figsson

I Hear Sounds

I noticed it while watching old Hollywood movies on youtube, with English subtitles turned on. The automation (a kind of AI?) to turn dialogues into written words did strange tricks. Speech recognition in digital technologies is nothing new, but for now when Jimmy Stewart speaks some outrageously funny approximations come out in the automatically written subtitles. When the transcriptions are to be once more recycled in the form of speech (dialogue)  and re-transcripted (written) sentence, we should expect more deviation from the original. And after several cycles the images, dialogues and the subtitles would be totally incompatible and incomprehensible. The composer Alvin Lucier’s work from 1969, titled ‘I am Sitting in a Room’ did something parallel in galleries and museums since then.(1) The piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Eventually the speech becomes an unintelligible grunt. Indeed the work is based on the acoustic properties of the space (the room) which imposes itself on the outcome, and on the technologies of analog recording. But then, I am still dangling in the gap between human emotions and the realm of the artificial intelligence learning from human cognition.

On a stupendously larger scale, the ‘space’ devoured human speech since time immemorial. In Archaeology and Language Colin Renfrew writes on one of the most difficult tasks that an archaeologist may face.(2) How does one reconcile material remains of prehistory with the spoken language? Do the migrations of artifacts also suggest the transference of words? While the lexicon may be more easier to trace, what about the semantics and grammar of a language? In the book, Renfrew’s aim is to search for the origins of the Indo-European languages. Published in 1987, his research traces these origins to the Neolithic settlements in Anatolia and the advance of agriculture towards the European continent. As an archaeologist studying the silent testimony of objects, geography, climate and varied ancient technologies, he naturally refutes claims of  a single origin, of an ‘urheimat’ and ‘urvolk’ and ‘ursprache’ where the language family before all its later variations originated. I have visited Çatalhöyük, the Neolithic ‘city’ (approximately 7500 to 6400 BC) in central Anatolia varied times to be immersed in deep history and to recognize our time and space apparently susceptible to very rapid change. On site, one is greeted with silence every time in the face of the mud-brick walls, paintings on them, the skulls of animals that adorn the interiors and the dead buried inside the houses. Like the caves in Southwestern Europe or, for example, Göbekli Tepe (c. 10.000 BC) in southeast Turkey, Çatalhöyük has a mythical aura combining human agency, nature and the supernatural. But the sound of speech the site suggests is of a different magnitude, and its abstractions of space and art point at the degree in which humankind is separated from other beings, for better or worse.

So, once again, how does one treat words (and sounds) as objects of (an) archaeology? Michel Foucault’s book Les mots et les choses  has the English title of ‘The Order of Things’. The literal translation would be Words and Things. From the nineteenth century onward, “…language” he writes, ” as the spontaneous tabula , the primary grid of things, as an indispensable link between representation and things, is eclipsed in its turn…” (3) Ever the historian of transition into modernity, Foucault narrates the story of the Tower of Babel in terms of similitude and resemblance. The signature (the sign, mark) of the thing finds its analog in the word: ” In its original form, when it was given to men by God himself, language was an absolutely certain and transparent sign for things, because it resembled them…” (4) Looking at the Holy Lands covered in blood as of today, God has not only cursed his people linguistically, but he failed the sons, daughters and followers of Abraham to the North, to South, East and the West. So, good riddance with the books, the Semites and the Aryans, the Flood and the curse of Babel: One should try to hear speech suspended from long before the scriptures, and even before Adam.

This brings us to the so called African Eve, the sensational find of late twentieth century: “According to (that) first estimate, the woman from whom all modern human mithochondria descend lived about 190.000 years ago…” (5)  later to be more accurately dated to around 143.000 years. By counting the (regular) intervals of mutations separating different species (ie. chimps and humans, 5 million years) and thus establishing a ‘calibration curve’ and comparing it to the number of mutations separating Africans from non-Africans, it was possible to estimate the approximate date for the African Eve. Working on evolutionary genetics, the mitochondrial DNA and blood types, Luigi L. Cavalli-Sforza’s book, “Genes, Peoples and Languages” expands the realm of evidence into the distant past, this time physiological, to map varied trees of dispersal of peoples and those of languages. As it happens, after thousands of people were genetically sampled from all over the world, the linguistic families and the genetic tree show some impressive similarities, genetic drifts corresponding to linguistic ones . Once again there appears to be no single root to all languages, only ‘Superphylums’ and language families distributed among populations. But it appears that my quest to hear an archaic human sound in the form of a word is faintly met when “…Joseph Greenberg noticed at least one word all the linguistic families share: the root tik, meaning finger, or the number one…  which is found in other languages as the semantic change of the same root which appear acceptable, like ‘hand’ ‘arm’, or ‘point’, ‘indicate’.” (6) As in other archaeological evidence, the languages are subject to very rapid change in comparison to genes: “Modern languages derived from Latin would not be understandable to a Roman of two thousand years ago–a thousand year separation is often enough to render a language incomprehensible to its first speakers.” Meanwhile, the book has one very significant implication in explaining why racism is fallacious: “The main genetic differences are between individuals and not between populations, or so called ‘races’…” (7) This should also refute the supremacy of certain languages over others.

As an enthusist, I feel being sucked into greater questions in this brief (and quasi-academic) survey. For a relatively enlightened citizen of Turkey, the pre-history of the Near East holds the seeds of a unique pride leading to a kind patriotism beyond national borders. This also leads to a naive conception of one’s place on earth. The cliche, as the bridge between East and the West surprisingly holds true when considering the distribution of the roots of Indo-European language towards Persia and India on one side, and towards Europe on the other. But then, one’s gaze to the past is cut ‘short’ at the Neolithic site and at the lexicon of the Hatti language. The oldest roots of language in remote history is searched by a number of scholars worldwide, mostly Russian linguistic historians working in varied institutions since 1950’s proposing the ‘Nostratic’ super-family, the mother of all languages. Yet, in another ‘Out of Africa’ moment, Martin Bernal traces the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization in “Black Athena”, a series of three volumes, one dedicated to linguistic evidence. (8) As in Mesopotamia and Ganges, one should look for the earliest traces of human feat along the river valleys, now in the Upper Nile, around Ethiopia, but this time before 12.000 BP, in Mesolithic and Upper Paleolithic era. How one re-constructs the roots of words from existing languages, some of which are well established and some possibly soon to be extinct, is an extraordinarily meticulous work. And to match these words with things, beings, acts and sentiments before writing is harder still: ” …languages are not anatomical in a metaphoric sense alone but are physically located in our bodies and distributed in our social relations. It might be more accurate to say that our bodies, like our social forms and material cultures, are deeply historical precisely because language (simulated and real) has become an essential component of their reproduction.” (9)

I have bought Roget’s Thesaurus (1982 edition) in around 1987 at Strand bookstore in New York City. Over the years, I must have gone over the whole word list for at least ten times for various occasions (index, some 600 pages) page by page, not to mention the countless cross-references I checked in the ‘text’ section while writing. Before most of the installations in galleries and museums, both solo and together with xurban_collective I came up with lists of words.  Even when not in use, the words and sometimes (made up) phrases would hint at a kind of ‘discrete poetry’ in dialogue with photographs, objects and video. There is no version of the thesaurus in my native language, Turkish, but only a guide to correct spelling (Yazım Klavuzu) and other proper dictionaries in printed form. Every now and then I go through them as well to find loan words (as there are many from the Middle Eastern languages, French, English and few others) and to look for the esoteric connections between my Altaic ancestors and Sanskrit and the Semitic languages. In a couple of instances, I have also gone through a Latin-Turkish dictionary as well. It is like a game, I dream neither in English nor in Turkish or a kind of creole. In these surveys, every now and then certain words beg for my attention. The ‘sounds’ of these names, adjectives or verbs frequently suggest archaic origins in my quite limited apprehension of linguistics, as I lack the proper  knowledge of respelling systems (many) in English language like IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). (Meanwhile, for many Turkish speakers -using the Latin alphabet for a few years less than a century now- the urban legend has it that Turkish is “pronounced just as it is written”(sic). What this actually means is that there are fewer exceptions to pronounciation when combinations of vowels and consonants come together.) The outstanding words, sometimes coming into the English and Turkish languages from many different sources are usually ‘angular’ as opposed to the rounded/rhyming/musical sound of one’s native tongue. And on rare occasions, unrelated words in different languages (ie. English and Turkish, borrowing from Middle Eastern languages) can be so resonant that they begin to attract each other in their deeper meaning as well, like in a kind of imaginary thesaurus of world languages coming from deep history. When all human sound from millenia is once more fed into the atmosphere spontaneously it should amount to a howl, exponentially growing, simply to mean that we were here like any other being, nothing more and nothing less.

July 2024

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room

(2) Colin Renfrew, “Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins” Penguin Books, London 1989

(3) Michel Foucault, “The Order of Things: The Archaeology of Human Sciences” Routledge, London 1989.  p.XXV

(4) ibid. p.40

(5) Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “Genes, Peoples and Languages” Penguin Books, London 2001. p.78

(6) ibid. p.142

(7) ibid. p.VIII

(8) Martin Bernal, “Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization” (Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence) Rutgers Un. Press, New Jersey 2006

(9) April McMahon, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Andrew Shryock, Language in “Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present”, Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, eds., Un. of California Press, Berkeley 2011. p. 127