Trip of the Tongue (11 page)

I was thrilled when I discovered that my cabin was a neat little one-bedroom house with a kitchen and full bath. From the living room, I could hear the ocean; from the front porch, I could see it. I grabbed my coat and walked the thirty seconds from the door to the beach, a half-moon of sand and sea grass flanked by wooded hills. I took off my shoes and stood in the surf as the sun set. I watched the waves turn gold.

It was at this moment that I began to think very seriously about never leaving the Olympic Peninsula.

Though it was midsummer, by the time I got back to the cabin, the evening had turned chill. I turned up the heat and curled up on the couch with
First Lessons in Makah
.

This slender volume—more of a booklet, really—was the reason I'd come to Neah Bay. The Makah language is part of the larger Waskashan family, a group of languages indigenous primarily to Vancouver Island (which sits just across the strait from Neah Bay). Although languages such as Haisla, Kwak'wala, and Nuu-chah-nulth can still boast native-speaking populations, Makah, the southernmost language of the family, now exists solely as a second language. Ruth E. Claplanhoo, the last native speaker of Makah, died in 2002 at the age of 100.

The phonetic inventories of Makah and other Wakashan languages are renowned for their use of consonants, which is a nice way of saying that they use lots of sounds that don't exist in English. There is the letter
ł
, which my book informed me is “an
s
-like sound with the tongue in the position of
l
.” Or
x
, which is “an
h
-like sound with the middle of the tongue raised.” I was guided in the pronunciation of an entire set of consonants with the instruction “A glottal stop is produced simultaneously with the consonant. This closure in the throat must be maintained until after the closure in the mouth is released.”

I honestly had no idea what to do with any of that, so I decided to set pronunciation aside and move on. Only then did Makah begin to reveal its secrets—like its particularly fascinating way of dealing with something called evidentiality.

In English I can simply say, without qualification, “The sky is blue.” Although I could certainly explain how I know this or why I believe it, it's not grammatically necessary to back up declarative statements with supporting evidence. But in Makah there exists a series of suffixes that deal very specifically and precisely with the question of how a person knows something. Adding
-wa:t
to a verb, for instance, indicates hearsay—the difference between “The sky is blue” and “I heard that the sky is blue.” If you're looking at something from afar and aren't quite sure of what you're seeing, you can use -
cadił
: “The sky looks blue—I think.”

Evidentials have always been a favorite linguistic subject of mine. If I were ever to go back to graduate school, I imagine I would probably want to write a great many papers on comparative political discourse in languages with and without evidentials. Just imagine, for instance, how different the experience of watching Fox News and MSNBC might be if the anchors' every declaration included this kind of information.

It was in my reading about evidentials that I found—from an article written by William Jacobsen, who also happens to be the author of my Makah primer—what must be one of my all-time favorite bits of linguistic data. As part of a discussion of lexical suffixes that act like evidentials, Jacobsen cites the following pair of sentences:

“You're getting fat.”

“You look like you're getting fat.”

I spent a long time thinking about which statement would annoy me more.

Makah, like Crow, Navajo, and so many other indigenous languages of North America, is polysynthetic. Which means, again, that a single word can oftentimes be broken down into a relatively large number of linguistically meaningful parts. (The smallest of these parts, by the way, is what's called a morpheme.) This doesn't mean that a curt utterance in Makah necessarily translates into a mouthful of English. But it does mean that a word in Makah can be extended by a series of affixes and thereby take on a more elaborate meaning. Take
. When parsed out, it becomes:

So one word in Makah—
—becomes four words in English: “device for going along.” This is a fairly simple example. It becomes more complicated with a word such as a
.

A literal translation would be “stick-like object with separated grooves on one end.”

I'm often charmed despite myself by the level of description a single word in a polysynthetic language can contain. But I try to remember that the literal translation isn't necessarily the most appropriate translation. Because although a
is a fairly specialized bit of fishing equipment—a finger rest for a harpoon—a
is something much simpler: a paddle.