Locally embedded systems like Tuvan river-flow orientation may be found in many cultures, where the local landscape takes priority over the more abstract cardinal directions. Such languages force their speakers to specify at all times whether they are moving up, down, or across relative to a stream, mountain, wind, or some other frame of orientation. In order to speak correctly, one must attend to the lay of the land.
For the Mongush family, with their seasonal migrations among the mountain passes in unending pursuit of greener pastures, nothing was more pertinent to their survival than the local landscape. They were finely attuned to notice the tiniest details. In their world, but also in ours, landscapes permeate daily life. Landscapes are sculpted by humans, not just in the obvious physical ways—for example, by building roads or leveling hills—but also in cultural ways. What people pay attention to or name in the landscape may be deeply influenced by the language they speak. This holds especially true for small, indigenous cultures, well adapted by cultural habits to surviving in a particular place. Languages, too, adapt and equip their speakers with tools to describe, divide, and manage the local environment and its resources. Nor is this dynamic limited to small or indigenous cultures. If one Manhattanite says, “I’m cabbing it uptown,” another Manhattanite will understand perfectly, but outsiders may need a second to process the use of “cab” as a verb and to figure out what exactly “uptown” refers to.
Living with Tuvans, I learned that languages thus come to reflect local geography, not only in their vocabulary but also in more deeply structural ways, in their grammar. This knowledge is often accumulated over many centuries, and so geographic terms can represent an ancient layer of cultural knowledge encoded in language. Grammar can be “embedded” in the local landscape, and in fact cannot be understood or described in isolation from it. This finding, and similar ones by other scientists, has contributed to an emerging area of study known as “ethnosyntax.” This formulation goes against the traditional wisdom in linguistics, within the Chomskyan paradigm, by claiming that knowledge of grammar is not contained solely in mental structures—that is, rules in the mind—but also spills out to encompass the local landscape and cultural habits.
* * *
In Ket, a nearly extinct language of Siberia that is a distant relative of Native American languages spoken in Alaska, the verb “to stand” is said in four different ways, depending on what is standing:
dúghìn
for a human or animal (as in keh’t dúghìn, “a person stands”)
dúghàta
for a tree (as in ohks dúghàta, “a tree stands”)
úyba’ut
for an object (as in u’y úyba’ut, “a cradle stands”)
hávìta
for a structure (as in qu’s hávìta, “a tent stands”)
* * *
If this expansive view of grammar is true, then you cannot fully explore a language by simply sitting down with a speaker in a room and asking him questions, as is the current practice in linguistics courses. When I was co-authoring a Tuvan dictionary, I grappled with the problem of what information to include under the entry for “go.” To give an accurate and complete definition, I would have had to include not only the descriptions given above, but the very landscapes themselves. Similarly, as the following section describes, languages may lack what we think of as basic terms for colors, and instead have a complex system that describes the colors and patterns of animals. All these ways of encoding local knowledge in language are useful cultural adaptations, and they reveal a uniquely Tuvan worldview.
WHAT COLOR IS YOUR YAK?
One thing I learned about yaks is that they are incredibly skittish animals. They dislike strangers, noises, and camera flashes. The Mongush family’s yaks did not allow anyone other than their master, Eres, to approach them. Yet once a day the entire herd, the cows and calves following their leader, an imposing shaggy bull, ambled downhill to the stockade. Here the lactating mothers were tied up and milked, while their mewling calves waited eagerly to suck the leftovers. Leaning on the split-rail fence of the stockade, I spent many hours observing and conversing about yaks. My take-home lesson? Every yak has its own color, and color (like other characteristics such as pattern, horn shape, or personality) provides a system of powerful descriptive detail.
The nomadic Tuvan yak herders have a complex hierarchal system for classifying yaks by the following traits in ascending order of importance: (1) fur color, (2) body pattern, (3) head marking, and (4) individual personality. They use different classifications for horses, goats, sheep, and cows. Mastering the system of yak-naming allows a herder to efficiently pick out or refer to a specific yak from a herd of hundreds. The color-and-pattern naming system is a strict hierarchy, determined by cultural preferences (which yak, horse, or cow colors and patterns Tuvans regard as more desirable, beautiful, or rare). If an animal possesses one or more special traits, you may omit mention of the less special ones, but if an animal has only a common trait, such as fur color (which all animals possess), you must mention it. If a horse or yak possesses one of several recognized body patterns—for example, star-spotted—then it will simply be called by that pattern, and its color need not be mentioned. A horse or yak possessing the highest trait, a spot on the forehead, will be named by that characteristic alone. If two animals each possess a foreheard spot, they will be differentiated by naming the spot plus the next trait down the hierarchy, for example “forehead spot brown stripe.” Learning extra labels for animals imposes a slight burden on memory, but as an information-packaging technology, it affords Tuvans great efficiency in breeding and herding.
By spending many hours with Tuvan children, I observed that they do not seem to learn words for colors as abstracts labels for qualia (e.g., colors). Rather, what they learn are a set of concrete labels that subsume both color and pattern of specific types of animals. By learning a set of labels and their proper use, the speaker also acquires (with little or no effort) a hierarchal classification scheme. Tuvan children learn their color terms as they learn to distinguish (and herd) domestic animals. This provides an example of how categories we may think of as abstract and universal, like color, are in fact culturally filtered and locally contingent.
Tuvan nomads seem to prize certain colors and patterns for horses, yaks, and goats. Not merely aesthetic, this preference reveals an even deeper knowledge system. As experienced breeders, Tuvans have for centuries practiced genetic modification by selecting and manipulating preferred outward traits. They do so not by understanding the DNA (which is to them invisible and unknown), but by observing how external traits interact and combine. Knowing which are recessive and which dominant, they maximize desired traits by controlling breeding among animals. For example, for a good chance of getting a calf with the highly prized star-spotted pattern, you should mate a solid-colored bull yak with a spotted yak cow.
Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), the father of genetic sciences, experimented with cross-pollination of pea plants and discovered which traits would be passed on, and which of those traits would be dominant or recessive in a particular combination.2 Mendel did all this without actually seeing or understanding genes themselves. Humans have been practicing folk genetic engineering as long as they have domesticated plants and animals. Tuvans, like most animal-breeding cultures, have not had the luxury of setting their genetic knowledge down in books. Instead, they recruit language—and powerful folk taxonomies like the color/pattern hierarchy—to encode, store, and transmit this knowledge.3
Folk taxonomies encapsulate generations of subtle and sophisticated observations about how the pieces of the animal and plant kingdoms fit together, and how they relate to each other and to humans. They differ in which outward traits they use to classify organisms, almost always choosing combinations of multiple traits over single ones. Traits may include appearance, behavior, habitat, impact on humans, or some combination of these. The selection is limited only by the standard of usefulness. Folk taxonomies e
nable human survival. They arise from humans’ keen ability to notice and correlate multiple characteristics and interacting patterns, and put this information to practical use. They typically contain a great deal of hidden, or implicit, information, as well as explicit facts about the plant and animal kingdoms.
Such knowledge is fragile, however, and may be lost in transmission. This is particularly true for cultures without writing, which must take great care to pass on their traditional wisdom. A single word may reflect generations of careful observation of the natural world.
Looking up at this edifice of knowledge, I traced my own intellectual path across the landscape. The academic study of linguistics thrilled me, to be sure, and I reveled in piecing together the multidimensional jigsaw puzzle that is the grammar of a language. But in my studies, I had encountered all this knowledge on paper. Out among the nomads, I found language to have an entirely new heft, texture, smell, and taste. My time in Tuva awakened me to the larger possibilities. I now saw language not just as a way of speaking or a domain of cognition. It was an entire conceptual universe of thought, compactly and efficiently encoded into words. Largely unmapped, this landscape of languages awaited discovery.
{CHAPTER THREE}
THE POWER OF WORDS
The struggle between dominated and dominant groups for the right to survive includes what I have called “the ecology of language.” By that I mean that the preservation of language is a part of human ecology.
—Einar Haugen
DÖNGGÜR (doong-gur) is a powerful word. It means “male domesticated uncastrated rideable reindeer in its third year and first mating season, but not ready for mating.” It is one of dozens of words that can be expressed in the Tofa language spoken by Siberian reindeer herders, each providing a precise description of a type of reindeer. This technology allows herders to identify and describe with a single word what would otherwise require a complex construction. But the Tofa are giving up their ancestral tongue in favor of Russian—the dominant national language, which doesn’t have a remote equivalent to the word “dönggür.” And the Tofa are just one of hundreds of small communities whose language is endangered. Working with such groups, I explore how knowledge is encoded in language, and what exactly is lost—in terms of descriptive power and survival technologies—when small languages vanish.
Many linguists, including leading thinkers Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, view language in the technical, cognitive sense as consisting of basic elements. For example, there are words (the lexicon) and then there are mental rules for building words or combining them into sentences (the grammar). An English speaker, for example, has in her mental dictionary the word “hat,” which is simply an arbitrary string of sounds she has learned to associate with an object one wears on one’s head. She also has a rule of morphology that tells her the plural is “hats” and a rule of syntax that says when there’s an adjective, put it first—“red hat,” not “hat red.” And she has certain cognitive structures, not learned but thought to be genetic. The knowledge that nouns and adjectives are different parts of speech and that one modifies the other, for example, allows her to understand that red describes a type of hat, but hat does not describe a type of red. This cognitive view, while not incorrect, bypasses much of the knowledge that language actually contains.
As the examples in the last chapter show, languages abound in “cultural knowledge,” which is neither genetic nor explicitly learned, but comes to us in an information package—rich and hierarchical in its structure. Any English-speaking child may know the word “uncle,” but what does she store in her head as its meaning? An uncle may be a mother’s brother, or a father’s sister’s husband, or perhaps just her parents’ adult male friend. The English-speaking child has no explicit linguistic information to indicate these distinct positions in the kinship tree. Why not? We could speculate that since it was not culturally crucial to distinguish these positions, the language did not do so. While our mind readily grasps the various types of uncle, English provides no ready-made, unique labels to distinguish them. Conversely, in cultures like Tofa, with more socially important kinship relations, there exists no general word for uncle. Five different types of uncles would have five completely different labels. By learning these labels, the child implicitly learns that these are distinct kinship roles.
Kinship systems are just the tip of the iceberg. By simply knowing the word “dönggür,” the young Tofa reindeer herder has, at the tip of his tongue, a tool to identify among the herd a specific set of reindeer. Tofa reindeer herders who have switched to speaking Russian can still talk about and herd reindeer, but they lack the labels to do so efficiently. Knowledge their ancestors accumulated over centuries, knowledge that is specifically adapted to the narrow ecological niche of reindeer herding in south Siberian mountain forests, has essentially been lost.
At some deeper level, human cognition may be the same no matter what tongue one speaks. But languages package knowledge in radically different ways, facilitating certain means of conceptualizing, naming, and discussing the world. In the case of a young Tofa reindeer herder who no longer speaks his ancestral tongue, the human knowledge base—as manifested in specific ways of describing the world of reindeer—has been impoverished. Arcane bits of knowledge vanish under the pressures of globalization.
Does this matter? While this may seem like a minor loss in the face of modernity and progress, we cannot even fathom what the long-term effects will be. Klaus Toepfer, former executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (1998–2006), warns: “Indigenous peoples not only have a right to preserve their way of life. But they also hold vital knowledge of the animals and plants with which they live. Enshrined in their cultures and customs are also secrets of how to manage habitats and the land in environmentally friendly, sustainable ways.”1
We don’t really have a grip on how much or what kind of knowledge is out there, uncataloged and unrecorded, existing only in memory. Much of this knowledge concerns animal and plant species, many still undocumented by modern science. The sobering fact that both animal species and human languages are going extinct in tandem portends an impending loss of human knowledge on a scale not seen before. If we hold any hope of understanding and fostering ecodiversity on Earth, we must value vanishing knowledge while it still exists.
WHERE IS A LANGUAGE?
According to the classical theory that is taught in most linguistics classes today, under the influence of Noam Chomsky and his followers, grammar is an invisible set of rules in the mind for combining sounds into words and words into sentences. Yet my struggles to decode spoken Tuvan convinced me that it contains much more than that.
Of course, languages are made up of invisible rules in the head, and some of these are likely genetically determined and dictated by the structure of the brain. This brilliant insight by Chomsky—that language cannot be learned by trial and error or by mere learning and observation alone, but rather is part of our DNA—caused a fundamental shift in how linguists viewed language, as important as the Copernican revolution for astronomy.
But it does not the tell whole story, and there are several important gaps to fill. The first gap is descriptive—we still lack even a basic scientific description of the vast majority of the world’s languages. Many anomalies out there will surprise us once we do notice them, and they will cause us to revise basic assumptions. For example, Urarina, a language spoken by fewer than 3,000 people in the Amazon jungle of Peru, has an unusual way of constructing sentences. An Urarina sentence containing these three elements in the following order:
Kinkajou’s bag + steal + spider monkey
is understood to mean, “The spider monkey steals the kinkajou’s bag.” Urarina places the direct object first, the verb second, and the subject last.2 Other word-order patterns are much more common. English uses subject-verb-object (SVO), but this is not the only possibility. Turkish and German put the verb last, using subject-object-verb (SOV) order. Welsh, on the other han
d, is VSO, putting the verb first, subject second, and object last (read + I + book = “I read the book”). The Urarina OVS word order is vanishingly rare among the world’s languages. If not for Urarina and a few other Amazonian languages, scientists might hypothesize—falsely—that OVS word order was cognitively impossible, that the human brain could not process it. Small languages have many more surprises in store for science. Since each new grammar pattern sheds light on how the brain creates language, the loss of even one language may impact a full understanding of human cognition.
Imagine a zoologist describing mammals by looking only at the top hundred most common ones. It would be easier to examine dogs and cats and cows, all of which are composed as the same building blocks as other mammals. But if we did, we’d never know that a mammal could swim (whales), fly (bats), lay eggs (echidnas), use tools (sea otters and orangutans), or have an inflatable balloon growing from its head (male hooded seals).3 Ignorance of unusual mammals would impoverish our notion of what mammals can be. It is precisely the weird and wonderful exceptions that afford us a full view of the possibilities.
The second gap in our basic knowledge about languages arises because the invisible mental rules (the grammar)—which have been almost the exclusive focus of study among linguists for decades—by themselves do not generate the whole linguistic system. When Chomsky proclaimed language “a window on the mind,” an entire research program for the discipline of linguistics was launched. In the 50 years since, this research has already yielded many important insights into human cognition. With his famous sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” Chomsky demonstrated how linguists can explore complex structures (sounds, phrases, sentences, etc.) even when there is no meaningful content at all. The lack of meaning does not hinder us in our investigation of pristine mental structures, and we ought to distinguish between the two. This has been the conventional wisdom in linguistics for decades.
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