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Beyond the Elder Peaks

The Legends of Virginia Dare & the Allegwi

Savage Worlds

Language

For game mechanics on how to learn a new language, see Learn language.

Language Groups in this Campaign

Native Languages

For what makes a language “native,” see Native

Algonquian
- Secotan
- Powhatan
- Delaware
Siouan
- Occaneechi
- Eno
- Allegwi
Iroquoian
- Iroquois
- Tuscarora

Invasive Languages

For what makes a language “invasive,” see Invasive

Indo-European Languages
- Germanic Languages
  - English
  - German
- Romance Languages
  - French
  - Spanish

Theory

Language provides a particularly human means of communication. Many other animals have complex, nuanced calls, songs and means of communicating with one another and other species, but human languages exhibit a still greater degree of complexity.

Language can alienate us from the world around us, certainly,[1] but they can also bring us closer to it. In literate thought, we sometimes go so far as to define language by its arbitrary nature; the sounds themselves have no inherent meaning, aside from the meaning we assign to them. Native languages, on the other hand, pride themselves on the very opposite notion: that their words, grammar and sounds come from the land they grow out of, and that humans learn to speak from other-than-human persons.

In Sensory Worlds in Early America, Peter Charles Hoffer highlighted the differences between English and Indian cultural soundscapes by writing:

The demands of English perception required that auditory and visual signals not blend into the landscape, as Indians’ signs did, but stand out from it in sharp relief. Thus, the trumpet blast identified the English to one another rather than the imitation of birdsong or animal call the Indians adopted. (p. 44)

We can have a difficult time trying to tell which came first, our assertion of human supremacy and separation from the rest of the world, or the structure of our languages to reinforce that notion, but the relationship between them seems much more than coincidental. It goes back, once again, to the powerful connection between patterns of speech and patterns of thought. In many native cultures, even faculties like intelligence and imagination reside not solely inside the human skull, but all around us. Intelligence acts not as something we have, but something we partake of, like the air we breathe.

From a Haudenosaunee or Mohawk perspective,we notice that minds colonized by these assertions concerning the universality of imagination’s origins and functions are contributing dimensions to larger conceits maintained by anthropocentrically biased cultures. Cultures colonized by these conceits tautologically confirm the interior sources of their intelligence. Minds colonized by such conceits think and conceive of themselves in this grammar of possessive individualism. Onkwehonwe (unassimilated, traditional Haudenosaunee), in contrast, regard any assumption concerning the existence of autonomous, anthropogenic minds to be aberrations that violate the unity, interrelation, and reciprocity between language and psychology, landscape and mind. The ecology of traditional Haudenosaunee territory possesses sentience that is manifest in the consciousness of that territory, and that same consciousness is formalized in and as Haudenosaunee consciousness. Of course, other beings manifest that consciousness in their literature of tracks, chirrups, and loon calls.
Onkwehonwe mind everything because everything minds Onkwehonwe.

Bringing that down to earth a bit, David Abram provided an excellent example with the Koyukon language, in Spell of the Sensuous.

The Artic tern (k’idagaas’), the northern phalarope (tiyee), the rusty blackbird (ts’uhutlts’eegga), the blackpoll warbler (k’oot’anh), the slate colored junco (k’it’otlt’ahga)—all have such names. Written transcription, however, cannot convey the remarkable aptness of these names, which when spoken in Koyukon have a lilting, often whistle like quality. The interpenetration of human and nonhuman utterances is particularly vivid in the case of numerous bird songs that seem to enunciate whole phrases or statements in Koyukon.
Many bird calls are interpreted as Koyukon words … what is striking about these words is how perfectly they mirror the call’s pattern, so that someone outside the tribe who knows birdsongs can readily identify the species when the words are spoken in Koyukon. Not only the rhythym comes through, but also some of the tone, the “feel” that goes with it.

As we ponder such correspondences, we come to realize that the sounds and rhythyms of the Koyukon language have been deeply nourished by these nonhuman voices.

Hence the whirring, flutelike phrases of the hermit thrush, which sound in the forest thickest at twilight, speak the Koyukon words sook’eeyis deeyo—”it is a fine evening.” The thrushes also sometimes speak the phrase nahutl-eeyh—literally, “a sign of the spirit is perceived.” The thrush first uttered these words in the Distant Time, when it sensed a ghost nearby, and even today the call may be heard as a warning.

Tom Brown teaches things like this in the concept of “concentric circles”: you might not see a fresh deer kill half a mile away, but you can see the movements of ravens and crows overhead, and hear—and possibly understand—their calls. If you can master that, then the entire land becomes an extended set of senses. Hoffer describes the stark contrast between the comfort of native Indians who relied on such “concentric circles,” versus the English who became incredibly terrified in the Virginia Wilderness, in his aforementioned book. Abram, in the same book quoted previously, provides another example of a Peruvian doctor named Manuel Cόrdova-Rios, who spent several years living among the Amahuaca Indians in the Amazon. Their language remained impenetrable for him, until he became attuned to the jungle soundscape. When he began to recognize different bird and animal calls, the distinct sounds of wind through different types of vegetation, the unique sounds of water rushing along the most common courses in that particular environment, then he began to understand what the Indians said.

All this merely goes to prove that language, in a native context, means a great deal more than simply human communication. It embodies an aural and oral system embedded in the land itself, and nourished by many other inputs than simply humans. From archaeological evidence, we know that pre-Columbian Indians, almost universally, regarded language, not ethnicity, as the primary means of organizing and dividing themselves. Lenape graveyards, for instance, show an eclectic ethnic mix, though we know historically that they often had bitter relationships with groups that spoke other languages. Hence, also, why so many tribal names translate to something like, “People Who Speak Properly,” while the names they give to their neighbors generally mean something like, “People Who Talk Funny.”

Invasive languages, on the other hand, mean as little as they assume all languages to mean: merely human communication. For them, the story of Babel sums up their general attitude: that the fragmentation of language impedes a universal, human endeavor. They see no virtue in localized languages adapted to local ecologies; rather, they typically see wilderness in terms of Biblical metaphors, or myths like Beowulf, as a dark, haunted presence that humanity must at best restrain, and at worst eradicate. The concept of connecting to wilderness, particularly in 1610, has no real place in the European mind. But just as the Indians look down on Europeans for their inability to properly speak the language of the land they’ve moved into and their complete illiteracy with regards to the “literature of tracks, chirrups, and loon calls,” the English, as we well know, look down upon the oral communities of native America for their inability to read and write.

At this time, the movable type printing press has existed in Europe for a few centuries, and literacy has spread, helping to form the concept of the nation around the shared, literate experience of all those able to read the same pamphlets and news, written in the same language. The synaesthetic power of writing (we hear the sight of printed letters) contains a very potent kind of magic, as David Abram describes so eloquently; perhaps too potent. Abram’s description lends itself to a narrative of literate cultures becoming drunk with the magic of writing, and ultimately blind to any other kind of magic. We do not recognize spirits, we do not hear their voices, and we become utterly convinced that only humans can speak—or at least, only humans have anything to say.

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