The Last Speakers (23 page)

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 considered 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.

A whole range of domestication technologies had to be tried, tested, and improved in order to fully make the animals come under human control and serve human nutritional needs. We have no idea how this was accomplished, since it predates the invention of writing and no records remain. The only record we have is cultures like the Tsengel people, who represent an unbroken continuity of knowledge, going all the way back to the first instance of animal domestication and practiced in more or less the exact same form up to the present day.

Eres's expertise, and that of his family, did not stop with camels. They sang to their yaks to make them calm for milking, to their goats to prod them along, to their sheep to render them passive for shearing, and to their horses to teach them to take a bit and bridle. Each song was as intricate and melodic as a lullaby sung to an infant, and each magically produced the desired effect. Yet they could be sung only when needed, as I discovered—much to my chagrin—when I asked Oyumaa, the 65-year-old grandmother, to sit in front of my camera and sing the songs. She giggled, blushed, and glanced around nervously. How could she possible sing a goat song, a camel lullaby, or a mare melody while sitting inside of her yurt with no animals present? It was like asking a mechanic to demonstrate an oil change with no car present—completely silly!

THE POWER OF THE SHAMAN

Many of the indigenous peoples I discuss in this book are still practitioners of an ancient religion, animism. Though the oldest and most widespread body of beliefs in existence, animism is still understudied and misunderstood. Many modern scholars refer to it simply as shamanism, which is in itself a misnomer. Though shamans exist in these societies, they are not essential to the practice of animism. In other words, the shaman is not to animism what the priest is to Catholicism. But early European explorers who encountered animistic societies tended to fixate on the person of the shaman, because he or she was the most visible, most exotic practitioner. Viewed through a European religious lens, this person became the focal point for what they then called shamanism. What I learned among the Siberian and other peoples is that animism is still widely practiced, even though no shamans may be present. Animism at its core requires a belief in spirits that reside in the local landscape (trees, rocks, streams) and that must be appeased lest they cause harm. Most people who practice animism have never seen a shaman or consulted with one. Nonetheless, they devoutly make offerings to the local spirits, fully engaged in their faith.

When we do find shamans, however, they can play a crucial role in preserving ancient aspects of their language and belief system. They do so by their healing practices, songs and chants, blessings, curses, and the other forms of verbal art they deploy. One of the most impressive shamans of many I have met was a woman you would never have suspected.

We met Kara-Kys (whose name means “black girl”) in a high mountain camp in western Mongolia. She was a weary-looking, poorly dressed woman about 30 years old, though she looked older. She held in her arms a sickly child, pale and underweight. But when Kara-Kys sat down to talk with us, a dramatic transformation ensued. First, she handed the child over to a daughter for care, then straightened up her back, cleared her throat, and began chanting. Her voice and manner changed completely, and as I rushed to adjust my camera, I noticed that she had morphed from a shy, bedraggled woman to a commanding presence. Everyone present leaned in closer to pay rapt attention to her words. She began singing
aaaay-aaay-aaay-aaaay
in a deep voice, fixed her eyes on the sky, and seemed to enter a trance. She intoned a powerful blessing song, calling upon Kurbustug, a sky deity, for health and protection from evil spirits.