The Last Speakers (4 page)

Hunters taught me to recognize animal calls and to find the right kind of kindling (the papery inner bark of a birch) to make a survival campfire in the winter forest. In the far west of Tuva, in the Black Lake district, two young brothers dove into shallow, rocky, and unbelievably cold and swift mountain streams with me. Later, we warmed in the sun on the riverbank and drank araga to warm our insides. Its intoxicating effects filled my head with the swirling burble of the water and put me into a kind of trance.

Everywhere I went in Tuva, I was treated as a brother and a son. Amazingly, the Tuvans who hosted me never expected anything in return but my smile, my interest, my efforts to speak and understand the Tuvan language, and my solemn promise to tell people outside of Russia that they exist and are well.

On my arrival in Tuva in 1998, I once again faced the same polite insistence that I was a spy and met lots people who wanted to speak to me only in Russian. So I fled Kyzyl as soon as I could to immerse myself in the language and culture in the countryside. Flying in a decrepit single-engine plane, I reached the remotest corner of Tuva, a place where few people spoke Russian. In my pocket, I carried a letter of introduction addressed to country cousins of my Kyzyl friends. They could never have dreamed an American linguist would be dropped at their doorstep. Yet they reacted with aplomb, offering me, in true Tuvan style, tea before questions.

After five days knocking about the hardscrabble town of Mugur-Aksy befriending locals, I tired of being shadowed by the local police (convinced I was a spy, they began to openly harass my village host family). On the sixth day, I finally met the head of my nomadic host family and seized the opportunity to leave town for the countryside. Eres (meaning “brave”) Mongush, a weather-beaten, reticent herder wearing a black sheepskin hat, had ridden into town briefly on errands. With no ceremony and almost no introduction, I set off following Eres on foot for the two-hour walk back to his campsite. The landscape was severe, nubs of brown grass buffeted by tiny pellets of ice, with a crackle in the air. Eres was not a talkative soul, and he stopped just twice to point out sacred spots to me, where we placed stones on an
ovaa
(sacred cairn).

We arrived at the Mongush family campsite, a high, flat, and somewhat sheltered spot with two yurts and a large enclosed stockade. Eres's wife Aylana served tea, but was shy and avoided eye contact with me, while the two six-year-old boys, cousins Marat and Murat, were curiosity personified. Red-cheeked, laughing, and dripping snot from their noses, they had boundless energy. In Tuvan, it is not proper to say that children are beautiful, for fear that the praise will attract malicious spirits who may cause them harm. Children are instead praised by calling them “choo-deck,” meaning “ugly”! The ugly boys bounded gleefully after me wherever I went, even to the toilet (any convenient spot out of sight of the yurt). They tirelessly answered my every question of “What do you call this?” and “What is that?” as if playing a game.

The family's 50 head of yaks, two horses, two dogs, and 200 sheep and goats lived within spitting distance of the yurt, constantly making their presence known through smell and sound. The dogs barked at me, the sheep fled, and the skittish yaks were perturbed by my presence as they licked their salt blocks.

There's nothing romantic about the herding life: it is a relentless struggle. The harsh conditions age people well beyond their years. Eres was only 33, but to me he looked 45. Their daily routine was unvarying. Up at six to stoke the fire, then out to the stockade to let out the yaks and sheep. After morning tea, Eres saddled his horse to drive the herds out to pasture, and he would be gone for at least four hours. Aylana began baking flatbread and sometimes a stew for the main meal, eaten around four o'clock. Marat and Murat helped mind the lambs, collect manure, and fetch water, but had plenty of play time. The grandparents, Aylana's elderly mother and father, lived in an adjacent yurt and helped out with everything, from herding to milking. Nomads enjoy neither vacations nor retirement.

The Mongush family indulged my naive desire to help out by assigning me simple tasks I could not flub. Under Aylana's watchful eye, I was given the task of collecting frozen yak manure patties. On my back, I wore a square wicker basket, and I had a special forked stick. Stacking the collected patties into orderly piles about eight feet high, I would bring them into the house in small batches and chuck them into the stove. Yurts heat up fast when manure is burned, then cool quickly due to the large smoke hole in the roof. I fell into a rhythm: two manure patties on the stove translated into ten minutes of heat, so I would seize the moment to remove my gloves, write notes on what I was hearing, and sip tea.

Dung is precious, and so Eres and his family had words for describing it at various stages.
Miyak
is what plops out steaming onto the ground. After being mashed, dried, flipped, collected, and stacked (special words exist for each of these activities), miyak becomes
argazin
. To the outsider's eye, this is exactly the same substance (manure), except dry. But to Tuvans, it has been magically transformed from something unclean, smelly, and belonging outdoors to something sanitary, safe to handle, and good for boiling tea. Each stage in the metamorphosis of shit, from drying to stacking to kindling, is named and well described in the language. As I jotted down the “shizzle lexicon” in my notebook, the flaming manure warmed my fingertips, the smell permeated my clothing, and I felt closer to nature than I had ever wanted to be. The fire flared when someone came in with a gust of air, the yurt chilled again, and my manure routine would begin anew.

Over the following days, my duties expanded, though goat-herding proved far more challenging. I worked hard to perfect the art of strategic stone-throwing needed to keep goats moving compactly in one direction. Tuvans make special sounds to different animals to induce different mental states and make them compliant. In fact, they have an entire psychology of the domesticate mind—a special repertoire of songs sung to camels when they will not nurse their young, to yaks when calving, to sheep when shearing, and so on. Their animal domestication songs, plaintive and tuneful, combine a stylized mimicry of the animal's own vocalizations with a kind of coded command. Oddly, the animals seem to obey, falling into a kind of trance or pacified state as the song carries on the wind. I was able to learn the songs easily, because they had no meaningful words, only vocables, meaningless syllables that followed a different tune for each animal. For sheep,
tot-pa tot-pa tot-pa;
for goats,
che-che-che-che;
for mares,
huree-salsal-sal-huree;
and for the skittish yaks,
hoar-hoar-hoar-hoar
(more on this in chapter 8).

Every evening, the Mongush family and I would huddle around the back of the stove for salty tea and pieces of dried mutton. Some days we'd share a baked flatbread. I usually managed to scrounge up a few pieces of candy for the boys, though my gift of a menthol cough drop sent them sputtering and teary-eyed out of the yurt, unused to the pungent flavor.

I already knew that my hosts were reticent and spoke very little, but on the second night, when the grandparents appeared from the neighboring yurt, an animated conversation broke out between them and Aylana. Trouble was, it was entirely in a sign language. Aylana's mother was Deaf, and the family used a system of what linguists call “home sign”: a repertoire of meaningful gestures that allow a family to carry on a simple conversation. Home sign is an early step on the way to developing a full sign language, but the full form arises only if children learn it as their first language.

They seemed to have a repertoire of several dozen signs, if not more, and these were often combined into longer strings of five or six gestures. Seeking a way to understand, I watched the two boys to see what they signed. Their sign utterances were simple and short: TEA (a bowl shape with both hands), AXE (chopping one flat hand across the opposite wrist), YURT (one palm held flat, facing upward, while the other hand formed a curved cuplike shape upside-down above it), and GO (pointing a finger in one direction). Marat and Murat also made sentences, but the largest ones had just two elements: GO HOME, BRING AXE, GIVE TEA. The children's simplicity at the sentence level meant that the Tuvan home sign was not yet a full-fledged language.

The mother and daughter had more signs, and they carried on lengthy conversations, seeming to discuss persons, places, and events removed in time and space. Whether they also had signs for abstract concepts—love, uncertainty, forgetfulness—I did not discover. I was never able to crack the code, fixated as I was on learning spoken Tuvan. I did verify later, from Deaf Tuvans, that a native sign language exists, in scattered locations where there are small numbers of Deaf Tuvans. But it is not taught in any school, and Deaf Tuvans are instead schooled in Russian Sign Language. Tuvan sign and home sign are surely among the world's uncounted and undocumented indigenous sign languages, meriting urgent study. I should point out that many traditional cultures also use hand signs not because of deafness, but to communicate in special circumstances to express things that should not be spoken.

DISCOVERING WORDS

My daily sessions spent huddled by the fire, interspersed with forays outdoors to perform chores, began to yield a small treasure trove of new words in my notebook. The first verb I learned among Tuvan yak herders was “fetch water.” The noun for water is
soog,
and
soog-la
is a command, “Fetch water!” Linguists call it a “denominal,” a verb built from a noun, “water,” plus a simple suffix, -la, that says, “Now I'm a verb.” But although -la was an easy suffix to memorize, it turned out to have multiple possible meanings. When attached to
shay,
the word for tea, it did not mean “Fetch tea,” but rather “Drink tea.” And when attached to
hem,
meaning “river,” it did not mean to fetch or drink a river, but rather to travel along or across a river. When attached to
Moskva,
the capital of Russia, it meant to travel via Moscow.

Not only was the -la suffix variable in its meaning, but it also had a chameleon-like quality of constantly changing its pronunciation under the influence of the sounds that surrounded it. This process, called “allomorphy” by linguists, is one of the fundamental mechanisms of grammar we expect to find in all kinds of languages, even English. In Tuvan, verbs look like this:

Upon collecting many examples, I found that this chameleon morpheme had a total of
eight
completely different manifestations:
-la, -le, -na, -ne, -ta, -te, -da,
and
-de.
The first consonant changed under the influence of the sound that immediately preceded it. The vowel of the suffix was always
a
or
e
, obeying vowel harmony, a topic I will discuss later.

For scientists, these chameleon morphemes present a learn-ability puzzle. Children learning the language are not observed making mistakes about which form to use. They also manage to figure out, with no explicit instruction, that all eight of these variants are in fact the same entity. Other chameleon morphemes in Tuvan, I would learn, have as many as 16 forms. How children master such complexity, while making few or no errors, is one of the unsolved mysteries of linguistics. Rival theories posit different possibilities, yet the brain remains sufficiently mysterious that we do not know how it accomplishes this task at the age of five or six.

Languages are so much more than just words—they are seed-beds for poetry, semantic networks of possibility. But words are the most graspable entities, and the ones we most commonly think of as making up languages. And so I began by collecting words. This process led to many funny misunderstandings along the way. Once I was pointing to a tree but my speaker gave me the word for “finger,” thinking that's what I wanted. And there's the famous problem of segmentation: Tuvan, like many languages, does not divide the arm and the hand into separate entities, so I might think I was getting the word for hand, but actually it meant the arm and hand together. Conversely, many languages have finer distinctions than English. For example, they might have a single word that means “left hand” and another word that means “right hand,” but no word that simply means “hand” (since any given hand is always left or right). Days or weeks later, or even never, the linguist may realize what he had written down in his notebook as simply “hand” meant precisely “left hand.”

At Swarthmore College, I teach a course called “Field Methods,” where we sit down with a speaker of a language that no one in the class, including me, has any knowledge of. The goal is to discover as much as possible of the grammar of the language by asking the right kinds of questions. Though I try to replicate a real field environment, the process is much easier and more efficient in a classroom, with a speaker who knows English. My students and I fill up many pages of notebooks, write examples on the blackboard, and morpheme by morpheme build up a descriptive grammar.

In a real field setting, the challenges are multiplied many times over. No one speaks English, curious neighbors come by to help, dogs bark, chickens cluck, and the whole village gathers around to hear and laugh at the foreigner mispronouncing the language.

Extracting the grammar of a language is like solving a multidimensional jigsaw puzzle, of which some of the pieces may be missing and others you have to carve as you go along. Native speakers of any language can almost never explain
why
something sounds the way it does or is said the way it is. They rely on what we call intuition, or “grammaticality judgment.” They just know what sounds right and what doesn't, without knowing why. Grammar is what cognitive scientists call
tacit
knowledge: you know it, but you don't know that you know it and you can't really articulate it. The kinds of so-called English grammar rules we are taught in school (“Never end a sentence with a preposition”) are, quite simply, boring and not to be put up with. (The preceding sentence ending with a preposition is fully grammatical.) Such dicta are not grammar, the stuff of deeper thought, but merely style, the artifice of writing.