Less Than Words Can Say | Page 7

of our language in particular, and out of the political history of language in general.

The Two Tribes
The Jiukiukwe Indians live in some swamps near the headwaters of the Orinoco. They are the most primitive people on the face of the earth, and their homeland is so isolated and dismal and totally lacking in anything of value that they will never be discovered by civilized men.
They do not know the use of fire. They wear no clothing, although on special occasions the married men do drape pieces of vines around their necks. They don't tie them, however, for they have not discovered the knot. They build no shelters, and they use no tools, except for unworked rocks with which they bang on trees in order to dislodge the bark and expose the grubs and worms on which they live. Once in a while they find a dead fish floating in the water close enough to the shore to be hauled in without having to wade out too far. The waters teem with nasty creatures. They celebrate the occasion with a communal meal and a religious festival, at the climax of which the married men drape the pieces of vine around their necks. When the party is over, they squat happily in the muck and jabber away at each other in a language that contains thirty-four separate noun declensions, each providing forty-five separate forms, fifteen singulars, fifteen duals, and fifteen plurals.
Their verbs are even more complicated. The conjugations, eleven in all, indicate not only the usual things like person, number, tense, voice, and mood, but also the relationship of the speaker to his listener. A younger brother who is nevertheless not the youngest of his mother's sons and who has never found a fish must speak, in the dry season, to the eldest of his paternal uncles in verb forms that would scandalize the mother-in-law of his youngest female cousin, especially in the rainy season.
The Jiukiukwe language has an enormous vocabulary in matters of interest to the Jiukiukwe. Although their technology is limited to the banging of trees with stones, they have scores of words to describe it. They have separate and unrelated words for flat stones, round stones, big stones, little stones, sharp stones, and so on, but they have no word for ``stone.'' In the case of trees, the vocabulary is even larger, since trees in which grubs or worms have been found are distinguished individually from one another by words that amount almost to ``names'' and are devised as needed, while unproductive trees or trees not yet banged are named not for any physical attributes but for their location with reference to the nearest tree that has provided grubs and worms. The whole system is duplicated with utterly unrelated words for fallen trees. They have, however, no word that simply means ``tree.''
Since they use their knuckles and fingertips for counting, they can count only up to thirty-eight. (They count three knuckles on each finger but only two on the thumb.) Counting begins with the knuckle at the base of the left little finger, moves out to the tip, continues starting with the knuckle at the base of the ring finger, and so forth. Each hand thus provides nineteen units. Every knuckle and every fingertip has its own name, and those names are also the names of the numbers. They have, however, no names for the toes, and, while they do speak of the arms and the legs, they use one and the same word to name the ankles, knees, wrists, and elbows.
``Correct'' social behavior among the Jiukiukwe is entirely a matter of doing and saying the right thing to the right relative under the right circumstances. Accordingly, the vocabulary and grammar of kinship are very large and complex. They have separate words for every possible degree of familial relationship. Not only, for instance, is there a special word for the oldest son of your mother's next youngest sister, but there is yet another word for him should he have reached that estate through the death of some older brother. In either case, he is called by still another name until sunset on a day when he has found a dead fish. However, since all the Jiukiukwe are related to one another in some precisely nameable way, they have no need for words that mean things like ``family'' or ``relative'' or ``kinship.''
There is a curious thing about the way they use their verbs. They have, of course, both passive and active forms, but they consider it a serious breach of etiquette amounting almost to sacrilege to use the active form when speaking of persons. In a child, the use of the active voice in the first person singular is taken somewhat less seriously, but it is still discouraged as a