Free The Last Speakers by K. David Harrison Page A

propitiate the spirits. I felt a bit queasy at the smell of fresh sheep guts, but at the same time I was mesmerized by the ritual. By the end, I would collect more than 50 new words in my notebook. At the same time, I felt like an adopted son who had been taught one of the most important activities in Monchak life.
    The stomach was carefully lifted out. It was full of rank-smelling half-digested grass, and I recoiled at the stench. A critical moment came when the stomach was severed; at that instant, it had to be handed over to Nyaama, and from then on could only be handled by women. Nyaama and Golden New Year took it to down the riverbank, where they emptied it, turned it inside out, and washed it thoroughly.
    Next came the large and small intestines, carefully uncoiled and placed on a specific type of flat rectangular wooden tray. They too had to be prepared by the women, methodically turned inside out, emptied of the little balls of dung they contained, and washed thoroughly.
    The end result, about an hour later, was a large bubbling cauldron of what the Monchak call “hot blood,” a stew of all the carefully prepared internal organs. The cleaned stomach became a bag into which blood was poured (it would congeal into a blood pudding). The meat was not eaten yet; it would be hung on the walls to dry and consumed over the next two weeks. The sheep’s massive fatty tail, weighing at least five pounds, was the dish that would be consumed first—and it was offered to me, the guest of honor. I was given a knife and sliced off a small wedge of fat to present to each family member, in descending order of age, as protocol demands.
    Afterward, as I lay in my sleeping bag in the yurt, my stomach full of sheep organs and fat, I was amazed at how much I had experienced in just one day. I’d been befriended by an entire extended family, participated in a sheep slaughter, helped collect dung for the fire, and helped herd, corral, and milk the goats. Above all, my brain was buzzing with information, new words for dozens of objects that only yesterday I had not known existed—for example, the sheep’s bile sac or the chunk of fat on the sheep’s tail. I had a new appreciation for the intricacies of naming objects in a culture where knowledge means survival. Collecting words during a sheep slaughter could not have been further from a dry academic discussion of how a grammar is constructed. Yet it revealed a richness and precision about the Monchak way of talking, indeed of how they apprehend the world.
    THE LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT DEBATE
    My time among the Tuvans, the Tofa, and the Monchak made me realize just how many important concepts they possess that have no exact counterpart in any other language. This reminded me of a long-standing debate among scientists about the relation between language and perceived reality. As biologist Brendon Larson has noted: “There are multiple challenges in examining this linguistic link between ourselves and the natural world because such reflection is akin to a fish reflecting on the water in which it has lived its entire life. We cannot escape language to look at it.” 4
    Scientists and philosophers have long speculated: Does the language we speak impose certain categories, pathways of thought, or filters that affect the way we perceive the world? Or is the language we speak irrelevant, exerting no effect upon the way we think? This thesis was classically formulated in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as described by Benjamin Lee Whorf:
    We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic system in our minds. 5
    Taken in its strong form, linguistic determinism