The link above goes to a lecture about Australian Aboriginal languages, and is titled "The genius of Aboriginal languages and why they are important for all of us". (It begins around the 17 minutes mark.) While the lecture is interesting, my reflections went in very different directions than those of the speaker (a White Australian linguist).
First, the question itself ("why are Aboriginal languages important for us") is typically modern and Western. "We" have an unbounded curiosity and want to know everything there is to know, for good or for worse. Why do we *really* want to know everything? To better understand the world? Maybe. Or is it because we want to control everything? Knowledge is power, and knowledge about something gives us at least the illusion of control over it. We also want to appropriate everything, make it part of our energy matrix so to speak. From an Aboriginal perspective, Aboriginal languages are only important to Aboriginals (i.e. to the specific native people speaking it). Already here, we see a cultural chasm between the modern Westerner (including the tolerant liberal) and the native - once again, for good or for worse.
Second, I don´t doubt that Aboriginal languages and kinship systems are incredibly complex. But there are different kinds of complexity. *Why* are the Aboriginal languages mentioned in the lecture so complicated? Somewhat ironically, the explanation seems to be that they *lack* abstract terms suitable for science or philosophy. It´s their concreteness and place-bounded-ness that makes them so complex. The languages are deeply embedded in their respective cultural matrices, and even their grammatical structure directly reflect the social structure of whatever tribe is using them. It´s very difficult to see how these languages can be used outside their relatively small ethnic groups. Can they be used to express the general, the universal and the abstract?
In the language called Murrinhpatha, you can´t really say "They are talking", since "they" is apparently too general. The English sentence "They are talking" would have to be translated differently, depending on whether the people talking to each other are siblings or non-siblings, and also whether they are two or more. In the Lardil language, kinship relations are also encoded in the pronouns. Words such as "we", "you" or "they" don´t really exist, since different pronouns are used depending on whether you are talking about "even generations" (including siblings, cousins, spouses, grandparents and grandchildren) or "odd generations" (including parents, aunts, uncles, children, nieces, nephews, great-grandparents and great-grandchildren). All in all, Lardil has 16 pronouns to express "we, you, they"!
Another common trait of these languages is that a whole scenario is expressed with just one word, albeit often a very long one. Thus, in Murrinhpatha, one word is used to express "he was going through our bags and stealing things from us (who are not related as siblings)".
Knowledge about the natural environment is also encoded in the language. In Marrithiyel, apples are called "edible clouds", since the apple trees bear fruit during the season when the weather is indeed cloudy. In Bininj Gun-Wok, there is no single verb for "hop", which I suppose is logical for hunters who might want to differentiate between the hops of different kangaroo species and ditto sexes. Bininj Gun-Wok also has the most ultra-concrete word I´ve ever seen, "burrmarlarla", which apparently means - wait for it - "the male of a antilopine kangaroo that is resting, lying on its side in part shade during the heat of the day and the movement of the dappled light on its fur gives it the appearence of having covered itself with white clay, just as hunters do when they hunt these animals". (Perhaps that´s a common occurence in Arnhem Land, who knows.)
Third, I just realized why Native cultures can be so vulnerable to mass death, social dislocation or other consequences of White colonization. Since their language (and identity) is so completely tied up with their kinship structure and natural environment, it must become meaningless if these collapse. Are cultures with a more broad or general language more resilient in such situations, I wonder? Besides, nothing precludes such languages from inventing new words for resting antilopine kangaroos seemingly covered in white clay...
None of which means that Aboriginals are particularly maladapted from a Darwinian viewpoint. After all, they managed to survive for 60,000 years in a climatological shithole like Australia, where bizarre weather patterns makes an advanced civilization impossible to develop (unless its introduced from the outside). They should be given some credit for this. Meanwhile, the modern world, built upon thousands of years of advances, is winding down after only 300 years in something akin to an auto-genocide, so perhaps some obscure concrete-operational native tribe somewhere might still get the last laugh...
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