That means, I guess, a part of us has always been there. Metaphorically, at least, our hearts are all in the same place, and though we’ve been “scattered across the face of the Earth,” though our languages have been “confused” so that we can no longer understand one another, we need to find our way back. We need to understand one another again. We need to start building a new Tower of Babel.
2 At the Gates of the Western World
I got on the wrong bus. All the signs were in Greek, and the lettering was indecipherable to me. Ironic, considering that the Greek letters alpha and beta make up the English word alphabet. In Hebrew they are aleph and bet; in Arabic alif and ba. It didn’t make any difference, though. I couldn’t read any of it.
When I bought a ticket to Athens, the man in the booth waved me generally in the direction of a row of buses behind him. I hoisted my backpack and trudged toward them, squinting at the cardboard signs displayed on their windshields. Finally, after a little deliberation, I got on the bus whose sign read:
I tried to check that I had the right bus, but when I asked the driver, I got completely confused. To say yes in Greek, one says né, which to me sounded a lot like no. And to further complicate matters, no in Greek is okhi, which sounds suspiciously like okay. So when I asked the driver if his bus was going to Athens, he said, “Okay,” and waved his head at me.
After I climbed on, we took off in approximately the right direction. It wasn’t until we’d been travelling for an hour that I knew something was wrong. We came to a broad stretch of water, and I was pretty sure we weren’t supposed to be crossing anything like that. With a sinking heart I glanced around the bus for someone who might speak English. I found a middle-aged woman from France. “But, of course, we’re not going to Athens,” she said. “Unless you want to go the long way.” She laughed cruelly. “Mais oui … a very, very long way.”
I sat with her, anyway. For an hour or two she lectured me on the geometric period in ancient Greek pottery shards, often breaking into French when her English wouldn’t do. It turned out she was a professor in Paris and looked down on the world over a long, aquiline nose. I tried to keep up, but mostly it was beyond me. Our bus puttered into the green mountains past almond trees and olive groves until we stopped at a little town on the edge of the Gulf of Corinth. We had arrived at Itea, just down from
Back behind the town a huge mountain, Parnassus, reared up, and we waited a while for the connecting bus that would carry us to a natural amphitheatre in the rock that held Delphi, home of the legendary Oracle.
Delphi is where the human world touches the divine. Zeus, it is said, released two golden eagles. One flew west and the other soared eastward. They circled the globe, and where they met again was Delphi, the centre of the world, the navel of the universe.
I had come to Greece to search for beginnings, so perhaps I hadn’t made a mistake getting on that bus, after all. Maybe it was fate, since there was little doubt that I had come to the right place.
No one really knows how languages began. Somewhere in the primordial jungle a system of sounds developed. A particular shout, “yeeee,” for example, might have alerted our ancestors to a predator that was on its way, while another, “yaaaa,” might have told them that a snake was coiled in a tree. And that, in a nutshell, is what language is: a random set of sounds to which we’ve affixed meanings. Simple as pie.
Languages developed almost organically, so much so that we can talk about them in terms of families. We can build the lineages for most of them, tracing their relationships and their roots farther back than one might think. Joseph Greenberg, one of the grand old masters of linguistics, hypothesized a proto-language for the Earth’s tongues. By reverse engineering from a mountain of data, he and his colleagues came up with a list of twenty-seven words from this presumed initial language.
The sniffing out of bloodlines, a favourite pastime of linguists, is usually based on the study of cognates, which are similar-sounding root words in different languages. Salam in Arabic and shalom in Hebrew are good examples and clearly demonstrate a common ancestry. Cognates, typically, tend to show up in the roots of the most basic concepts: kin relationships such as mother, brother, sister, father; and words for the most fundamental descriptions of nature — hand, bird, cat, tree.
Greenberg’s team hunted for cognates that would pertain to every language on the planet. Tik, for example, is what Greenberg claims is the first word for finger. It’s daktulos in Greek and digitus in Latin. These come to us in the English form digit (and from that, digital), and that’s how cognates tend to work. Languages tumble around, swapping, quite predictably, a t for a d, or a b for the pop of a p. Phonetic changes over time, in fact, are so predictable that they provide a sort of carbon-dating for languages.
We can tell fairly accurately when Old English split from High German. We can surmise when Norwegian diverged from Icelandic and when Portuguese hived off from Spanish. Greenberg simply pushed this research as far as he could. Some say he shoved it too far. While claiming that he had found cognates for the word finger across all of the language families, he also posited as many related concepts as he could imagine. For example, if he didn’t find the word for finger, he would look at the words for hand or thumb, or in quite a lot of cases, the number one, which according to him is described in most languages by holding up a single finger.
Greenberg’s theories are highly controversial, and talk of a single proto-language is largely downplayed in academic circles today. In fact, most linguists find it a load of bunk. It was a brave idea and obviously a hell of a lot of work, but unfortunately the truth probably leans more toward the opposite dynamic. Whereas there are now some six thousand languages spoken on Earth, chances are there were as many as fifteen thousand before written language appeared. So the languages we speak today aren’t the result of a Tower of Babel phenomenon. They probably didn’t all come from a single source. More likely, a multitude of languages sprang up around the same time independent of one another, and today, sadly, most of them have already disappeared.
The French professor and I strolled to a little hostel that had staggering views over the Gulf of Corinth. She was put into a room with Chantal and Valérie, two young women who also spoke French. As it turned out, they were from Quebec, my country … more or less. I was in the next room, and the girls soon escaped the professor’s dry lectures and found their way over to my balcony. A couple of cheap bottles of Greek wine appeared, and far from home we talked about Canada.
Chantal and Valérie were from Quebec City, though Chantal had born in the Province of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. She was from the little town of Notre-Dame-du-Portage, which has, she insisted, one of the most beautiful sunsets in the world. The sun dips into the wide St. Lawrence River, and the colours, she told me, are magnifique.
Valérie pursed her lips in agreement, and I couldn’t help but remember a woman I once worked with. This woman always claimed that before she spoke French she had to make her face “go French.” It sounds ridiculous, but there’s actually something to her contention. Speaking a language is a whole way of being. You can feel it in the very sounds of the words (French,