Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (4 page)

The day my family was to arrive I woke up before dawn. At first light I paced the airstrip, checking for holes. There were always new sinkholes opening up. I also searched carefully for any large pieces of wood, such as firewood, the Pirahãs might have left on the strip. I was excited. This was really the beginning of our mission to the Pirahãs, for without my family, I knew that I could never stick it out. I needed their support. This was their mission too. They were stepping into a world without Western entertainment, without electricity, without doctors, dentists, or telephones—they were traveling back in time in many ways. This is a lot to ask of children, but I was confident that Shannon, Kristene, and Caleb would handle it well. I knew that Keren, the most experienced of all of us in this kind of life, would do very well and that the children would draw confidence and strength from her experiences. After all, Keren had been raised among the Sateré-Mawé Indians and had lived in the Amazon since she was eight years old. She loved it. And nothing about the missionary life was too hard for her. In many ways I too drew strength from her confidence. She was the most committed missionary I had ever known.

When the plane was about five minutes away, the Pirahãs started shouting and running to the airstrip. I heard it a couple of minutes later and ran excitedly to welcome my family to the jungle. My children and Keren were waving enthusiastically as they landed. After the plane finishing taxiing and the pilot had opened his hatch, I approached the plane and shook his hand vigorously. Keren then stepped off, ecstatic, smiling, and immediately trying to talk to the Pirahãs. Shannon, with her dog, Glasses, Kris, and Caleb exited the passenger doors. The kids looked uncertain, but were glad to see me. And they smiled broadly at the Pirahãs. As the pilot prepared to return to Porto Velho, Dick said as he was boarding, “I’m going to think of you, Dan, while I’m eating a juicy steak tonight in Porto Velho.”

We carried all our supplies to the house with the Pirahãs’ help and then rested for a few minutes. Keren and the children inspected this home I had brought them to. It was still in need of serious organizing. But within a couple of days, we would get into a routine of work and family life.

After unpacking our supplies, we set up house. Keren had made mosquito nets and hanging cloth organizers for our dishes, clothes, and other belongings. The children began home-schooling, Keren managed the home, and I threw myself into fulltime linguistics. We attempted to carry on an American Christian family culture in the middle of an Amazonian village. There were lessons for all of us.

None of us, not even Keren, had anticipated all that this new life would entail. One of our first nights as a family in the village, we were having dinner by gas lamp. In the living room I saw Glasses, Shannon’s puppy, chasing something that was hopping in the dark, though I couldn’t make it out. Whatever it was, it was hopping toward me. I stopped eating and watched. Suddenly, the dark thing hopped on my lap. I focused the beam of my flashlight at it. It was a gray-and-black tarantula, at least eight inches in diameter. But I was prepared. I worried about snakes and bugs, so I kept a hardwood club with me at all times. Without moving my hands toward the tarantula, I stood quickly and thrust my pelvis to throw the spider to the floor. My family had just seen what was on my lap and they stared wide-eyed at me and the hairy hopper. I grabbed my club and smashed it. The Pirahãs in the front room were watching. When I killed the spider they asked what it was.

“Xóooí”
(Tarantula), I replied.

“We don’t kill those,” they said. “They eat cockroaches and do no harm.”

We adapted to these situations after a while. And at that time, we felt that God was taking care of us and that these experiences gave us good stories to tell.

T
hough I was a missionary, my first assignments from SIL were linguistic. I needed to figure out how the grammar of the language worked and write up my conclusions before SIL would allow me to begin Bible translation.

I soon discovered that linguistic field research engages the entire person, not just his intellect. It requires of the researcher no less than that he insert himself into the foreign culture, in sensitive, often unpleasant surroundings, with a great likelihood of becoming alienated from the field situation by general inability to cope. The fieldworker’s body, mind, emotions, and especially his sense of self are all deeply strained by long periods in a new culture, with the strain directly proportionate to the difference between the new culture and his own culture.

Consider the fieldworker’s dilemma: you are in a place where all you ever knew is hidden and muffled, where sights, sounds, and feelings all challenge your accustomed conception of life on earth. It is something like episodes of
The Twilight Zone,
where you fail to understand what is happening to you, because it is so unexpected and outside your frame of reference.

I approached field research with confidence. My linguistics training had prepared me well for the basic field tasks of collecting data, storing it properly, and analyzing it. I was out of bed by 5:30 each morning. After hauling up at least fifty-five gallons of water in five-gallon containers for drinking and dish washing, I would prepare breakfast for the family. By eight o’clock I was usually at my desk, beginning my “informant” work. I followed several different field guides and set measurable language-learning tasks for myself. My first couple of days back in the village, I made crude but useful drawings of the locations of all the huts in the village, with a list of the occupants of each. I wanted to learn how they spent their days, what was important to them, how children’s activities differed from adults’ activities, what they talked about, why they passed their time the way they did, and much more. And I was determined to learn to speak their language.

I tried to memorize at least ten new words or phrases per day and to study different “semantic fields” (groupings of related items such as body parts, health terms, bird names, etc.) and syntactic constructions (looking for active versus passive, past versus present, statements versus questions, and so on). I entered all new words on three-by-five-inch index cards. In addition to transcribing each new word phonetically on a card, I also recorded the contexts in which I had heard the word and a guess as to its most likely meaning. Then I punched a hole in the upper left corner of the card. I put ten to twenty cards on a ring (taken from a three-ring binder, so it would open and close) and put the ring through a belt loop on my pants. I would frequently test myself on the pronunciation and understanding of the words on my cards by working them into conversations with Pirahãs. I refused to let the Pirahãs’ constant laughter at my misapplication and mispronunciation of their language slow me down. I knew that my first linguistic goal was to figure out which sounds of those I was hearing in Pirahã speech were actually meaningful and perceptible to the Pirahãs. These are what linguists call the phonemes of a language, and they would be the basis for devising a writing system.

My first big breakthrough in understanding how the Pirahãs see themselves in relation to others came during a trek into the jungle with some Pirahã men. I pointed at the branch of a tree. “What’s that called?” I asked.

“Xií xáowí,”
they replied.

I pointed again to the branch, the straight portion of the branch this time, and I repeated,
“Xií xáowí.”

“No.” They laughed in unison. “
This
is the
xií xáowí,
” pointing toward the juncture of the branch with the tree trunk and also to a smaller branch’s juncture with the larger branch. “
That
” (what I had pointed at, the straight portion of the branch) “is
xii kositii.
”

I knew that
xii
meant “wood.” I was pretty sure that
xáowí
meant “crooked” and that
kositii
meant “straight.” But I still needed to test these guesses.

On the jungle path walking back toward home at the end of the day, I noticed that one long stretch of the path was straight. I knew that
xagí
meant “path,” so I tried “
Xagí kositii,
” pointing toward the path.

“Xaió!”
came the immediate response (Right!).
“Xagí kositíi xaagá”
(The path is straight).

When the path veered sharply to the right I tried
“Xagí xáowí.”

“Xaió!”
they all responded, grinning.
“Soxóá xapaitíisí xobáaxáí”
(You already see the Pirahã language well). Then they added
“Xagí xaagaia píaii,”
which I later realized meant “Path is crooked also.”

This was wonderful. In a few short steps I had learned the words for
crooked
and
straight.
I had already learned the words for most body

parts by this time. As we walked along, I remembered the words that had been given to me by the Pirahãs in their language for
Pirahã people
(
Híaitíihí
),
Pirahã language
(
xapaitíisí
),
foreigner
(
xaoói
), and
foreign language
(
xapai gáisi
).
Pirahã language
was clearly a combination of
xapaí
(head) and
tii
(straight), plus the suffix
-si,
which indicates that the word it is attached to is a name or a proper noun: “straight head.”
Pirahã people
was
hi
(he),
ai
(is), and
tii
(straight), plus
-hi,
another marker similar to
-si:
“he is straight.”
Foreigner
meant “fork,” as in “fork in the tree branch.” And
foreign language
meant “crooked head.”

I was making progress! But I was still only scratching the surface.

What makes the Pirahã language so difficult to learn and to analyze are things that do not appear in the first few days of work, however cheerful one’s immediate successes make one. The most difficult aspect of learning Pirahã is not the language itself, but the fact that the situation in which the learning takes place is “monolingual.” In a mono lingual field situation, very rare among the languages of the world, the researcher shares no language in common with the native speakers. This was my beginning point among the Pirahãs, since they don’t speak Portuguese, English, or any language other than Pirahã, except for a few limited phrases. So to learn their language, I must learn their language. Catch-22. I can’t ask for translations into any other language or ask a Pirahã to explain something to me in any language but Pirahã. There are methods for working in this way. Not surprisingly, I helped develop some of those methods as a result of my ordeal. But the methods for monolingual field research were mostly around long before I came on the scene.

Nevertheless, it is hard. Here is a typical exchange, after I had been there long enough to learn the Pirahã expression for
How do you say ———in Pirahã
?:

“How do you say that?” (I point to a man coming upriver in his canoe.)

“
Xigihí hi piiboóxio xaaboópai
” (The man upriver comes).

“Is this right: ‘
Xigihí hi piiboóxio xaaboópai
’?”

“
Xaió. Xigihí piiboó xaaboópaitahásibiga
” (Right. The man upriver comes.)

“What is the difference between ‘
Xigihí hi piiboóxio xaaboópai
’ and ‘
Xigihí piiboó xaaboópaitáhásibiga
’?”

“No difference. They are the same.”

Clearly, from the perspective of a linguist, there
must
be a difference between the two sentences. But until I learned Pirahã on my own, I had no way of knowing that the difference was that the first sentence means “The man returns upriver” and the second means “I am an eyewitness to the fact that the man returns upriver.” This makes learning the language very rough going indeed.

Another thing that makes the language hard to learn is something already mentioned—Pirahã is tonal. For every vowel, you must learn whether the pitch on the vowel is high or low. Many of the languages in the world are like this, although this number includes almost no European languages. English is not tonal in this sense. I had already decided to write vowels that had a high pitch with an acute accent () over the vowel and vowels with a low tone with no mark over the vowel. This can be illustrated by the simple pair of words meaning
I
and
excrement: Tií
(I) has a low tone on the first
i
and a high tone on the final
i.
Impressionistically, this would be “tiI.”

Tíi
(excrement) has a high tone on the first
i
and a low tone on the second
i
—“tIi.”

The language is hard to learn too because there are only three vowels (
i, a, o
) and eight consonants (
p, t, h, s, b, g,
the glottal stop, and
k
). This small number of sounds means that the words of Pirahã have to be much longer than in a language with more speech sounds. To have short words each word needs enough sound differences to tell it apart from most other short words. But if your language has only a few sound differences, like Pirahã, then you need more space in each word, that is, longer words, to be able to tell the words apart. The effect for me at first was that most Pirahã words sounded the same.