Monotony, an absence of male friends

Extract from Bruce Chatwin's 'In Patagonia':

"Finding in 'primitive' languages a dearth of words for moral ideas, many people assumed these ideas did not exist. But the concepts of 'good' or 'beautiful', so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted in things. The first speakers of language took the raw material of their surroundings and pressed it into metaphor to suggest abstract ideas.

 

Monotony, an absence of male friends

 

(Speaking of the Yaghan  language - the Yaghan, also called Yagán, Yámana or Yamana, are the indigenous inhabitants of the islands south of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego extending their presence into Cape Horn.)

What shall we think of a people who defined 'monotony' as 'an absence of male friends'? Or, for 'depression', used the word that described the vulnerable phase in a crab's seasonal cycle, when it has sloughed off its old shell and waits for another to grow? Or who derived 'lazy' from the Jackass penguin? 

Here are just a few of their synonyms:

A tangle of trees that have fallen blocking the path forward - A hiccough
Fuel - something burned - Cancer
Mussels out of season - Shrivelled skin - Old age

...Verbs take first place in this language. The Yaghans had a dramatic verb to capture every twitch of the muscles, every possible action of nature or man. The verb iya means 'to moor your canoe to a streamer of kelp'; okon 'to sleep in a floating canoe'; ukomona 'to hurl your spear into a shoal of fish without aiming for a particular one'; wejna 'to be loose or easily moved as a broken bone or the blade of a knife', 'to wander about, or roam, as a homeless or lost child'.

Compared to the verbs, other parts of speech droop in the wings. Nouns hang suspended from their verbal roots. The word for 'skeleton' comes from 'to gnaw thoroughly'. Aiapi is 'to bring a special kind of spear and put it in a canoe ready for hunting'; aiapux is the hunted animal and so 'the sea otter'.

 

Birds of Passage

 

The Yaghans were born wanderers though they rarely wandered far. The ethnographer Father Martin Gusinde wrote: "They resemble fidgety birds of passage, who feel happy and inwardly calm only when they are on the move"; and their language reveals a mariner's obsession with time and space. For, although they did not count to five, they defined the cardinal points with minute distinctions and read seasonal changes as an accurate chronometer.

 

Four examples:

Iuan: Season of the young crabs (when the parents carry their young)
Cuiua: Season when the young let go (from a verb 'to stop biting')
Hakureum: Bark loose and sap rising
Cekana: Canoe building season and time of the snipe-calls (The 'cek-cek' sound imitates the snipe and the noise as the canoe-builder rips sheets of beech-bark from the trunk)

Thomas Bridges coined the word 'Yaghan' after a place called Yagha: the Indians called themselves Yamana. Used as a verb yamana means 'to live, to breathe, be happy, recover from sickness or be sane'.

The layers of metaphorical associations that made up their mental soil shackled the Indians to their homeland with ties that could not be broken."

 

I wonder

(Asha: Maybe this adds to their lost-ness and anguish when they are chased out of their natural habitats - because dislocation is also a loss of language, since they can no longer see the natural elements their metaphors are based on? And perhaps they cannot teach their language to their children who have never seen these things and therefore cannot relate?)

Page 175-176, 'In Patagonia', by Bruce Chatwin