The Last Speakers (6 page)

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.
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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.
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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 enable 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.

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.”
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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.
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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 hand, 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).
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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.

But although languages certainly contain abstract structures, they evolve and exist to convey information, and that function permeates and influences every level of language. To its critics, including this author, the Chomskyan program has been unduly narrow, overly focused on large global languages, and preoccupied with structure at the expense of content. Linguists' preoccupation with these abstract structures (collectively termed “grammar”) has led to a microscopic approach that treats languages like laboratory specimens, utterly divorced from their natural environments, the people who speak them, and the content of those people's thoughts. Like the Tuvan ways of saying “go,” the internal grammar
requires
explicit reference to the external world, and dynamically adapts to it. These words arise in the context of rich feedback loops and interactions among themselves, with other brains, and with the external environment.

What's missing in the Chomskyan view of language as a mechanism in the individual brain is the distributed, social nature of language. If only one speaker of a language remains, that language essentially does not exist, because it is missing the fundamental condition: conversation. Grammar is a distributed system of knowledge. Nobody's brain can hold all of English, or Chamacoco, or any other tongue. Language spills out into the world, residing in multiple brains, embedding itself in the local environment, shaped by cultural values and beliefs. It takes on its own mysterious trajectory of change with no one leading it. Such complexities can be thought of as products of emergence, like insect swarming patterns, fireflies flashing in unison, or geese flying in a V-formation, where no rule or leader coordinates the activity, yet a distinct pattern emerges, unplanned. When looking at migrating geese, we may immediately notice the V-formation, since the geese are few in number. But languages are made up of many thousands (in fact an infinite number) of possible forms. Ideally what we would need to collect is every utterance out of the mouth of every speaker, in order to appreciate the full range of possibilities. Of course, that is not possible, but as responsible scientists, we must at least make an effort to encounter as many speakers as possible and to hear as much as they will tell us. That sense of constant discovery is what makes the task of mapping the world's linguistic diversity so exciting. Never knowing what I might hear next keeps pulling me to some of the most remote places on Earth.

MONGOLIA'S HIDDEN PEOPLE

I arrived in Mongolia in the summer of 2000 with high hopes. I was participating in a National Geographic–sponsored expedition led by musicologist Ted Levin, and as our expedition moved farther west from Ulaanbaatar, we left the Mongolian-language area of dominance and approached places where some of Mongolia's tiny and endangered minority languages were spoken. I looked eagerly for small signs of cultural difference: the style of the cloth coverings on the yurts, the brands on horses' flanks. Ted had invited me along on the expedition because I would be able to communicate with one of the smallest minority peoples we expected to encounter—in their own language.

After five or six days of driving along the dusty tracks in Land Rovers, at last we reached what was reported to be the territory of the Monchak people, a tiny minority of 1,200 in the western part of the country. The Monchak are not even officially recognized as one of Mongolia's minority people; they are so few as to escape official notice almost entirely. To find them, I had our impatient city guides make multiple stops at encampments along the way, where we asked the residents, “Where can we find the Monchak people?” Of course, the Monchak were migratory, like everyone else, but locals knew their movements, and eventually we arrived at an impoverished encampment with a straw stockade, a few dozen goats, and four cows.

This would be my home for the next week. I bade farewell to our caravan of Land Rovers and our city drivers with their bad manners, and I settled into the hospitable embrace of a local family, consisting of a 33-year-old man, Nedmit; his wife Nyaama; and their 12-year-old son, “Brave,” and 10-year-old daughter, “Golden New Year.” I knew I needed to spend time alone with a local family in order to build the kind of trust and communication that would lead to a deeper understanding of the language. As much as I appreciated the efficiency of our caravan and the ability to cook our own food, I also needed to experience daily life with the local people.

Hardly anyplace could be considered more completely off the grid than the far west provinces of Mongolia, or a people more steadily grounded in ancient lifeways than these nomads. Yes, they are aware of the outside world. Some of them have traveled to cities and seen airplanes and computers and cell phones. But they have many reasons for preferring their own traditional way of life, and strong feelings about the security and comfort they find in basing their living on yaks, sheep, and camels in the high mountain passes.

The first way Nedmit's family made me feel welcome was to slaughter a sheep. Few events in the life of the Monchak are so highly ritualized, so full of protocol and traditional meaning, as the slaughter of a goat or sheep. The entire life of the nomads is centered around the welfare of the sheep. It may seem odd to a western mind that people who cuddle a tiny lamb next to the stove in February can dispassionately slaughter the mother of that same lamb in September. Yet the killing of sheep is done with care, with honor, and with feeling. The sheep is the livelihood of the people. It dies to sustain them, and the Monchak show in their ritual of slaughter how they value and respect that sacrifice as they do life itself.