I could come at language from a linguistic point of view. I could describe noun clauses and verb stems, but I didn’t live the language the way Chantal and Valérie did. Chantal shook her head at me. “You don’t understand. You see French on your cornflakes.”
“My cornflakes?”
“Yes. You see the French. On the box. The translation. But you don’t really understand.”
“That’s true,” I said, sloshing some wine onto the floor of the balcony.
Chantal tugged at her floppy woollen hat and smiled. She saw that I at least understood that, even if I could speak a few words of a language, I didn’t know what it was like to be “in” that language … to live it. And that, for Chantal and Valérie, was a start.
I spent the next few days with Chantal and Valérie, traipsing around the ruins of Delphi. The most famous one is the Temple of Apollo. It lies halfway up a cliff, and in a little grotto at its foot there once sat the famous Oracle. The Oracle was always a woman, and it’s generally agreed that there must have been some fissure in the rock that leaked a kind of gas that put the Oracle into her trance. An earthquake closed up the whole thing a thousand years ago, but scientists now say it was methane gas with traces of ethylene. Essentially, the poor woman was sniffing a hallucinogen.
In ancient times the Oracle’s ruminations were considered the height of wisdom. Pilgrims came from distant lands to ask questions. The Oracle’s answers, of course, were enigmatic, but there were legions of priests on hand to interpret them. Monarchs and emperors frequently sought advice, and one of the many famous tales is that of King Croesus of Asia Minor. He was set to attack Persia and asked the Oracle if he would be victorious.
In her gas-induced trance the Oracle answered that once Croesus crossed the river a great empire would fall. The king understood this to mean that once his troops crossed the Euphrates River into what was then Persia, victory would indeed be his. Unfortunately, the reverse was true, and he suffered a devastating defeat. Years later the broken king returned to Delphi to pose a second question. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” he cried.
“I did,” the Oracle said. “The great empire that fell was your own.”
When we approached the Temple of Apollo, we looked around, but I couldn’t see either a grotto or a fissure. They had long ago disappeared. As we wandered around, we were caught in a sudden cloudburst and got soaked to the skin. The temple is only one of many on the hill, and we still had a long way to walk. Chantal glanced at her watch. “The time is short.”
“Sounds like something the Oracle might say,” I ventured.
“Are you having fun with my English?” Chantal looked at me sternly from beneath her floppy hat.
“No, no … your English is a hell of a lot better than my French.”
“That’s right,” she said. “A hell.”
Later, ploughing wetly back to our hostel, we spotted something bizarre. A single black cloud clung to the top of the cliff. It broiled darkly and was lit up repeatedly by small explosions of sheet lightning.
“Look,” Valérie said, “do you think we’ve angered the Oracle?”
I snickered. “Do you think she’s mad about the ‘time is short’ thing?”
“Don’t laugh about these things.” Chantal was serious. Time wasn’t something to be messed with.
The family groupings of European languages are well understood. That’s no surprise. Until recently, most linguists have been English, American, German, or French, and they’ve been more interested, of course, in how their own languages evolved. Still, over the years, Western linguists have discovered a lot more than they bargained for.
In 1786 Sir William Jones, a British judge and scholar working in India, noticed strange resemblances between Latin and ancient Sanskrit. Like Greenberg, Jones began matching up cognates. Some were fairly obvious like the Sanskrit word for king — raj. In English we have the cognates regent and royal, both deriving from the Latin regina. There’s also the Latin diva, meaning “god,” from which we get the word divine.
However, my all-time favourite cognate is Buddha. It stems from Pali, a dialect of ancient Sanskrit, and literally means “to awake.” But the only tattered remnant we have of this particular cognate, in English at least, is the word bed. It’s amazing how a concept can take different directions. I’m even tempted to say that a culture gets what it deserves. While the ancient wise men of India and the Far East became enlightened, well, we were … sleeping.
Sanskrit was the language of the ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts and spread its wings across most of Asia. It spawned languages such as Hindi, Punjabi, the Urdu of Pakistan, Bengali, Kurdish, and Persian … and the list goes on and on. All of these languages seemed to have a common ancestor, the same as European tongues. The evidence this time was simply overwhelming. We now believe that this ancestor language, what today is unimaginatively called Proto Indo-European, was spoken about five thousand years ago by a small band of hunter-gatherers. By an incredible fluke of history, it survived, prospered, and spread even as countless languages around it died out.
More recently the search for this ancient and unwritten Proto Indo-European language has become even more focused. Among the cognates for animals and trees there are only a few that run through all of the hundreds of languages descended from Proto Indo-European. Salmon is one. The cognate here is actually lok. The Old English is leax from which we derive just lake. German has lachs and Yiddish, of course, has lox. The Greek is
The only other cognate that features in all Indo-European languages is the word for beech tree. With a little insight it was realized that Proto Indo-European must have arisen among a people who lived on the banks of a Salmon-spawning river in an area where beeches grew. This observation narrowed the search to the plains of what is now eastern Germany and Poland. There a small tribe of wanderers spoke a tongue that forms the basis for the languages of more than two billion people today, about one-third of the Earth’s population.
Have I mentioned hell journeys? Have I referred to marathons in cramped buses sitting squeezed and stiff for ten or twelve long, impossible hours? Sometimes there’s no other way to get where you’re going. In this case I was headed into the northern reaches of Greece. I’d already veered off track, and there was one thing up there that I thought I might as well see.
I’d been on the road for a full day already when I tucked into the city of Thessaloniki. From there I should have had a short jaunt over the border and into Turkey, but it wasn’t that easy.
Greeks and Turks hate each other passionately. The Greeks on their side of the border warn travellers not to venture into Turkey. “They eat babies over there,” they say. “Don’t go.
It’s terrible.” On the Turkish side, meanwhile, they say much the same thing. “What do you want to go there for? They’re monsters … horrible, horrible.”
Such antipathy no doubt dates back to the Turkish occupation of Greece for hundreds of years, but the discord really heated up in the 1920s when the present borders between