I hardly expected so remote a mystery to turn a corner in my hometown of Aspen, Colorado, but it was there, during dinner with physicist Murray Gell-Mann, that a new factor surfaced. Known to the outside world for quark theory, Murray is also a virtuoso linguist fluent in some three dozen languages, with knowledge of scores more. Having traveled with him in mainland Mexico and Spain, I can vouch for the perfection of his Spanish, though he modestly says his French is better. What most bonds us, I think, is a mutual obsession with words, for analyzing our words as we communicate with them, for speculating about others, and most of all for playing with them without shame in the process. When I told him that Mexican Spanish was in-coger-ent, he instantly issued its overdue laugh. In Baja California he had only been as far south as Guerrero Negro, but even about the town’s name he had a theory. “It is well known that Guerrero Negro is the translation of an American boat shipwrecked there, named Black Warrior. My own belief is that the boat was built in Tuscaloosa, for Tuscaloosa is Choctaw for ‘black warrior.’ The name ‘Guerrero Negro’ has its ultimate origin in Choctaw.”
“Tuscaloosa is pretty far inland for boat-building,” I said, “and that theory strikes me as naval gazing. But there is a curious phenomenon further south.” I described, in full, the phenomenon in La Giganta.
“Well,” stated Murray, leaning back in pre-lecture mode, forgetting about food. “There were three indigenous languages in the southern part of Baja California. Pericú and Guaycura were independent languages, not much is known about them, and they’re gone. But the northernmost language, Cochimí, was part of the Yuman family of languages, some of which are still spoken in southern Arizona and California. If Cochimí was cut off for centuries and perhaps millenia from its Yuman origins, it would have gone its own way, but if enough of its words survive, linguists might be able to trace the degree of transformation from Yuman that remained in Arizona. Rate of change is a measure of when speakers of a language separated, and if Cochimí’s degree of change from other Yuman languages can be established, it might be possible to fix an approximate date for the Cochimí migration to Baja Califonria. Since the speech you’re talking about is between Loreto and La Paz, any words that survived would have been Cochimí.”
I had no further information of my own to supply. Murray resumed eating and the conversation changed course, but I left the meal with my mind racing. Was I unable to penetrate the fast mumble because it was laced with Cochimí? Was there enough language left that linguists could determine when the Cochimí migrated to the peninsula, speaking a branch of Yuman that would have evolved at a rate measurable by linguists? The area of Cochimí speakers coincided with that of the great cave paintings, whose makers remained unknown. If it could be determined linguistically that the Cochimí arrived as far back as the first images, could it be determined that the Cochimí, in fact, were the mysterious painters? Soon after dinner with Murray I encountered an article on the lost indigenous languages of Baja California, authored by a team of linguists and posted on a La Paz website, which mentioned as a long-established fact that Cochimí indeed belonged to the Yuman family of languages. Murray might have been winging it about Choctaw, but about the origins of Cochimí in Yuman he was on solid ground.
In March of 2009 I was asked by a La Paz environmental organization of which I was a board member, Niparajá, to co-author a book with photos on La Giganta and its contiguous mountain range to the north, Sierra Guadalupe, with the goal of promoting biosphere reserve status for the whole cordillera. Such a designation would complement existing biospheres El Vizcaíno to the north and Sierra de la Laguna to the south, extending protective measures to the state’s volcanic spine. I quickly agreed. The integrity of ranching culture was central to the plan, and I realized the moment had arrived to bring its speech anomaly to public attention. As part of its ranching tradition, La Giganta boasted a linguistic phenomenon that deserved preservation—and study. The book itself would draw attention to the speech, and because the supervising structure of biosphere reserves attracts grant money, somewhere down the line a linguist might actually be dispatched to check into it.
I also realized that what I had to go on—personal observation, inability to understand, stray facts and speculation—were less than the basis I needed to introduce a new phenomenon to print. I needed someone with academic discipline who might have encountered this enigma. A name leapt into my mind: Fermín Reygadas. An anthropology professor from the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur, Fermín had explored the state by vehicle, foot, mule, archeological dig and ties to living ranches, and I was sure that his aptitudes included speech. I had known him socially for years, had interviewed him formally for a previous book, set up the interview and punched the tape recorder.
I told Fermín that I had heard an alternate form of speech in La Giganta and asked if he had encountered it. “I know exactly what you’re talking about,” he declared, and as he began, I realized I didn’t need to ask questions, only to listen.
When Fermín first visited La Giganta with a colleague, who was also from Mexico City, they made a list of one hundred-fifty words they did not know. There were areas of usage. When ranchers spoke of cars they used contemporary Spanish, and when they spoke of cattle, pack animals or plants they employed a vocabulary out of use elsewhere. Fermín and his friend began to investigate these words, found them to be indeed legitimately Spanish, but to represent a seventeenth century vocabulary long superseded in the rest of the peninsula. The Giganta, communities, isolated from such new influences such as mining to the south and north, spoke a language still frozen in the seventeenth century, which is to say, the language of the artisans and growers of crops that the padres recruited from the mainland, principally from Sonora.
There was indeed another influence, but it was from the area itself, for many of the bachelors from Sonora married Indian women, and the children grew up speaking with their mothers as well as their fathers. Fermín and his associate didn’t identify actual Cochimí words, but the nasal sound of the alternate speech could well derive from inflections of the aboriginal tongue. “It sounds like this,” said Fermín, and he suddenly abandoned his professorial bass for a nasal whine in which he squealed “Nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh!” Was he demonstrating or lampooning? After multiple replayings of the tape I couldn’t decide, or help laughing.
Two well-studied sources offered remnants of the lost languages of Baja California Sur, he continued. The journals of the missionary padres, above all those of the Jesuits glutted with free time after their expulsion from the Americas in 1767, were full of linguistic information about the tribes they tried to convert to Christianity. Further clues lay in La Giganta’s toponyms, its place names. In the Sierra de la Laguna, for instance, there were only a half-dozen toponyms that derived from Pericú, and everything else was named for saints. In La Giganta, by contrast, there were literally hundreds of place names that derived from Cochimí, providing further data for linguists. Through anthropological studies, the meanings of some of those names could be determined—whether a location was a canyon, a hill or a plain; the presence or absence of water; the abundance of animals to hunt. Some of these words could be correlated with versions in the records kept by the padres, and all the language that had been converted to European spelling and survived in written form had been studied in minute detail. But since the twenty-year-old collection of antique words by Fermín and his colleague, study of living speech in areas formerly occupied by the Cochimí had been zero.
Now that I was researching a book instead of just being nosy, I felt secure about asking Lico himself about what he was speaking. They had two forms of speech, one of which I couldn’t understand, and I proceeded to describe my impression of it. Lico rushed to assure me that there was no wish to exclude. It was only a kind of shorthand they used for talking about practical matters on the ranch.
I reassured him that I hadn’t been offended but was just curious. I had been in ranches all over the state and had he
ard that sound only in La Giganta. Now that I was writing about the area, I felt I should account for it. I had interviewed a professor from the University of La Paz about it and had the tape with me. Did he want to hear it?
We opened beers and Fermín held forth on the dining table with a view toward the enclosing peaks. I paid close attention to Lico’s face when Fermín reached his nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh. This, I thought, might finally offend, but Lico listened with no change of expression. Lico had little to say about Fermín’s discourse, finding it an elaboration of what I had already said. I raised the possibility that there might be Cochimí words mixed with the Spanish. No, there were no Indian words, said Lico, just Spanish spoken another way.
Fermín and associate had found Spanish but no Cochimí, and Lico denied any non-Spanish words, but for me the case wasn’t quite closed. In La Giganta, any word that survived nine generations since mestizo children grew up talking Spanish with their fathers and Cochimí with their mothers would have gained a fully Spanish pronunciation and been assimilated into the language. In English, for instance, we routinely refer to coyotes and chocolate, staples of English vocabulary, unaware that both terms derive from Nahuatl, which descends from Aztec. The same process would have transformed Cochimí originals into local choyero. Fermín and friend, widely knowledgeable and focused in the detail, were not finally linguists schooled in the permutations of Yuman. It was conceivable, desirable—and unlikely—that a Yuman specialist would venture into La Giganta for field work, but even a linguist with more general training might collect words that couldn’t be accounted for in Spanish and send them to a Yuman specialist, wherever he or she be.
Before the book introducing the fast mumble to the public was published, a biologist friend to whom I had described the phenomenon sent me an emergency e-mail: a young man who was leaving the next day to pursue a doctorate in linguistics in Mexico City, and who would be gone for two years, could meet me that very afternoon for coffee. My friend thought it important that the doctoral candidate arrive in the capital aware that there was a local linguistic anomaly to be accounted for. I sped to the internet café.
In his early twenties, the student was intelligent and personable. My friend accompanied us for an hour, then left us for another hour to ourselves. The young man was passionate about words, and had taped choyeros discussing the topics of their choice so he could collect and compare accents. He had never visited the area of the fast mumble or heard of its existence, but he found it fascinating. I told him it wasn’t speech they used with strangers, but I would be glad to introduce him to my friends, and once they were used to his presence he would hear all the mumbling he liked. He replied that the doctoral program required two years of book and class study before he could do field work, but his ultimate plan was to return to Baja California Sur and become one of its few resident linguists. The fast mumble would itself vary from place to place, he said, so he would need to study it across its range. As an unstudied phenomenon it might even be a possibility for a doctoral thesis, though it was far too early to tell. A turn of conversation revealed that we were both pianists dedicated to Chopin, which gave me new confidence in his ear. I left the conversation elated that a seed had been planted, however long it would take—if it did—to fructify.
As for my own inability to penetrate the fast mumble, I realized that its inclusion of 150 Spanish words so old they were new to Fermín, delivered in a slurred sotto voce, was enough to render their sound opaque to my foreign ears even without permutations of Cochimí. Purely my own was the notion that the Cochimí might be established as the creators of the unattributed cave paintings, simply because the degree of change in their speech from a remote mother tongue indicated that they were around when the murals were created. Such a historical bank shot was so tenuous that it was less hypothesis than personal fantasy. But, as the genre of mystery books and movies shows us, the human being delights in inventing conundrums, then solving them.
Bruce Berger has published eleven books, the majority of which investigate the intersections of nature and human culture in desert environments. Among them are The Telling Distance, winner of the Western States Book Award and the Colorado Book Award, and Almost an Island, an account of thirty years’ experience in Baja California. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Outside and many other publications. For recreation he plays benefit classical piano concerts in Mexico.
ERIN BYRNE
Spirals: Memoir of a Celtic Soul
She explores a trip to Ireland that was a strange kind of homecoming.
If you do not bring the kind eye of creative expectation to your inner world, you will never find anything there.
—John O’Donohue, Anam Ċara
A shell-shaped spiral emerged in my center when my child-eyes first beheld the rugged cove outside the cottage where I was born on the west coast of Ireland. The clear wavelets lapped over grayblue rocks and my little pink toes, and washed into my fragile senses. This shape was all around me as I grew—mollusca, seahorses, and Scolelepis Squamata (the bristleworm, slender bluish green, which swims in spirals when disturbed)—and I collected many to set upon my shelf.
The Gaelic tongue curled into the whirls of my ear, to the spiral ganglion, sending the sound to my brain when my mother called me home across fields of high grass (gabh isteach!) or in my own voice raised in song (amhrán) or when my grandmother (máthair mhór) murmured her love, saying, “Tá grá agam duit.” The lonely tones of a uilleann pipe chased the wind through mist-kissed air to rustle the leaves of the wild cherry tree I climbed.
When I was four years old, my mother held my newborn sister in her arms and I put my hand upon her small head, smoothing her silky black hair.
“See this place where God breathed life into her,” my mother said. “Right here on the top of her head it was; see how her hair grows around and around the spot. It happened just the same way with you, love.”
She cupped her hand on the top of my head and smiled.
My grandfather took me for long walks along leafy lanes. One autumn day he pointed to a falling leaf.
“Watch the wind waft it down in spiralesque whooshes, darling,” he said. He reached down and pulled the ribbon from my head and my long hair lifted and fanned out and wrapped around my face. The sound of our laughter rose and was carried off.
He put his gnarled finger on the tip of mine and whispered that the spirals there were my very own print, with none other like it in the wide world. He told me about limitless galaxies that danced in space in the very same shape, and magnetic fields that drew objects together. He showed me rings upon a freshly chopped tree trunk, and tendrils of flower stems and vines that grew in loops.
Some days at dusk, I stood on the shore and watched for my father’s boat on distant waves. He’d told me that the oceans ushered their tides in and out in a spiral motion, and I trusted the sea to return him to me in just this same way.
Smoke snaked into my nostrils from a peat fire in the hearth of our cottage, then again in another cottage, then again in another, illuminating, cooking, warming, and ever burning—smoldering overnight then blown to orangish life in the morning. The smell wound around my red-bright heart while my family slept and waked and worked and ate and stared into those licking flames; we were warmed outside and in.
I remember arcs of sparks leaping from fires.
A strange thing happened to me when I was fourteen, walking home late one night across a high plain in County Kerry. Across the black ink-spill of sky I saw fires on far horizons. Suddenly, my spirit flew backwards over decades, centuries, millenniums to a night halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice. I was standing inside a circle of gigantic stones and there were fires everywhere. The warm earth pulsed under my bare feet and a restless breeze raised the hair on my arms. A heavy cloak pressed my shoulders (I knew, of course, that it was white). My raised hand held a dagger.
Bealtaine, the fire festival.
I was at the pla
ce of seventeen pillars, Drombeg, called Druid’s Altar, over in County Cork, miles from my home. I knew the bonfires were the burning of winter bedding and floor coverings, and some saw witches jumping through flames in ethereal ecstasy while others performed rituals to protect people from otherworldly spirits. It was the Bronze Age. As I stood surrounded by the stones, spirals sparked from the fire and sprinkled down from shooting stars straight into me.
And just as suddenly as I’d appeared at the bonfires, I was at the gate of our cottage—my hand on the latch, my feet on the path. It was like something out of a story, it was, that apparition of myself. Even now when I think of that dagger, I am filled with fright. Have I been gifted with a faery life?
It sounds strange, but the spirals I felt that night remained inside me, wrapping around time and place, turning memory to experience and experience to memory, in spite of time’s insistence otherwise. What is this shape that laps around and around my awareness of the real?
These ancient symbols existed before the written word. Before the pyramids emerged in Egypt, in a place called Newgrange on the eastern side of Ireland, the people sensed something quickening inside their bodies when they looked up at the swirling of the heavens. They sought to imprint this upon their stones, to show order coming out of chaos. The spiral’s mystical powers were thought to repel evil spirits from entering tombs, and the stones of Newgrange were covered with these curving carvings.
Bees danced in a spiral near their hive, revealing the source of honey I collected as a young woman. It was for the making of the mead: ambrosia, honey-wine, the nectar of the gods, which promised pleasures of the palate and the flesh, and quickened the mysterious pulsings of arousal that were beginning to stir in my blood when I felt the touch of a certain young man.
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