The Last Speakers (3 page)

As soon as one moves outside of the Indo-European, all bets are off, bizarre and unfamiliar structures abound, and assumptions about how languages work must be set firmly aside. Non-Indo-European tongues can also be more difficult to learn because it is difficult to break out of familiar patterns and understand radically different ways of organizing information.

Having found a topic that stirred my interest, I decided to find out more about this field called linguistics. I had no idea that my graduate school studies would send me to one of the most remote regions of the world. Nor did I suspect I would specialize in the world's smallest languages. All I knew was that I had found a mission of my own.

STRETCHING EASTWARD FROM MOSCOW
lies a vast land that spans eight time zones. Most people think of it as a barren, snowy wasteland, or place of exile for dissidents. Yet Siberia would be the place I came of age as a scholar and a linguist and forged lasting intellectual and emotional connections. The many adventures I had there radically shifted my view of language and gave me a whole new understanding of how people organize knowledge and communicate.

My original semester as an exchange student in Eastern Europe somehow morphed into a five-year sojourn, and I began to explore the peripheries. I used to loiter at the Kazan' railway station in Moscow, watching trains arrive from Baku and other exotic places and listening to some of the minority languages of Russia. I visited the local mosque to hear Tatar spoken, and the fruit market to hear Georgian spoken by the watermelon vendors. I felt drawn eastward, but visa and legal restrictions on foreigners held me back.

Finally, one day in 1996, I heard that travel restrictions had been lifted. On a whim, I packed my backpack and went directly to Kazan' station. I stood in line clutching $200 in rubles and, when it was my turn, asked for a ticket to Tuva. The surly ticket clerk behind the window, without looking up, said, “There's no such place.” When I persisted, she assumed that I was simply mispronouncing Tula, a Russian city where samovars are made. I shouted back at her through the little gap in the ticket window, insisting that a place called T-u-v-a did exist and thinking to myself that she could verify it if she would only heave her bulk up out of the chair and look at the enormous map of Russia on the wall behind her. People behind me in the queue tried to shoo me away, grumbling that I was delaying their purchases. However, being loudly rude in Russia, and with an American accent, sometimes gets results. I stuck to the ticket window, and eventually we reached an understanding. The ticket vendor sold me a train ticket to Abakan, the nearest city to Tuva where trains go.

Tuva had captivated my imagination by the simple fact that, in the late 20th century, people there still lived as nomads, in collapsible felt houses, making their own ropes, saddles, cheese, and wool. Protected by mountains, with no railroads, few airplanes, and no paved roads leading in or out, many Tuvans migrate seasonally, following their animal herds to greener pastures. I couldn't wait to see it with my own eyes.

I boarded my train in Moscow, and 2,500 miles later emerged sleepily before dawn in Abakan. Four days of clackety-clack, sharing a small, four-bunk sleeping compartment with a family of three and watching the monotonous Siberian forest-scape of birches rolling by, gave me plenty of time to prepare. I had read cover to cover the somewhat outdated but only existing grammar of Tuvan, written in the 1960s by Soviet scholars. And though I could not speak or understand much Tuvan, I could at least envision the elegant word structures and knew how to assemble smaller pieces to build longer words like
teve-ler-ivis-ten,
meaning “from our camels.”

In Abakan, I hopped in a shared taxi to cross the mountain pass to Tuva. “This road is built on human bones,” the driver solemnly declared, recounting that forced Stalinist labor camps had been located here. A tiny statelet absorbed into the Russian Federation, Tuva is culturally one part Russian and three parts Central Asian nomadic, with a strong dash of Mongolian flavor and influence. It contains some of the world's wildest and most magnificent combinations of animals and landscapes: wolves frolicking in mountain pastures, Bactrian camels loaded with bundles plodding across snowdrifts, saddled reindeer treading single file through dense alpine forests, yaks charging each other on the high plains.

Tuvans are perhaps most famous for their throat singing, a technique that sounds like whistles, barber's clippers, and foghorns all emanating from a single vocal tract. Tuva also has its share of grim Soviet traditions: asbestos mines spewing dust, corrupt bureaucrats, secret police who view all outsiders as spies, rampant alcoholism and violence.

We arrived road-weary in Kyzyl, Tuva's capital, a dismal collection of Soviet-era cement block buildings, with an imposing central square adorned by a large theater and a pointing Lenin statue. The local joke is that Lenin's outstretched arm is hailing a taxi. Kyzyl was all turned out for “Policemen's Day,” and the streets were filled with uniformed officers on horseback. I befriended a few of them and was invited to the yurt village outside the city to see horse races and wrestling and eat the local fare (sheep were slaughtered and prepared by convicts who had been let out for a day to assist in the festivities).

At the yurt camp, I realized quickly that knowing Russian was both an asset and a handicap in Tuva. With my Slavic appearance, people were loath to speak anything other than Russian to me. Being an American was also a mixed blessing. I was the first foreigner many Tuvans had ever encountered, which made them eager to talk to me. At the same time, many told me directly that they knew I was a CIA spy. I did not deny it—what good would that do? But I resolved to spend less time with the Tuvan police and more time with the nomads on my next visit.

A few days later, I returned to Moscow, with a nearly expired visa and in a hurry to leave the country. But Tuva left an impression on me like no other place, and I knew I would have to return. My first visit to Tuva in 1996 had lasted barely 72 hours. But I went back to Yale determined to come back and immerse myself in the language. I would need two years of planning and some crucial training in graduate school, but I resolved to come back prepared, with the tools and time to study Tuvan seriously.

When I asked my dissertation committee in 1997 for permission to spend a year in the field studying Tuvan, they sensibly asked me what I might expect to learn or discover there. At that time, Tuvan was poorly documented and no linguistic recordings were available. The only published grammar of the language was that obscure Soviet one, written in Russian and likely to be incomplete and outdated in terms of the kinds of questions modern linguists ask. A brief handbook of Tuvan written in English was compiled from second-and thirdhand sources by a scholar who had never set eyes on a Tuvan or heard a single word of the language uttered.

Tuva itself was a mystery, having been shut off from much of the world, with foreigners denied visas to travel there during most of the Soviet period. The land had become an object of fascination for Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman, who long dreamed of going there. He finally managed to wrest permission from Soviet authorities, but died before he was able to go. The first American to gain access to Tuva, in 1988, was musicologist Ted Levin, who went on to launch the now famous Tuvan throat singing as a major cultural export from Tuva to the West. While throat singing is the most iconic part of Tuvan culture, I found the character of Tuvans revealed in their deep veneration of the Earth, their unique synthesis of animism and Buddhism, and their rich tradition of myths and stories. I chose to school myself in the language and listen to the stories and songs, while living the local nomadic lifeways as much as I could.

One of my role models was an intrepid Finnish linguist named Matthias Alexander Castrén (1813–1853), who spent his most vibrant years (1845–1849) tramping around Siberia. Covering vast distances under extreme conditions, this intrepid scholar would spend a few weeks here and there with various families and isolated tribes. He had to hunt his own food, build his own campfires, and forage for every calorie he consumed. Despite these hardships, he managed to collect thousands of words and sentences from such languages as Forest Nenets and Karagass—the latter now referred to as Tofa, whose last speakers I would encounter 144 years later. In a prodigious body of scholarship, Castrén stitched these words together into a grand tapestry (and many volumes of notes) that gives us perhaps our earliest and most comprehensive view of the linguistic landscape of Asia's cold left shoulder. Castrén was manic in his work, motivated partly by a desire to show that the Finns, whose language was a linguistic oddity in Europe, were connected to peoples deep in the Siberian hinterlands. These linguistic ties placed the Finns as a branch on a larger and more ancient lineage than their Scandinavian and Slavic neighbors, rooting them more deeply in the Arctic cultural landscape. Castrén's years in Siberia produced “a vast addition to previous knowledge,” but at the cost of his own health. He died, his great work unfinished, at age 39.
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Following in Castrén's bootprints, I wanted to undertake long-term fieldwork, though given the constraints of family life and graduate school, my time commitment was going to be 12–18 months, not five years! The period that I lived in Tuva during 1998–1999 changed me in ways I could not have imagined, not only from the physical rigors but also through the intense interactions I had with people that led to my own intellectual awakening. I returned realizing that I knew much less than I thought I did, and with a new appreciation for the power of culture as a survival tool. My year in Tuva would change my life, my attitudes, and my values. Intellectually, it would forever alter my view of what language is and why even the smallest languages are worthy of careful study.

My professors were patient with me when I could answer them in only vague and speculative terms about what I expected to find in Siberia. In all honesty, I did not know exactly what I might learn there. Tuvan would have—I expected—wonderful complexity just waiting to be described. I knew it had something called “vowel harmony,” an intricate sound pattern that would soon become a near obsession for me. It was reported to have special “pharyngeal” vowels, which upon investigation turned out to be pitch accent (a poor man's tone language—whereas Mandarin Chinese contains four tones, Tuvan had just one or two). And it would turn out to have a wonderfully rich system of reduplication, a process that produces words like “willy-nilly” or “helter-skelter,” but in a much more productive and meaningful way than in English. This last phenomenon had not been reported previously in the scientific literature, and so my description of it would be an original contribution.

I proposed to bring back these exotic specimens, like so many captured butterflies, and put them—in my dissertation—under the microscope of modern linguistic theory. My professors advised me that my work would have a longer shelf life if it showcased new, original data collected in the field, and I was eager to collect it. While this might seem like a basic premise for any scientific work, the field of linguistics had in fact strayed very far from this ideal. Many scholars were earning their Ph.D.'s on the basis of work that contained no original data at all—only new theoretical analyses of facts someone else had collected. This is armchair linguistics, work done entirely in a library without ever meeting an actual speaker.

None of my professors at Yale could remember the last time anyone had submitted a dissertation based on actual fieldwork, or an attempt to describe a previously undescribed or unrecorded language. I felt a personal calling, since so many of the world's languages remain virtually undocumented and fieldwork can be such an enriching experience. In the decade since I defended my own dissertation, I've been heartened to see more and more young scholars eagerly heading out around the world to do fieldwork.

Before heading out to live in Siberia, I was a pampered graduate student at Yale. I spent my days browsing the vast neo-Gothic Sterling Memorial Library, among shelves of dusty (and mostly unread) grammars of obscure languages, or reading in cafés, or working out at the gym. I had received the best possible training in theoretical linguistics. I knew how to identify any possible speech sounds that might occur in any language, from sibilants to ejectives to clicks. With a trained ear, I could listen to and transcribe any language, writing it down in the International Phonetic Alphabet. I could deconstruct complex words into morphemes, the smallest meaningful parts. I could draw syntax trees, the invisible structures in the mind that allow speakers to build sentences out of words and phrases. With these basic tools, and with patient speakers to provide me with examples, I would be able to understand and describe the grammar of any language. Grammar resides in the mind and can be inductively understood by asking the right questions of a single speaker, typically while that speaker is sitting in a room, patiently answering the linguist's agenda of questions. That's the method I was taught, and I believed it. But Tuva would challenge much of my received wisdom.

AMONG THE NOMADS

The radical change in my view of language and grammar all started with the daily migrations of a nomadic family of yak herders, and the Tuvan word for “go.”

I went to Tuva in January 1998 burdened with heavy winter clothing, survival gear, tape recorders, and various gadgets, all of which I would leave behind when I departed in 1999. My load would be much lightened, in the physical sense. Spiritually and intellectually, however, I became weighed down with the knowledge and cultural wisdom Tuvans shared with me, and with a deep empathy for the problems they face. Tuvans live as a minority people, poor, persecuted, forgotten, at the margins of a once great empire—Russia—which regards them as backward, inferior social parasites. Yet the Tuvans are possessed of great cultural and spiritual wealth—and this is what may ultimately sustain their unique way of life far into the 21st century. From this store of wealth, disguised beneath a shabby exterior, Tuvans shared generously with me. Though I left Tuva with an empty backpack, my mind was bursting from the intensity and wisdom of their worldview and knowledge both esoteric and practical on a vast range of topics, from the fertility of camels to prayers for worshipping tree spirits.

Elderly women told me their life stories. Shamans chanted to heal me when I fell ill. Buddhist lamas prayed for my safe travel and peace of mind. Simple country folk made offerings to the local spirits on my behalf and brought me to bathe in the waters of springs they revere as sacred and healing. Young men patiently kept me in the saddle as I inexpertly attempted to ride along with the horse herds. Old men called me son while they carefully taught me the delicate procedures of slaughtering a goat and carving up its carcass. Old ladies (far stronger of arm than I) showed me how to grind grain on a hand-operated grindstone, churn butter by hand, and distill milk into
araga
—fermented milk alcohol much prized by the nomads. At their winter camp, high in the mountains overlooking the Mongolian border, two young boys, age five or six, became my tutors in the intricacies of Tuvan grammar—gleefully shouting out the names of every object I pointed at and giggling at my tongue-twisted attempts to repeat their words correctly.