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, phonetically, tends to be a bit more forward in the mouth than English). And that’s even before you get to the meanings, the ways languages describe the world. Languages are direct reflections of ourselves. We think in them. We dream in them. We exist in them.
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
