8 minute read
West by Southwest Ernie Bulow
SOME THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE
WHAT DOES GUTTERAL REALLY MEAN?
THIS PICTURE DOESN'T HAVE MUCH TO DO WITH THE ARTICLE, BUT I LIKE IT.
All my life I have been both amused and angered by some of the prevalent notions about Native Americans especially including their origins and language. The first chronicler of the New World speculated they were Persian, others have gone with Hebrew. Zunis are Japanese, and now we can add “space alien” to the list.
President Jefferson, who didn’t treat Natives very well, was the first to realize that all Natives did not speak “Indian,” but probably hundreds of languages. He didn’t know that half of the world’s languages would be found in the Americas, and nearly half of those in what is now California. That does seem to be an exaggeration, but it isn’t.
“Guttural” seems to be indiscriminately applied to any language not spoken by the person using the term. If “guttural” indicates some sort of grunting or growling, that makes the word even more offensive than its original meaning, which is bad enough. Guttural: husky, gravelly, gruff, croaky. The only time I have encountered that kind of speech was when the speaker intended that sound— intimidating.
Cushing, who eventually spoke Zuni fluently, describes his early impression of the language as a “strange, clicky language,” and that Zunis always said a sentence, long or short, in one breath. Curious. Even Cushing couldn’t help but make derogatory pronouncements “It’s all Greek to me” simply means it is unintelligible. Griego is similarly used in Spanish, giving origin to Gringo. Don’t believe any of the silly folk etymologies. It had nothing to do with “green coats” or “lilacs.”
I have heard a lot of languages in my life, speak some of a couple of them, and I am quite familiar with Navajo, Zuni, and Goshute. The fact is, German may be the only language qualifying for that sound. Actually, the English letter R is harsher than found in other languages with a similar sound. In Spanish it is referred to as a flap. Listen to a native speaker of Spanish and a word like “gracias.” The R is not a growling sound, “Rrr,” as most Gringos say it, but almost a “GrD” sound. Say the word correctly and feel what the tongue does.
In Zuni it is usually an aspirate, sort of a “Rh,” softer. By the way, our pronunciation of “a” as in “bad” is limited to only American English in the entire world. Even the Brits don’t ever use that sound. All in the ear of the listener, so to speak.
DOES ESKIMO SNOW MAKE BETTER SNOWBALLS?
Most everyone has heard at one time or another, usually in school, that Eskimo (Inuit, Aleut, Yupic, etc.) has at least fifty words for snow. Over the years the number has either gone up (100 or more) or debunked as just an accident of sloppy scholarship. That also depends on how “word” is defined. The Aleut languages do have a basic word for snow, but it is never use by them.
The notion of a huge number of words for snow came originally from Franz Boas, one of the founders of modern anthropology, in his introduction to “Handbook of American Indian Languages” in 1911. He was the Arctic’s answer to Frank Cushing. He wrote his fiancée that he had gone native: “I am now truly like an Eskimo….I scarcely eat any European foodstuffs any longer, but am living entirely on seal meat.”
The huge number of words for snow captured the popular
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West by Southwest
by Ernie Bulow
imagination, as in “how curious” coming from people who shared their wives, fed their elderly to polar bears, feasted on blubber, kissed with their noses, and that weird stuff, and linguists pretty much dismissed the whole thing. No way there were fifty words for snow. Right?
Boas never said how many words he counted, but he also didn’t mention the fact that the Eskimo language group is agglutinative or polysynthetic. From a single root word any number of other words can be made by adding suffixes and prefixes to define it. Both nouns and verbs can be constructed this way, but in some languages, virtually an entire sentence is a single word. In that case Eskimo has more than fifty words for snow, and one of its relatives has more than one hundred words for ice. These folks live most of their lives on sea ice so they need to be precise.
Probably the only significance of having so many words is having a need for them. And, comparisons are usually misleading in some way. How many words for snow does English have? Off the top of my head (honest), I came up with this list: grapple (the local weatherman just added this one to my vocabulary), snow, snowflake (or just plain flake), sleet, slush, drift, blizzard, whiteout, powder, flurry, hail (a destructive
type of sleet), snowsquall, corn (larger sleet), and that’s avoiding any two or more word constructs: drifting snow, frozen snow, snow balls, wet snow, dry snow, hard pack, and many more. Remember, don’t eat the yellow snow.
So, we have plenty of words for snow ourselves. The number of words in a language for things that come in a variety is almost entirely based on need. I hope that disposes of the issue of obsession with a single item to the extent that the language makes up many words to describe it. Any language comes up with words it needs to make distinctions.
What if someone thought it was funny if we had words when “metal” kind of covered them all? Navajo doesn’t like to borrow words, especially if they don’t need to. When the Spanish introduced iron in the form of knives, axes, and the like, Navajos called it beesh, the word for flint. That made perfectly good sense when they were both made into awls, arrowheads, knives, and hatchets.
Now for the ugliest myth of all: that there are languages with no word for common feelings and objects. You can read that Navajos have no word for “love,” but that is not true except in a really literal sense. Sometimes there is not a single-word correspondence. Any linguist will tell you that there is nothing you can say in one language that can’t be said in any other human tongue.
English does not have a corresponding term for the Zuni “kokshi.” We have words for beautiful, valuable, good, and obedient, but not one that combines them all, probably because it is really, really hard to come up with a concept in English that combines all attributes together. Of course, we can still use all those other words so who cares? I KNOW WHAT IT MEANS AND YOU DON’T
Yah-ta-hey to you too! Everyone (nearly) in Gallup knows what that phrase means, but it is not a Navajo word. Correctly, it is yahah-teh. One of the most popular word games these days is for Anglos to define, or redefine, Indian words for themselves—sometimes we call it politically correct, though there is nothing correct about it. The people who find the team name Redskins offensive are almost always people with little Native blood, do not speak a tribal language, and never lived on an Indian reservation. Most of the real tribal members I know couldn’t care less.
I did graduate work at the University of Utah, and when all the foofaraw came up, the university offered to change their name from the Utes to something else. The Ute tribe was instantly up in arms. We like it!
I’ll settle for two of the mistranslated words that come readily to mind—squaw and Anasazi. Anasazi was the name the early pot hunters gave to the Mesa Verde culture. Where did they get the name? They asked a Navajo, “Who were these people?” and that
was the response. So, Anasazi was soon translated as “Ancient Ones,” which is fine in the context. But the word-police elicited the translation “Ancient Enemies,” and the word was no longer tolerated. Very literally it just means “The Ancient ones not Dine.”
Common sense says that those ancient people could not possibly have been enemies of the Navajo who only came into the Southwest about the time of the Spanish. Coronado found the group in the Texas Panhandle area before the Apaches broke up into numerous bands, including Navajos. But it’s done now.
Squaw is more problematic. The word came from the Angonquin language group and meant “woman” and nothing more nor less. It does not refer to part of the female anatomy. On the other hand, it is one of those words that is uncomfortable in English. All the other words that start with squa- are ugly: squat, squalor, squash (v.), squawk, squalid, even square has taken on a negative meaning—you get the idea. Borrowing words from other languages doesn’t always work well.
One last item: the folk origin of names is often absurd, just look at gringo. Early white folks asked the Zunis what the Hopis were called. They said, “Mooque.” Somehow that was changed to “Moqui”—then “Moki.” I have no idea why, but that in turn was translated as meaning “dead.” The Zunis call Navajos “Pachus,” sounds like “Bachu.” The plural is “A:pachu.” There you go. Southwestern tribes rightly counted Navajos and Apaches as the same folk.
