LL-L "Lexicon" 2009.11.20 (01) [EN]

[Lowlands-L List]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 20 November 2009 - Volume 01
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From: ds <dstokely at infionline.net>
Subject: naming things

Ron -

This may not be entirely appropriate for posting on L-Lowlands, but I've
got to share it.  A friend of mine is planning a trip to Australia and sent
this out to her friends.  I'll paste an excerpt below.   You're welcome to
use or paste or post it.

David Stokely
Elkhart, Indiana

from my friend Gloria:

   In preparation for my trip down to Australia, I’ve been reading about
this land and in one of my readings, I came across this story in which
Wendy, an ethno biologist is working with Old Alex, an elderly Aborigine of
the Pintupi tribe, to put together an English-Pintupi dictionary.

      Here’s Bruce Chatwin’s account of this in his book, “Songlines”…

      …(Wendy) asked me to come and watch her at work on the dictionary. It
was drizzling. A fine light rain was moving in from the west, and everyone
had taken to their humpies.

      Wendy squatted with Old Alex over a tray of botanical specimens:
seed-pods, dried flowers, leaves and roots. When Wendy handed him a
specimen, he would turn it over, hold it to the light, whisper to himself
and then call out its name in Pintupi. She made him repeat the name a number
of times: to be assured of its phonetic pronunciation. She would then tag
the specimen with a label.

      There was only one plant Alex didn't know: the dried-up head of a
thistle. 'Come with white man,' he frowned.

      'And he's right too,' Wendy turned to me. 'It's a European
introduction.'

      She thanked him and he walked away, his spears slung over his
shoulder.

      'He's the real thing,' she said, smiling after him. 'But you can't ask
too much in a day - his attention wanders.'

      'I'm supposed to be an ethno botanist,' she laughed. 'But it's all got
a bit out of hand.'

      Alex was her best informant. You couldn't exhaust his knowledge of
plants. He would reel off the names of species, when and where they would be
coming into flower. He used them as a kind of calendar.

      She had never had a training in linguistics. Yet her work on the
dictionary had given her an interest in the myth of Babel. Why, when
Aboriginal life had been so uniform, had there been 200 languages in
Australia? Could you really explain this in terms of tribalism or isolation?
Surely not! She was beginning to wonder whether language itself might not
relate to the distribution of the human species over the land.

      'Sometimes,' she said, 'I'll ask Old Alex to name a plant and he'll
answer "No name", meaning, "The plant doesn't grow in my country.'"

      Wendy said that, even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the
first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the 'things' of
that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth.

      The child, at its mother's breast, will toy with the 'thing', talk to
it, test its teeth on it, learn its name, repeat its name - and finally
chuck it aside.

      'We give our children guns and computer games,' Wendy said. 'They gave
their children the land.'

      She'd then look for an informant who had, as a child, lived where the
plant grew - and find it did have a name after all.

      The 'dry heart' of Australia, she said, was a jigsaw of microclimates,
of different minerals in the soil and different plants and animals. A man
raised in one part of the desert would know its flora and fauna backwards.
He knew which plant attracted game. He knew his water. He knew where there
were tubers underground. In other words, by naming all the 'things' in his
territory, he could always count on survival.

      'But if you took him blindfold to another country,' she said, 'he
might end up lost and starving.' 'Because he'd lost his bearings?' 'Yes.'

      'You're saying that man "makes" his territory by naming the "things"
in it?'

      'Yes, I am!' Her face lit up.

      'So the basis for a universal language can never have existed?'

      Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance
of 4,900 miles (7,900 kms) before he begins to walk on his own. Since,
during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his
territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet…
----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
 Subject: Lexicon

Thank you David.

I feel that it **that it fits in with our discussions about lexicon and
language genealogy. Occasional exploratory excursions into other territories
are quite appropriate if they are likely to enhance our understanding of
subject matter that we discuss within the more limited Lowlands scope.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

•

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