Безѹмниѥ

The guesthouse I’m staying at in Bishkek has a large pile of random paperbacks left by travelers, and today I was flipping through Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (London: Bantam Books, 2003). It is Menzies’ thesis that the great fleet launched by the Chinese emperor Zhu Di on 8 March 1421 reached North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand. It’s initially an interesting conjecture, but as the book goes on the author seems increasingly megalomaniac. By the end, he is blasting the ‘historians and academics’ for dismissing his work, and sighting evidence of Chinese influence in everything, suggesting even that the Chinese knew of the whole world before 1421. The author makes use of some linguistic arguments, which prove risible.

Linguistics provide further evidence. The people of the Eten and Monsefu villages in the Lambayeque province of Peru can understand Chinese but not each other’s patois, despite living only three miles apart. Stephen Powers, a nineteenth-century inspector employed by the government of California to survey the native population, found linguistic evidence of a Chinese-speaking colony in the state.

The first assertion, on the Peruvian village, is not sourced at all. The second, however, carries the following bibliographic citation: Stephen Powers, ‘Aborigines of California: An Indo-Chinese Study’ in Atlantic, Vol. 33, 1874, and Stephen Powers, Contributions to North American Ethnology, Vol. 3, Department of the Interior, Washington DC, 1877.

In the Postscript of the paperback edition, where he includes all information sent in by readers after initial publication of his thesis, things just get progressively wackier.

Several years ago, long before my book was published, Jerry Warsing came to the conclusion that a huge Chinese fleet under the command of Admiral Zheng He encountered a severe storm off South Africa and was blown north-westwards to the Atlantic coast of North America. His evidence, which has taken years to assemble, is wide-ranging and fascinating. Jerry believes up to two hundred ships were wrecked on the coast between Floria and Newport, Virginia; separated by the storm, they landed in small numbers at different places. Because of the close similarity between the Ming dynasty spoken language and the language of earlier Chinese who had come across the Bering Straits, they were able to understand the local people and assimilate.

So Chinese, of whom there is little evidence in northeastern Russia let alone North America, spread across the Pacific and all the way to the shores of the Atlantic, continuing to speak a language mutually intelligible with Middle Chinese yet leaving no trace on local Native American languages? Ridiculous. And then there’s:

When the first Europeans arrived in New Zealand they came across an array of plants foreign to the island. The most common was Chenopodium album, introduced from North America, where it had been used by native peoples to make cakes since time immemorial. Captain Cook discovered it in 1769. The second is marsh cress, Rorippa palustris, identified by the French expedition of 1826–9 aboard L’Astrobole. Again, this was used by the Navajo — who have Chinese DNA, and whose elders to this day understand Chinese — as a ritual eyewash.

I’d sooner believe that Lithuanians can understand Vedic incantations than that Navajo elders could get anything of Chinese. For what it’s worth, Menzies even cites Nancy Yaw Davis’ popular book arguing that Zuni is Japanese.

One of the the last mention of linguistics in the book comes in an attempt to tie Peruvian place names to Chinese. If you have even the slightest training in Chinese (and I was unable to ascertain whether the author can, in fact, speak any of the language himself), you’ll immediately recognize how unsound these connections are:

In northern Peru, mainly in the Ancash province, there are 95 geographical names which are Chinese words and have no significance in Quechua, Aymara or any of the other dialects of northern Peru (examples follow). There are also 130 geographical names in Peru which correspond to names in China. The very name ‘Peru’ means ‘white mist’ in Chinese — the white mist which cloaks the coast many days each year. The name given to Chile (Ch-Li) was pre-Spanish (= ‘dependent territory’) in Chinese.

Peruvian name	Chinese Translation
Cha-Wan (La Pampa)	Land prepared for sowing
Chancan (Tarma)	To harden metals
Chamtan (San Gregorio)	Covered in sand
Chaolan (Margos)	Ready for combustion (viz. coal-mine)
Chulin (Caras)	Forest
(Har) (Bongara)	Red (i.e. red earth)
Hu-Pa (Huasta)	Leguminous plant
Colan	Difficult passage
Chanchan (area between Moche and Viru Rivers)	Canton

If the linguistic evidence used in the book is so suspect, the data from other fields is doubtlessly suspect as well. In his zeal to shoehorn everything into support for his theory, and in his reliance upon the shoddy research of yesteryear, Menzies might just be the Erich von Däniken of our time, and Chinese ethnocentric cranks are undoubtedly happy about their British useful idiot.

I’ve encountered two different Turkic terms for ‘city’, spread rather haphazardly across the Turkic languages. Initially I knew Chuvash хула xula (which was borrowed into Mari as ola e.g. Yoshkar-Ola ‘Red City’). In Kazakhstan one quickly learns the obvious cognate қала qala.

Crossing the border into Kyrgyzstan revealed a completely different word here on the streets of Bishkek, шаар šaar. This, it turns out, is found elsewhere among Turkic languages, with Azeri having şəhər and Turkish şehir. After doing some web searches, I found a helpful comparative Turkic glossary that shows which languages have what, but I’m still wandering what the original semantic connotations of each word were and what happened to the other word in languages that prefered either *qala or *šaɣar.

The 1989 collection The New Sound of Indo-European: Essays in Phonological Reconstruction ed. Theo Vennemann (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989) has a fond place in my heart. I spent much time pouring over this collection, volume 41 of the series Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, as it was one of the few Indo-Europeanist publications available in the library of Loyola University Chicago. I recently came across Andrew Garrett’s review of the collection, ‘Indo-European reconstruction and historical methodologies’, which appeared in Language Vol. 67, No. 4, (Dec., 1991), pp. 790–804. Garrett is pretty upfront that this collection, so precious to me, is a rather minor publication:

My comments on NSIE have been mostly negative. By and large it is an inadequate collection: a few contributions are provocative but too sketchy to evaluate, some neglect the relevant literature, and some have obvious problems in application or consistency. In part these flaws may be due to the space allotted or to the conference-volume genre, but in my judgment NSIE suffers by comparison even with recent generically similar collections like Schlerath 1985 and Watkins 1987, and also with Bammesberger 1988, an important collection of papers on the laryngeal theory. Certainly some of the papers in those volumes are unconvincing and others too short or programmatic, but in general they discuss in detail the relevant data and the empirical problems addressed, and they take due note of evidence against as well as for their proposals; some make significant contributions to IE linguistics. By contrast, with a few exceptions the papers in NSIE do not try to be complete or even to suggest a range of evidence which for reasons of space cannot be evaluated. In this respect NSIE is unrepresentative of current work in IE linguistics, and it is unlikely to have much impact on the field.

Indeed, most of the papers in the collection proved inconsequential. Glottalic theory has lost most of its support, and Schmalstieg’s anti-laryngeal argument in his paper ‘Monophthongizations — more plausible than laryngeals’ is inherently refuted by its failure to examine any Anatolian data. What I find interesting is the appallingly slow pace of scholarship in the publication of the collection and its review in Language. The papers in the collection originally appeared in a 1985 symposium. Mouton de Gruyter didn’t issue it until 1989, and Garrett’s review didn’t appear until 1991. It took six years from when the scholars involved submitted their papers to when the work was finally announced to the general linguistics community (as readership of Language).

I. A. Andreev’s textbook Чувашский язык (Cheboksary: Chuvashkoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1996) challenges the student to read real literature almost from the very beginning. Here’s one exercise, A. Timbaj’s poem Ҫулталӑк (The Year)

Of linguistic interest for me was the title itself, as besides the simple word śul ‘year’, Chuvash also uses the compound śultalăk ‘year’ + ‘period’. This explains the similar Mari word ijdalə̑k, formed from ij ‘year’ and what must be a Chuvash loanword.

I found this little bit of trivia from Raija Barten’s Mordvalaiskielten rakenne ja kehitys (Helsinki: Finno-Ugrian Society, 1999) worth translating and sharing.

Mordvin also has Indo-Iranian and Iranian loanwords which are not found in other Finno-Ugrian languages. Some 18 items have been found (Korenchy 1988: 675; only Hungarian has more of these loans: in Hungarian alone 30 Iranian loanwords have been found; in Mari there are only 6 such loans). Examples include M[oksha] pavas, E[rzya] pas ‘God;’ in Moksha also ‘luck’ ~ Sanskrit bhagas ‘God, sun, luck’. E veŕges, M vəŕgas ‘wolf’ ~ Sanskrit vṛgas. By the time of Avestan, Iranian words had already lost final sibilants, so Mordvin may have borrowed the words from an older layer. However, it may be that some Iranian dialects spoken in Southern Russia had conserved old features. Therefore, the borrowing may have occurred later, in the Middle Iranian period. (The Middle Iranian Saka tribes inhabited the north shore of the Black Sea as late as AD 400.) The Erzya name for the Volga, Rav, Ravo is attributed to Iranian, while in Moksha the same word rava means river. The term tarvas for a scythe and the E śeja and M śava ‘goat’ were also borrowed from the Iranians. The Mordvin kinship term E sazor, sazoro, M sazə̑r, sazə̑ra ‘sister’ is attributed to an Iranian source (it is present in Baltic Finnic from a Baltic source and Mari, Udmurt and Komi possibly have cognate words).

The Korenchy 1988 citation given is the chapter ‘Iranischer Einfluss in den finnisch-ugrischen Sprachen’ in The Uralic Languages: Description, history and foreign influences ed. Denis Sinor (Leiden: Brill, 1988).

I arrived in Almaty two days ago and have had much better luck acquiring Kazakh language resources than on my last visit.

My first find was Тіл ұстарт: қазақ тілі/казахский язык учебный комплекс. (Almaty: Жибек жолы, 1996) ISBN 5-7667-3819-6. This is yet another one of those annoying textbooks that seem so common in the former Soviet Union where it is assumed that the reader already has some basic proficiency in the language, hearing it from childhood. The exercises also do little to develop practical speaking ability, being often more interested in helping you appreciate the etymology of toponyms and terms of endearment. I bought it for 500 tenge in a used bookstore.

A considerably more helpful introduction is Самоучитель казахского языка: 1500 слов и сочетаний (Almaty: Аруна Ltd., 2005) ISBN 9965-26-047-8. This has a great number of exercises that help the reader quickly absorb useful everyday vocabulary, but it is less effective at teaching morphology. It cost 290 tenge. I bought it in the basement bookshop of the large media store next to Iubilennij on ul. Golgol.

The most substantial of the textbook currently on the market seems to be Казахский язык для всех (Almaty: Атамұра, 2004) ISBN 9965-05-910-1. It weighs in at over 700 pages, has an audio portion (which I’ve not yet found), and combines rigorous grammatical presentation with extremely worthwhile exercises. The title page boasts that it is recommended by the Kazakh Ministry of Education. It cost only 1125 tenge. I also got it at the bookshop on ul. Golgol.

While advances in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European may come a bit slower than they once did, evidentally there are new discoveries to be made in Indo-European linguistics. At the National Library I came across today Ignacio J. Adiego’s The Carian Language Handbuch der Orientalistik 86 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). It’s a description of Carian, one of the minor Anatolian languages that was soon made obsolete by Greek. Only the discovery of a bilingual inscription in 1996 finally settled the issue of decipherment of the Carian script.

The bulk of the book is the long story of the decipherment of the language and the various sources. Me, I’m not too interested in decipherment issues, so I turned straight to the survey of the language. Though attestations are exceedingly brief and fragmentary, Carian is squarely an Anatolian Indo-European language. It maintains the PIE laryngeal *h₂ like the other Anatolian languages, with the exception of Lydian. Interestingly, the laryngeal becomes a tectal stop in Carian instead of a (velar?) fricative in Hittite and Luwian. Could this serve to more securely identify h₂ as [x]? What sets Carian in the Luwic group of Anatolian languages is the palatalization of PIE *k > s, while the rest of Anatolian has k. The nominal morphology of Carian shows some general IE features. The acc. sg. ending is -n, and the acc. pl. ending -š is believed to come from -ns. Unfortunately, there are not sufficient examples of verbal morphology.

In a post made last October I present Andre Hesselbäck’s views in Tatar and Chuvash Code-copies in Mari (Uppsala, 2005) on the history of the Mari plural suffix -βlak. The second Mari plural marker, -šaməč has just as uncertain an etymology as the first.

This suffix has traditionally been connected to the Chuvash plural suffix -sem, and the Mari suffix is a loan from Chuvash according to the majority opinion, or a Finno-Ugrian contribution to Chuvash according to figures like M. Adamović (who note that all other Turkic languages have the plural suffix -lar). Interestingly, the suffix -šaməč occurs only in the central Mari dialects, which do not border on the Chuvash region.

The second syllable of -šaməč has defied explanation. Some scholars have connected it to the second personal singular possessive suffix, normally -t but occasionally -č via a sporadic sound change, e.g. erɣəč ‘your son’.

Hesselbäck suggests that the suffix -šaməč is a compound of the Chuvash suffix -sem and the Mari suffix -mət, the latter of which typically refers to all members of a family, e.g. Čapaevmət ‘the Chapaev family’. How this compound may have arisen, Hesselbäck believes, is when Chuvash complex plurals consisting of roots and affixes followed by -sem were reanalyzed in Mari as simple units. Other languages show singular loanwords originating from Arabic plurals, such as Ottoman Turkish fuqara ‘weapon’, which may then take plural suffixes, e.g. Chuvash ulama-sem ‘theologians’ (the Arabic singular being alim). Though Hesselbäck ends his explanation here, one must conclude the element šam-mət was ultimately reanalyzed as a general plural suffix, replacing -βlak in central regions and now the colloquial plural suffix in the speech of young people everywhere.

I encourage my readers in the sidebar to view this weblog with the fonts provided by the Dejavu project. However, I would like to remind readers that it’s not enough to just install these fonts, as one also should upgrade them frequently. Version 2.25 of the Dejavu fonts was released earlier this week, and in the Changelog one notices something directly applicable to the matters I write about: …added Kurdish and Chuvash letters from Unicode 5.1 Cyrillic Extended block.

While fonts which seek to completely support Unicode have sufficient coverage in their initial releases to satisfy the majority of the world, speakers of languages with especially exotic scripts get support only later on, and then the font hinting of those Unicode regions is carried out gradually over subsequent releases. But unfortunately, it’s precisely those minorities who probably have little knowledge of computing and little contact with the Unicode community, and so one can hardly expect them to make timely upgrades. It’s a difficult conundrum.

If you are even in the least bit interested in Central Asian languages and cultures, I cannot recommend enough the ‘Music of Central Asia’ recordings out on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, a joint effort of the Smithsonian Institution and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Each installment features authentic folk traditions played by enthuasiastic and still young performers, without any of the World music crossover gimmickry that one must usually fear in these sort of productions. The liner notes include lyrics both in the original language (written in transliteration) and in English translation, and there’s plenty of background information on the instruments and musical styles involved.

When I acquired Volume 1, Tengir Too: Mountain Music of Kyrgyzstan, the linguistic benefits were immediate. Kyrgyz too must be a descendant of Proto-Turkic *taɣ ‘mountain’, so Kyrgyz features loss of final ɣ with rounding of the preceding vowel (undoubtedly through ɣ > w) and then lengthening. From the title of a old hymn to the newly established Soviet state, Kengesh, I know now that Mari kaŋaš ‘council’ is a Turkic loan. The same goes with Mari pölek ‘gift’, judging from the presence of music here entitled Belek.

But what really fascinated me is Rysbek Jumabaev’s recitation from the Manas, the Kyrgyz epic recounting the life story of its eponymous hero. I’ll reproduce here the text of the extract present on this recording.

Kečee jurt atasy kan Kökötöi ölgöndö
Kairylgys jaidy kairan kiši körgöndö
Ošondo Kökötöidün uulu Bokmurun
Atama aš berem dep oolugup
Ošondo Karkyranyn talaaga
Ürkünčünün boiuna
Üč-Kapkaktyn boiunaa kelip konup
Ošondo kan Manasty Talastan čakyrtpai
Je kan Košoidun tilin albai.

Ošondo baiagy jaš Aidardy
Manikerdi mingizip
Tögöröktun tört burčuna čaptyryp.
Ošondo eldi aška čakyrtty deit Bokmurun.
Ošol kezde karasang
Ordoluu šaiyk kökjeke
Orčong, Kokon, Margalang
Kokondordon Kozubek
Margalangdan Malabek
Alty šaardan Alybek kelip
On eki kan košo kelip.

Ošol kezde karasang
Kakančynyn kanynan
Šailanyp tuu čygaryp
Kebez bel boo, keng ötük
Kečildin kany Kongurbai
Kelbersingen čirkin ai
Manjunun kany Neskara
Ošol kalmaktardan kan Joloi
Solondordon Oiokyr kelip.

Ošol kezde karasang
Karkyranyn talaasy
Kytaj-kalmakka kyjyldap tolup
Aš berüüčü kyrgyzdy takyr čaap koioordo
Ošondo kasiettüü kan Košoi arman kylyp
Kapyrai ee, bul kyrgyz Manastyn bardygyndai bolboit dep.

Bir adamga bilgizbei, bir adamga tuiguzbai
Ošondo jaš Aidardy Manikerge mingizip
Jylgynduu Talaska
Özüng körgön jaryktyk Manaska
Čaptyrdy deit ošondo.

Ošol kezde baiagy Neskara oolugup
Kökötöidün Bokmurunga:
Atangdyn körü, sen burut
Aitkanyma kön, burut
Andai-myndai debeimin
Tartkan ašyng jebeimin
Menin čykkan jerim Bakburčun
Kökötöidün Maniker
Karabaiyr kazanat
Kaiypka čalyš mal eken
Berender minip belsenip
Beejinde jürör mal eken
Atangdyn körü, dünüiö
Sende öčüm bar, düinö
Ušul turgan Maniker
Beejindin kara kanyna meni alyp ketčü jönü bar.

Dep ošentip turganda
Kökötöidün Bokmurun bileginen sap ketip
Jürögünön kap ketip
Asmandan allanyn künü bürköldü
Kökötöidün Bokmurun balaga
Ošondo altymyš müškül bir keldi.

Since Kökötöi-khan, the father of the nation, died recently,
And his poor soul saw the place from which nobody returns,
His son Bokmurun
Has been carelessly eager to throw a memorial feast.
On Karkyra steppe
He settled by the banks of the Ürkünchü,
And by the banks of the Üch-Kapkak.
He did not invite Khan Manas from Talas;
He did not listen to Koshoi-khan’s advice.

Bokmurun gave young Aidar
Maniker, his father’s horse,
And sent him to the four corners of the world,
Carrying an invitation to Kökötöi’s memorial feast.
Before long,
The campsite was beautifully decorated.
Guests came from Orchong, Kokand, Margelan.
From Kokand came Kozubek;
From Margelan, Malabek;
From the Six Cities came Alybek,
And twelve khans came along.

At the same time,
The Khan of Kakanchy
Elected a delegate, who was carrying his flag
And wearing a cotton waist sash and wide boots.
He was Kongurbai, Khan of Kechil,
Of proud looks indeed.
Neskara, Khan of Manju, came.
From the Kalmyks, Joloi-khan.
From the Solon tribe came Oiokyr.

And at the same time,
The steppe of Karkyra
Was filled with multitudes of Chinese and Kalmyks,
Who almost overwhelmed the Kyrgyz at the feast.
So Koshoi-khan said in despair:
‘Truly, the Kyrgyz people will never live in peace without Manas!’

Discreetly Koshoi-khan
Dispatched young Aidar hastily
Upon the deceased’s horse, Maniker,
To the tamarisk-rick region of Talas,
To fetch the beloved Manas.

Back at the feast Neskara raged
And said to Bokmurun, son of Köktöi:
‘Hey, you Burut!*
Do as I say, you Burut.
I will not beat around the bush.
I will not take your offering of meat.
I am from Bakburchun.
Kökötöi’s horse Maniker is
A humble yet exquisite thoroughbread;
An ethereal steed,
Worthy of warriors to ride.
It is an animal worthy of Beijing.
Oh, this cunning world,
I have a grudge against you!
This very Maniker is able to carry me
To the true khan of Beijing.’

As Neskara spoke,
The strength left Bokmurun’s hands,
And fear seized his heart.
In the sky Allah’s sun hid behind the clouds;
And to Kökötöi’s son
Sixty worries came at once.

* Burut is a Sino-Kalmyk name for the Kyrgyz.

It’s nice to find such a long text in Kirghiz to mine for linguistic interest that also has significant literary value. Elmira Köçümkulkïzï, while a Ph.D. Candidate in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington (Seattle), translated several other selections from the epic. A ‘complete’ translation by Walter May is rumoured to be easily available on the streets of Bishkek, and I hope to acquire that next month when I’m in Kyrgyzstan.