It's time again to explore the world of lesser known languages with another edition of Schendo's LiCTLe of the Month Club. This time, we turn to the vast, scarcely explored world of Amazonian linguistics and a language which might have faded into extinction unnoticed if it weren't for a remarkable series of coincidences and the work of a missionary turned linguist, Desmond Derbyshire.
An accountant by trade and training, Desmond and his wife, Grace, went to South America in the 1950's to visit a friend who was working as a missionary in what is now Guyana. This exotic vacation would perhaps have only collected dusty in the slide show bin of history had Derbyshire not decided to walk to the next village. Alone. Without food or survival gear. In a tropical rain forest.
An accountant by trade and training, Desmond and his wife, Grace, went to South America in the 1950's to visit a friend who was working as a missionary in what is now Guyana. This exotic vacation would perhaps have only collected dusty in the slide show bin of history had Derbyshire not decided to walk to the next village. Alone. Without food or survival gear. In a tropical rain forest.
Now, if my calculations are correct, Desmond was somewhere between twenty six and thirty five years old at the time, which may explain a lot. Then again, the version of the story told by his friend Geoffrey Pullum suggests that this was a route with which Des was familiar. In any case, he became lost and spent the night alone and sure of his impending doom.
Now, I don't know what kind of deals one strikes while wandering through the jungle, becoming increasingly lost and disoriented, but when Derbyshire emerged safely from this ordeal, he was under a lifelong obligation. Upon returning to England, he quit his job, took courses in field linguistics and bible translation and moved to Brazil with his wife, to live with the Hixkaryana, a remote and endangered tribe along the Nhamundá river.
The Hixkaryana live in remote Northwest Brazil along the river that forms the border between the states of Amazonas and Pará. Their language is of the Carib family, after which the Caribbean is named. According to a report prepared by SIL (the missionary group which trained and sponsered the Derbyshires), at the time of Desmond and Grace's extended field work (from 1959 to 1975), there were only 100 individuals and very few children.
By 1975, the Brazilian government had taken over the medical work begun by the Derbyshires, and Desmond had published his translation of the New Testament in Hixkaryana. They returned to England, where Desmond was not going to let a silly thing like not having gone to college stop him from applying for a Ph.D. in Linguistics at University College London. That same year, he met an academic linguist, Geoffrey Pullum, and the two of them would go on to overturn much of the “common knowledge” of linguistics and propel this little known South Amerindian language into a unique sort of linguistic fame.
In 1963, a linguist by the name of Joseph Greenberg was wondering just how different two languages could be. As anyone who has studied another language can attest to, English and Spanish and French and German play by different sets of rules. And, while some languages may be in the same ballpark, some are no longer in the same league, and some languages don't even look like the same sport.
Gathering up all the information about as many different types of languages as he could, Greenberg published a list of “Language Universals,” rules which every language was supposed to follow. Most of these Universals also had to do with “Basic Word Order.”
Word order can be very important for the meaning of a sentence. “Jack shot Jill” and “Jill shot Jack” have completely different people sitting in the defendant's seat. The Basic Word Order of a language is commonly defined as the most frequent or underlying order of a sentence with a subject (S), a verb (V) and a direct object (O).
Greenberg's very first Universal starts by pointing out the fact that there are six possible ways to arrange a sentence with these three elements:
| Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) | Verb-Object-Subject (VOS) |
| Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) | Object-Verb-Subject (OVS) |
| Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) | Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) |
The three orders on the left are the most common arrangements of the words in a sentence among the world's languages. English, for instance, is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language. The other three arrangements, according to Greenberg, “do not occur at all, or at least are excessively rare.” As often happens in academia, the “or at least...” part disappeared and by the 1970's, many linguists were saying that the three Basic Word Orders on the right were absolutely impossible.
Derbyshire and Pullum, however, proved them wrong. They showed that Hixkaryana has a Basic Word Order in its sentences of Object-Verb-Subject (OVS), as in this example from their 1981 survey of Object-first languages:
| kana | yanɨmno | bɨryekomo |
| fish | he-caught-it | boy |
In other words, here is a language whose sentences are in the complete opposite order of English. If I said “Jack shot Jill” in Hixkaryana, it is Jill, not Jack, who is going to jail. After researching more languages of the Carib family (mostly located in the northeast corner of South America), Derbyshire and Pullum found several other languages that may turn out to have an “impossible” Basic Word Order also.
An important question their work raised is whether so-called “Universals” may have more to do with patterns of history and colonialism. If Carib-language speaking peoples had colonized Europe and wiped out the Romance languages, the Slavic languages and the Germanic languages to the point of near extinction, wouldn't we consider Object-Verb-Subject to be a “normal” sentence?
Desmond Derbyshire died in 2007, and much of the information about his life and career is drawn from the obituary written by his friend and colleague, Geoffrey Pullum. I am nowhere near stupid enough to make a blanket statement one way or another about the effect of missionary activity on native peoples. Has contact between indigenous people and outsiders been generally disastrous for the later? Undoubtedly, yes. Is the history of the Western Hemisphere groaning under the weight of exploitation and genocide at the hands of those who claimed to enlighten and civilize? You bet it is. Are there exceptions? Aren't there always?
Michael Cahill's SIL report, “From Endangered to Less Endangered” is full of some some rather openly self-congratulatory statements about the role of Christian missionaries in Brazil and Papua New Guinea. I don't think I'm being unfair when I say it is not an objective point of view. But, if the numbers may be believed, there are now six times as many Hixkaryana as when Desmond and Grace Derbyshire arrived, and almost all of them can read and write in their native language. The attention brought to the tribe has also caused Brazil's Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI) to train Hixkaryana teachers and assist in creating a tribal operated Brazil-nut industry which has created income and jobs.
So, no- I am not going to make any comments about missionary activity. And I am not going to make any comment about these two individual missionaries. I am going to let Geoffrey Pullum do it:
Regardless of one's position on missionary work, one has to view the Hixkaryana as lucky that their first extended interaction with the modern world was this gentle missionary couple, Des and Grace. As is well known, many Amerindian groups in South America have been far less fortunate. Des loved the Hixkaryana people; he respected their intelligence, kindness, generosity, and practical skills; he delighted in their language; and he cared about their welfare.
Amen, brother.
This has been another production of Schendo's Bad Grammar. Much of the information on Derbyshire's life was drawn from Geoffrey Pullum's obituary, available online here. It's well worth reading on its own, especially for the anecdote about how Derbyshire met Robert Kennedy. The Hixkaryana data was taken from Derbyshire and Pullum (1981). "Object-Initial Languages" published in the International Journal of American Linguistics, vol 47, no 3, pages 192-214. And no, I don't have any idea how it is pronounced.
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