I was attacked in northern Spain by a pack of wild dogs. Well, okay, it was only two dogs, but one of them was a German shepherd and the other was a Rottweiler. They were big dogs, and the German shepherd had three legs. It was a real mean son of a bitch, so in my mind I was definitely assaulted by a pack of dogs. They ripped and tore at me, but why? Because I was on their turf.
I was staying in San Sebastian, a small city on the northern coast of Spain. It’s set in a beautiful bay on the Atlantic Ocean. The entrance to the bay is guarded by two small mountains, and on one of them a statue of Jesus Christ glowers over the city.
I had come to San Sebastian quite by chance during yet another major festival — Semana Grande, “The Big Week.” It’s really an enormous drunk. Deep into the night I wound through the ancient streets sloppily cavorting from tapas bar to tapas bar. It was a lot of fun.
After a few sweet nights of this, my liver was beginning to shut down, and I needed to get away from the mayhem. So I moved to a quiet hostel high in the mountains behind the city. The views over the bay were spectacular, and all around there was a deep and tranquil forest.
One evening my responsibility was to get the wine for dinner, which meant a trip to the village at the foot of the mountain. I set off, half walking, half jogging along a narrow path that wound through the trees. And that was when it happened. About halfway down, the dogs came out of the trees ahead of me, snarling and growling. I was jogging at this point, and I thought I could loop around them. That was a mistake.
I felt their teeth rip into my legs, and I realize now that if I had tripped and fallen it might have been all over for me. For some reason, though, I halted, turned, and yelled at them, even as they were tearing at my legs like piranhas. It was only a wordless howl of protest, but to my surprise the dogs backed off a step or two. My jeans were shredded, and I could feel warm blood dripping down my left leg. The German shepherd with three legs continued to snarl and bark, white flecks of saliva spraying from its mouth. The Rottweiler, though, had edged farther back. It was barking at me, too, but without much enthusiasm.
I continued down to the village with a bloodied leg and torn jeans. I didn’t resume my mission out of a sense of responsibility. It was more like I really didn’t know what else to do. When I returned to the hostel, everyone gathered around in concern. I called up Lesley, who was now back in England, and according to her instructions, we cleaned the wound, though I’ve still got a nasty scar there. I’m kind of proud of it. That was the leg the German shepherd got hold of. On the other, the pant leg was ripped, but the Rottweiler didn’t break the skin. I’ll remember that in future: four legs good, three legs bad.
Of course, I had no right to charge out of the trees at the dogs. That was their place, their turf, their empire. I should have understood immediately, since there’s no animal more territorial, more vicious, or more self-possessed than humans. We mark our turf emphatically, we raise our legs and piss around our borders, and we do it with language. Our accents and inflections, and the way we write, speak, and understand, indelibly mark us and the territory to which we belong.
In San Sebastian there was a large poster on the wall outside the station. It read in English: TOURISTS, YOU ARE NOT IN SPAIN. YOU ARE IN BASQUE COUNTRY.
San Sebastian is all about turf and language. This is Basque country — a fiercely separatist region. In fact, no one here would even call the city San Sebastian. In Basque it’s called Donostia.
The Basques are a curiosity. They speak a language called Euskara in their own tongue. It’s an isolate language, meaning that it’s completely unrelated to any other language on the planet. They’re very rare these isolates. There are only a handful of them on Earth, and the Basques take great pride in the fact that their language is one of them.
Euskara, for the most part, is a cacophony of k’s, r’s, and x’s. Here, for example, is a random sentence from a pamphlet I picked up: “Zuraren askotariko erabilerak giro bat sortu dugu orduko bizimoduaren kutsua emateko.” Try saying that three times fast.
The Basques believe they were actually the first inhabitants of Europe. They have a saying: “Before rocks were rocks, before God was God … the Basques were Basques.”
A couple of hundred kilometres north of Donostia are the famous prehistoric caves of Lascaux whose rock walls dance with red ochre bisons and antelopes. The paintings date back almost fifteen thousand years, and to some degree they’re not much different from Michelangelo’s marks in that little cellar in Florence. The prehistoric people were marking territory, calling their mountainous world their own. The Basques believe the caves were painted by their direct ancestors, and there’s a good possibility they’re right.
A series of genetic tests seem to indicate that the Basques are the only pre-Neolithic population left in Europe, which means they might well be the first people to have arrived there. Undoubtedly, Euskara derives from something very ancient, something much older than Spanish or even Latin, older even than Indo-European. At the very least it’s distinctly different. There are still about eight hundred thousand people fluent in Euskara and another two million who speak at least a little of it. Even though the language has been surrounded by Spanish for a thousand years, even though it was banned completely under the fascist dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, it has somehow managed to survive.
The Basques have been pushed into corners of Spain and France where the Pyrenees protect them. But they’ve been able to hold on to that bit of turf. They are and always will be something apart, something different, something that came before.
When I was studying linguistics at university, there was one name that kept popping up — Noam Chomsky. In 1957 he produced a work called Syntactic Structures, and my field of study has never been the same.
Chomsky claimed that our brains are hardwired to produce language. We all have certain built-in mechanisms, sort of behind-the-scenes cogs and wheels that spin out our languages. The hardware in the brain is the same for all of us. It’s only the software, or “wetware,” that differs from language to language. What that means is that the grammars of all languages are simply variations on a basic underlying foundation. With a bit of imagination you can take that to mean there really is only one language and that everything you hear around the world, all six thousand languages and tens of thousands of dialects, are simply variations of a fixed template.
It’s something like taking a mathematical formula, say (a + b)2, and imagining it as a grammatical sentence in one language. In another language the grammatical structure might look like a2 + 2ab + b2. But, if you remember high-school mathematics, you realize that it’s actually the same formula. It’s just been factored in a different way, or as Chomsky would say, the deep structure is the same.
I’ve never really liked this sort of mathematical model, though, this computer metaphor that seems so popular in academic circles. It’s too cold, too sterile. It’s like defining water as a molecule wherein two hydrogen atoms are bonded with an oxygen atom. That’s all quite accurate, but it tells you nothing about the shimmering, splashing, gurgling properties of water.
In my own graduate work in linguistics I’d been taught how to map out noun phrases. I’d been educated to decipher the rules by which a transitive verb might be able to move to a different part of the sentence. We spent great gobs of time looking at different grammar.
Blah, blah, blah, I thought. What about the toot and whistle of all the tongues of the Earth? What about the way language snaps and sparkles? What about poetry? What about philosophy?
What about the way a language makes you feel? What about the way it makes you think? What about