Painted black with a stylized raven near the bow in white, this Haida canoe is called a t’luu. It is the same as the ones the Haida have used for thousands of years.

  Contents

  PART ONE At the Gates of the Western World

  1 Climbing the Tower of Babel

  2 At the Gates of the Western World

  3 And Empires, Too, Shall Splash

  Across These Pages

  PART TWO Into the East

  4 Genghis Khan Rides Again

  5 On the Roof of the World

  6 The Heart of Darkness

  7 One Thousand Words for Rice

  PART THREE Under the Southern Cross

  8 Islands of the Many-Coloured Waters

  9 See You at Machu Picchu

  10 The Headwaters of the Amazon

  PART FOUR To the North

  11 The Lost World of the Maya

  12 Haida: The Surface People

  13 May You Walk the Trail of Beauty

  Epilogue: The Unimaginable Future

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  PART ONE

  At the Gates of the Western World

  1

  Climbing the Tower of Babel

  The airport security guard hauled me into a back room. “Step behind the curtain, please, and take off your clothes.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked helplessly. “Everything?”

  “Everything.”

  I stripped clumsily, my two pale feet hopscotching behind the thin curtain. Outside I could hear the guard flipping through my passport. I was sure he was eyeing the stamps from the Muslim countries I’d been to, and could well imagine his lips pursing in disapproval.

  It’s not so easy getting into Jerusalem. The whole place can be something like a war zone. The guard returned, took a quick look, and then asked me to dress and come out to identify my belongings. My backpack had already been hauled out of the plane and its contents had been placed on a long metal table. There was my toothbrush and my underpants neatly stacked in front of me. I’d flown in on the Israeli national airline — El Al — and it wasn’t taking any chances. El Al has yet to have an “accident,” and these extreme measures were one of the reasons why.

  The plane had landed at Ben Gurion Airport in the desert past Tel Aviv. It’s not actually near anything, so it’s somewhere you want to get out of as soon as possible. Actually, any airport is a place you want to leave quickly. I snatched my backpack off the table and hustled toward the buses.

  I’ve been travelling now for more than ten years, slipping in and out of countries, poking my nose into where I probably shouldn’t be. I’ve been attacked by wild dogs on a high mountain pass. I’ve heard jaguars roar in the deep jungle foliage. And once, in the calm blue waters above a coral reef, a shark angled in at me. But in every case the wildlife was protecting its territory, and I was the one who didn’t belong.

  Humans, of course, tend to section off their land with borders, guns, and barbed wire. But these are only surface markers. In reality we claim our territory with a much more powerful and ancient tool. We mark our place in the world, and even ourselves, with language.

  About six thousand languages are spoken around the globe today, and each is a whole world in itself. Before I went off travelling, I was studying linguistics. In fact, I’d been doing graduate work and had just been accepted to do my doctorate.

  I turned the offer down.

  Languages, as one philosopher said, are the Houses of Being. And I wanted to journey to these houses. I wanted to strut up their sidewalks. I wanted to knock on their doors and peek in their windows. I wanted to see what they were hiding in their basements … even if it meant a little bit of trouble.

  The bus took me into Tel Aviv, the most modern city in the Middle East. It sits on a long beach and could easily pass for a metropolis on California’s coast except that here people carry even more guns than Californians. I saw a young man and his girlfriend walking along a tree-lined street. They were holding hands and obviously much in love, and the whole picture would have made me sigh were it not for the Uzi machine guns draped over their shoulders.

  Near the bus station I found a bank to change my money into shekels. In the line something quite strange happened. The windows of the bank began to rattle quite noticeably. It felt as if a minor earthquake was shaking the ground. Then it stopped, and five minutes later it started again. Very odd.

  When I got to the cashier, I asked her what had happened. “Oh,” she said, “that means a jet has just broken the sound barrier.” Somewhere ten thousand metres above
us the cutting edge of military technology was knifing through the slipstream, arcing over some of the most ancient cities on Earth.

  But listen, shekels, can you believe it? I know it’s only a name, but it conjures up a world that’s long gone, something quite old. I miss such things in Europe now that the European Union countries have gone over to the euro. Euros themselves are dull pieces of paper adorned with nondescript images. I miss counting out drachmas in Greece. I miss the schillings of Austria. I miss the drawing of the little prince on the fifty-franc note in France. When the world becomes homogenized, something is lost. Even if it’s only a name, we lose a little part of the soul of that place.

  No matter. There I was on the doorstep of Jerusalem, hands dripping with shekels. I caught another bus that took me into the Judean hills, up into one of the world’s most disputed regions.

  And so … Jerusalem … Jeru-salam. The name rolls off the tongue like a poem. Five thousand years of history in four short syllables. A Canaanite city is mentioned in an ancient Egyptian papyrus scroll dating from the second millennium B.C. Then, in ancient Semitic, it was called Ursalem.

  My first glimpse of the old city was of its massive walls gleaming in the sunlight. Everyone must feel like a pilgrim here. It’s impossible not to. I’m not very religious, but this city wallops you on the chest and really gets to you.

  I spent a few days clambering down dark passageways, finding my way from one holy site to another. One early morning I went up to see the Temple Mount long before the crowds arrived. Even that early, sunlight splashed onto the stones and in the desert air, the blue tiles of the Dome of the Rock standing out vividly. The roof of the Dome is coated in gold and shimmers and dazzles.

  The first and second Jewish Temples stood here. Christ was whipped here. Muhammad ascended to heaven here. All of it here in an area no larger than a soccer pitch. These are events people kill and die for — and they have for thousands of years in great numbers on this very spot.

  On this particular morning, though, I had the whole place to myself except for one old Palestinian man who was sweeping the steps. I wandered aimlessly for a while around the geometric tiles of the Dome and eventually made my way to the back wall where a small set of steps dropped to the Golden Gate. Of the eight gates in the walls of Jerusalem, this is the only one that is sealed and permanently closed. The door has been bricked in because of an ancient legend that says the Jewish messiah will arrive through this gate. So the current keepers of the Temple Mount have blocked it up.

  The Golden Gate was one of the ancient entrances to Jerusalem, and almost certainly Jesus Christ, on his first palm-waving entry into Jerusalem, accessed the city here. So I stood and gazed at the steps, the very ones Jesus would have strolled up. They were roped off, but soon enough the old man who had been sweeping came over. At first he said it was forbidden to go closer, to actually walk down the steps and touch the fabled gate, but after looking both ways he removed the rope and swept his arm forward in invitation. I descended and placed my hand on the gate. It was cold. In the dark shadows, however, there was only decaying masonry and the acrid smell of urine.

  Wbutchers line the alleyways hen I came back up the steps, the old man held out his hand for baksheesh. This translates as a kind of a tip. If someone has done a service for you, you’re obliged to reciprocate by giving baksheesh, usually in the form of money. I didn’t begrudge him, and he seemed perfectly happy with the single shekel I doled into his old broom-callused hand. He flashed a cracked-tooth grin, and I left the Temple Mount, disappointed because, in the heart of three of the world’s major religions, I hadn’t felt anything.

  The streets of old Jerusalem are narrow and dark. Spice shops and halal butchers line the alleyways, and in one doorway I spied two elderly shopkeepers arguing with each other. Standing nose to nose, they shook their fists in the air, then, after a few hot moments, ambled down the street arm in arm. I watched them disappear around a corner, and I couldn’t understand it. How could they go from confrontation to friendship so quickly?

  I was forgetting that their House of Being, their Palace of Words, was different. In English we frame arguments within the metaphor of a battle. We “defend our positions.” We “shoot down” the ideas of others. It’s a metaphorical fight, and the whole point is that there will be winners and losers. It’s not necessarily like that in Arabic. Different languages work under different metaphors. An argument could, for example, be a performance, or a dance, if you like. There are steps to be learned. It’s a delicate interplay of give and take, a thing to be engaged in and even enjoyed.

  All in all, Arabic has received a bad rap in the West. We tend to think of it as a harsh language filled with crackling, angry consonants. The truth is that these consonants float on a bed of honey. They drip with vowels.

  Most Arabic words are constructed from three-letter “roots.” For example, k-t-b conveys the idea of writing. The addition of other sounds before, between, and after the roots produces a whole family of related words such as book (kitab) and writer (katib). Kataba forms the past tense, and yaktuba yields the future. And maktub takes everything a step farther. It carries the concept of fate, the hand of Allah, and a whole way of being. Literally, it means “it is written.”

  In English we, too, have words that shift meaning, or at least tense, with the change of a vowel: drink, drank, drunk; sing, sang, sung. I once taught English to a student who did well on these irregular verbs. For sit she wrote sat. For swim she wrote swam. For think she paused for a moment, confused, and then pencilled in the word thank.

  My favourite triad in Arabic consists of the letters s-l-m. From these you get the word salam or peace. All through the Muslim world you are greeted with salam aleikum — “peace be with you.”

  If you listen closely, you’ll hear salam everywhere. Even the very word Islam comes with these fine sounds: I-salam. Quite often Islam is translated in English as “surrender to God,” and a Muslim mu-salam is “one who surrenders to God.” But to me those English translations are loaded with baggage. We’re still working here with negative connotations. Another translation I often hear is “submission.” That’s even worse. It carries the idea that Muslims are forced into something, which isn’t true. All these translations only serve to reveal the West’s own prejudices and ignorance.

  Among the alim — the scholars of the Quran — there is much discussion about such subtle distinctions. A proper understanding of the word Muslim must carry the flavour of the word salam, so that in English it should translate as something along the lines of “one who is pacified by God,” or even “one to whom God has brought peace.”

  And I like that very much.

  Now imagine a voice … deep and resonant, biblical even. “Behold,” it booms, “the whole Earth had one language and one speech … and it came to pass that the people found a plain and they dwelt there.

  “Then they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. Let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole Earth.’”

  The above passage concerns the Tower of Babel, of course, the story of the formation of languages. It’s found in Genesis 11:1–9.

  Babel almost certainly refers to Babylon, though the forgotten scribe who wrote this particular tale had probably never seen that fabled city. He would have lived somewhere in ancient Israel, quite likely in Jerusalem, and anyway, he was already writing about something long ago and far away.

  “Let us make a name for ourselves,” the people of Babel said. That was arrogance, obviously, and it didn’t go unnoticed by God. He didn’t like the idea of people coming up to see him. In fact, he didn’t like it at all.

  “Behold,” said God, “they are one people and they have one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do.” He considered the tower. “Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” This worried Go
d greatly, and after deep deliberation, he made his plan: “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

  Confuse in the ancient Hebrew texts is the word balal, an archaic root that actually means “to overflow or spill.” And that’s what God let loose. He turned up the heat until the pot spilled over, mixing up the languages of these first people and “scattering them from there over the face of all the Earth.” After that, God thought, the troublesome creatures wouldn’t be a problem.

  Boy, was God wrong!

  Today there seems to be a sort of reverse Tower of Babel effect. Of the six thousand languages spoken around the world, it is estimated that only five hundred will be left by the year 2100, and even then only about twenty will still be in solid shape. The rest will have simply withered away. And another century after that the world may be down to three or four superpower languages and a handful more that have simply refused to die.

  Arabic is one of the Big Twenty. It’s spoken by almost two hundred million people in more than twenty-two countries, though it has separated into a number of dialects that vary greatly from nation to nation. The Arabic spoken in Morocco, for example, is virtually incomprehensible to Saudis.

  The written language is the same, however, and that’s what anchors everything. The Quran retains the seventh-century Arabic script of Muhammad, and according to Islamic thought, it simply can’t be translated without losing something. The sacred book of Islam can only be read in the original Arabic. Even in Muslim countries such as Malaysia and Pakistan where Arabic isn’t spoken, the faithful must learn the old Arabic. The Quran can’t be reproduced in Malay or Urdu. Something of the nuance would be lost, it’s claimed, or something of its power — a very interesting idea indeed.