Galina Adamova, a last speaker of Tofa, on her funeral bier, Russia, 2001.
Galina and Varvara loved to sing. They broke into song at any opportunity. The problem was, there only seemed to be one song, or rather just one melody for every Tofa song. Our team musicologist, Sven Grawunder, had traveled all over Siberia and many other places documenting special vocal techniques and ancient song traditions, but even he was stymied by this impossibly small repertoire. Each time we asked for a different song, we were treated to what sounded to us like exactly the same song with different words. It was really a single couplet, with only five distinct notes. We would later record four other singers who all seemed to be doing the same thing, even though singers in the other village insisted they were singing a different song. It again sounded exactly the same, the simplest possible pattern of five notes, repeated in two lines. It was as if every single song the culture possessed was as minimal as the first two lines of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” with no further variation possible.
Another odd thing they did with the songs was to cleverly disguise the words, interrupting every syllable with a kind of yodel, so that even other Tofa speakers could not repeat or understand most of the words. So, a sentence like “I’m riding my reindeer” would come out as I-oho-m ri-oho-ding my-oho rei-ehe-ndeer. It was like a speech-disguise game, pig latin or ubbi dubbi, scrambling syllables to keep the meaning secret.
Our initial hypothesis was that in past times the Tofa must have had a rich song tradition, as did all the native people around them, but that due to cultural decline they had forgotten all their songs apart from one basic melody. But after hearing dozens of variations on the theme and finding half a dozen people in two villages who eagerly performed songs for us, we realized this was not the tail end of some tradition. Rather, it was a truly ancient, basic, primordial song tradition that had persisted, resisting outside influences, special and insular unto itself. It was the original song for the Tofa people, perhaps the only one they had ever sung or cared to sing, even though they had been exposed to many other types of songs and melodies over the centuries of contact with outsiders. Nor was their musical ability limited. Like other Siberians, they had a heightened attunement to forest sounds and animal calls and, using their mouths, birch-bark horns, or birch-bark whistles, could imitate many different kinds of animal sounds. And their language boasted a large number of words describing different types of sounds.
We were excited to be sitting in the presence of two distinguished elders, but getting anything useful out of them proved difficult. Drunken relatives and neighbors frequently barged into the house and wanted to “help” us, rambling incoherently. The sisters, though eager to talk, were missing teeth and spoke nearly incoherently, whether in Tofa or Russian. And after recording several songs and deciding there was really just one song, we figured we’d gotten what we could. We sighed at the fact that, of the elders we’d met so far, several were too shy or too incapacitated to talk, while the sisters clearly wanted to talk but were incomprehensible. If this was all that remained of Tofa, we were in trouble.
One of the most animated moments we captured was when we managed to ask in the Tofa language about shamans. We knew from historical accounts that the Tofa were animists, believing in a profusion of local spirits, and that they had practicing shamans as recently as the 1950s. We had even seen a shaman’s costume in the local museum in Nizhneudinsk. We figured the sisters would have witnessed shamanic rituals themselves. Though it had been a forbidden topic for many years under communism, we hoped they might be willing to talk about it.
No sooner did I utter the word “shaman” than Galina spryly jumped up from where she had been sitting on her bed. She began a little dance around the room. She waved her stick in the air—it suddenly was no longer a walking stick, but a shaman’s staff, a dayak. She pretended to hold an invisible drum in one hand and beat it with her staff. “Dang, dang, dang,” she sang, making drumlike sounds. “The shamans danced like this,” she said. “If it’s a good shaman, you will get well,” she added, attesting to the healing powers once exercised by shamans.
I sucked in my breath and looked over at Sven, who was steadily aiming our camera at Galina. We had captured a truly special moment on film. This was a woman whose very culture had nearly been driven out of existence and who had personally been exiled to a labor camp. Any kind of cultural pride had been downright dangerous in her lifetime. Yet here she was, singing and dancing and celebrating the shamanic past, putting it on display for visiting foreigners.
As we left, she hugged us and said, “Come back soon!” Little did we suspect how soon we would be saying goodbye to Galina, and even though most of what she said was cryptic, we faithfully recorded every word. A few months later, on a return visit, we followed Galina’s funeral procession and paid our respects as the village bid yet another elder farewell. The day after Galina was buried, her elder sister Varvara knocked on our door. “I’ve come to sing for you,” she declared, breaking into the familiar five-note melody.
SINGING THE FLOCK BACK HOME
I crouched in the snow and waited quietly, deep in the woods on a northern slope of the Altai Mountains in Mongolia. My friend Mergen of the Tsengel people, an expert guide and hunter, sat next to me, waiting with his rifle and binoculars. He seemed to be hearing and seeing things I could not. His senses had been sharpened by thousands of hours spent observing this forest ecosystem, attending to bird calls, insect chirps, and details as minute as which side of a tree moss grows on and how deep an imprint a deer hoof makes in the moss underfoot. Mergen, at the relatively young age of 30, was already renowned for his hunting prowess: he bagged marmots in the fall, elk in the spring, wolves and foxes in winter, and squirrels in the summer. He knew the behavior patterns of each animal, its characteristic habits, resting places, and sounds. Stripping away a patch of birch bark about the width of two fingers, Mergen could make a birch-bark hunting whistle, called an etiski, in just minutes. Its squealing call resembled that of a small wild pig and could lure bears to come out in search of a meal. With more birch bark, carefully peeled away and soaked in a stream to make it pliable, he could make a murgu, an elk hunting horn that simulated a mating call.
Mergen’s language, a minor dialect of Tuvan with only about 1,200 speakers, has a remarkably rich system of sound mimesis, words that mimic natural sounds. His people, in part because of the landscape where they live and the hunting and herding activities they engage in, have both a heightened sensitivity to the soundscape and an enhanced ability to mimic and stylize sounds. The language has many more words than does, for example, English to describe different types and qualities of sounds. It also has a “productive” system, which means that speakers can make up new sound-symbolic words on the fly, and other speakers can understand them.
The system uses high vowels (pronounced with the tongue high in the mouth, such a ee, oo) to describe high-pitched sounds, such as a tin can clattering down a cliff. And it uses low vowels aa and oh to describe low-pitched sounds, such as a large wooden barrel rolling over rocks. It also uses consonants to express particular types of sounds, so that fricatives (sounds like s, sh, f, and z) express friction sounds (such as scraping the soles of your feet across shards of broken glass) and plosives (sounds that involve a burst of released air, such as p, b, t, and k) describe impact sounds, such as a boot being thrown against a wall. By combining these innovative uses of vowels and consonants, a speaker can imagine and make up an entirely new word to describe, say, the squeaking sound made by new leather boots (such a word would contain high vowels and fricative consonants). Or the sound made by dropping a boulder into a lake, which would use low vowels and plosives. Or a bear scratching its back against tree bark.
New words made up according to the above principles can be understood instantly by others, which makes the system uniquely productive. And productivity is one of the key elements linguists look for to give us insight into how human cognition is organized. Some
systems are not productive, like the irregular verbs of English; they must be merely memorized as a list, with their various idiosyncrasies. A productive system is one in which small building blocks, phonemes or morphemes, can be combined according to some general rules or principles shared by all speakers to form new words that are understood by other speakers. Linguists have long theorized that the smallest meaningful unit or building block is the morpheme; for example, the suffix –able, as in “fixable,” adds the meaning “able to do or be” to any verb.
Sound symbolism, the use of words that somehow represent sounds, like “blam” or “crunch,” is hard to explain because it seems to be using even smaller units—individual sounds or what linguists call “phonemes”—to carry meaning. While linguists have had to acknowledge that some sound symbolism does seem to exist even in English—words like hiss, gurgle, burble—they typically dismiss this as a marginal aspect of language, highly idiosyncratic, and not a category that can actually be as widespread and productive as I witnessed among the Tuvans of Mongolia.
I had first visited the country in 2000, as a member of a National Geographic expedition, the one in which I learned the intricate Monchak sheep ritual described in chapter 3. The expedition leader then was renowned musicologist Theodore (Ted) Levin of Dartmouth College. Ted’s mission was to explore the soundscapes of the Altai region. By “soundscapes,” he meant both the naturally emitted sounds produced by rivers, rocks, animals, and winds and the ways that people who live in Mongolia and the surrounding Altai region interpret, perceive, and make music with these sounds. His exploration of these topics in his book Where Rivers and Mountains Sing paints a fascinating and very different picture of what people can do with sound.3 As I tagged along on the expedition, I was lucky to hear a number of Mongolia’s greatest virtuoso performers, some world famous, some known only locally.
A typical day on the expedition involved breaking camp at dawn, driving five to seven hours across the roadless, dusty plains of Mongolia, or crossing a mountain pass and pausing at the top to place spirit offerings on a stone cairn. By late afternoon, we would arrive at a campsite and have the same daily argument with our drivers. The drivers were urban Mongolians, and they viewed the countryside nomads with utter disdain. “They’ll steal from you.” “You’ll get sick if you drink their tea,” they scolded us. But we stubbornly insisted that we were here in Mongolia precisely for the purpose of meeting people, and so eventually we would win the argument and camp near the locals.
We were always received with the customary salty milk tea and hospitality, and the word would go out, on foot and on horseback, that we had come to hear music. Within the hour, like magic, musically talented people would begin arriving: an old man with a wooden nose flute, a young man with a birch-bark hunting whistle, a young mother nursing her child and willing to sing lullabies for us, a local teacher who was a virtuoso Jew’s harp player. Almost always, someone would show up who could produce the striking overtones of the famed Mongolian throat singing. We were always provided with more music in any one location than we could listen to or record, and our sessions lasted well into the night. Though I am not musically inclined, I listened with appreciation to the orchestra of sounds that were produced by human voices and with such humble materials as horsehair, wood, home-forged metal, and goat-hoof rattles.
The most spectacular use of song that I witnessed in Mongolia was never intended for human ears at all. Herders not only herd, corral, milk, and look after their herds of shy, furry yaks, but they also sing to them. Not merely a form of bovine entertainment, songs sung to yaks, camels, goats, and sheep provide nomads with a technology to manage scarce resources. Songs are also a part of their adaptive ability, developed over many generations, to interact with the ambient sound environment by using sounds to decode, manipulate, and manage the natural world. Each animal and each desired behavior requires a different song. At first, the herders were shy about singing animal domestication songs because we asked them to do so in front of the camera, which was not a natural setting. But as soon as we went out with them to visit the herds, they sang eagerly to their animals.
Domestication songs represent yet another type of indigenous knowledge embedded within a linguistic system. The songs themselves have no meaning; they do not contain words, simply vocables, similar to the jazz tradition of scat singing, but they follow a precise pattern and melody, just like a composition written down in a musical score.
In my field studies of languages from Siberia to India, I’ve found, perhaps by coincidence, several languages that have incredibly rich systems of sound symbolism, suggesting that it must be given a more central role in our understanding of grammar. While English has a limited repertoire—words like clang, sizzle, blam! and ka-pow!—many languages have dozens or hundreds of phonaesthetic words and also allow their speakers to make up new ones and be understood. Sound symbolism is usually considered to be a fringe area of language, since most words do not actually imitate the things they refer to, but we do not yet know how far a language can travel down the path of having many such words, of inventing a large and very useful vocabulary to mimic sounds, shapes, or qualities of experience.
NOMADS AND SINGING CAMELS
Unless I had seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed that you could control a surly, spitting camel by singing to it. I stood on the high crest of a windswept mountain in western Mongolia, looking down into China to the south. We were on the move, on the second day of a trek that would take the nomadic family from spring to summer pasture. The trek had begun the previous morning, as the family packed up its belongings (two collapsible felt houses called ög, or in Mongolian ger) and all their contents (beds, saddles, lassos, wooden chests full of clothing, a stove, and cooking pots). All of this had been loaded onto an antiquated Russian truck that was on loan from relatives in town. In the cab of the truck sat the grandparents, too old to walk, and I sat up on the heap of belongings on the back, which also included dried dung for cooking. Most of the rest of the family, with the two dogs, went on foot and horseback, herding the 200 goats, 6 horses, and 40 yaks. Though I would have preferred to follow the herd, I was not an adept enough rider or animal herder, so the family packed me onto the truck, cradling two newborn goat kids that were too small to walk.
The plan was that the truck would arrive at the new campsite by evening, and the herds would catch up the next day after an overnight stop. Little did they know that we would reverse roles! No more than five miles along some of the worst roads imaginable, the truck broke down. Grandpa and Grandma were immediately put onto two borrowed horses and sent to a nearby neighbor to rest. After two hours, the truck driver decided we should unload all the gear, and he managed to restart the truck by rolling it down the hill. He told us, however, that it would never make it over the pass, and so he went on his way and returned to town. The rest of us—the mother, two young boys, and myself—were left to figure out how to transport two houses, a large load of manure, clothing, wooden chests, and goat kids across a mountain pass.
In front of me stood tiny Eres (his name means “brave”), who was about 12 years old and weighed 80 pounds. He held the lead camel by its nose rope. This was clearly unpleasant for the camel, and he pulled and brayed loudly. Eres was not intimidated, however. He put his face right up to within inches of the camel’s snapping teeth and let loose a loud, melodic series of riffs. A kind of musical command, it could be heard clearly even above the howling wind, and it had an immediate effect on the poor camel, which promptly sat back on its haunches and perhaps resigned itself to carrying its heavy load.
What Eres was demonstrating was one of the most remarkable skills that his nomadic people have developed. They can read the moods of animals and manipulate and control them using little more than song. Of course, they also have other techniques, like piercing the nose of a camel with a stick and tying a rope to it, and binding the rear legs so they can milk them, but the physical manipulation of the animals is consi
dered crude and a last resort. The primary tool is psychological, and is expressed through music. It’s paralinguistic in that, while not a part of language proper, it does use the human vocal tract, has expressive capacity, and seems to communicate information, perhaps in a similar way that many animal calls do. It is also mimetic, meaning that it imitates and stylizes vocalizations that already exist in nature and are made by animals. By mimicking and turning the calls back at the animals, a specific psychological effect is achieved.
This technology allowed for one of the greatest advancements in human cultural evolution: the domestication and control of animals. While some animals, notably the wolf, which eventually evolved into the dog, were thought to be self-domesticating (e.g., they began following humans and eventually adapted to living with them), large animals like the horse, yak, and camel were tamed only by dint of very hard, persistent work and effort, coupled with a very sophisticated understanding of how they think, behave, and react.
The Last Speakers Page 19
