Muhakamat al-Lughatayn

I was once advised that it takes "a special kind of nut" to study Xinjiang. The comment was raised with regard to Justin Rudelson, who, in his introduction to Oasis Identities, lists the dozen or so languages he learned in preparation for his research. Like many others, I took it both as a warning as to the sorts of problems I would face in the course of my work and as a kind of challenge.

Six years later, I speak several languages passably well and read a half-dozen others. Certainly, first earning an MA in Linguistics helped tremendously: Not only did I learn a great deal about languages, how they're put together, and how to pronounce their funny sounds, I also gained an appreciation for the universality of the language faculty. (It was a very, very Chomskyist program.) That's a very reassuring thing, the idea that, really, they're all the same under the hood.

What really enabled an ongoing marathon of language-learning, however, was following links from one language to another, avenues of typological similarity or shared content. I will illustrate this with a diagram, slapped together with Netdraw in about 15 minutes:

Languages, each one a node, are labeled thus:

Ones that I have studied as "living" languages and learned to speak are circles. "Dead" languages, or at least ones that I've only learned to read, are squares.

The nodes vary by size. The larger they are, the longer I've studied them. (Mandarin Chinese: 11 years; Uyghur: 5 years; French: A bit on my own, etc.)

Then, I've labeled them by a sort of "super-family." The Romance languages, then, are all gray, as are the Germanic ones, since they belong to Western Indo-European. Persian and Russian, which form a bridge with the Asian languages, are Eastern Indo-European. Then I've done them by broad, paralinguistic area: Uyghur, Mongol, and Finnish are all under "Central Eurasian," while Chinese, Japanese, and Wenyanwen (Literary Chinese) are under "East Asian." This makes for some very clear areal distinctions in the diagram!

Finally, there are the arrows. An arrow pointing from a language to a language shows that knowing the first contributes or contributed actively to understanding and using the second. The thicker the arrow, the closer the connection.

Let's work through this. I studied 5 years of Spanish in high school. This was completely and utterly useless, but it taught me how to learn languages, more or less. This is its only contribution to Chinese, which I started in college as my third language. (Yikes, memories!) On the other hand, some years later, it was in fruitful dialogue with German: Only a good first-year German teacher got me to understand the subjunctive, which suddenly made perfect sense in Spanish, while Spanish had been my most recent European language with declinations. Finnish, which I -- looooong story -- ended up studying for a little less than a year was my first agglutinative language, and it prepared me for Uzbek, which then turned into Uyghur.

As we move left through the diagram, it becomes less historical and comes more fully to represent what goes on in my head as I learn or work with a language. Take Mongol, which I studied intensively for a summer: In my head, it was just Uyghur grammar with different words. Indirect and direct speech especially just grafted themselves onto my Uyghur grammar. What this meant, unfortunately, was that my hard-earned Uyghur started to turn into Mongol! Oh, no! Thankfully, even though Japanese also resembles Uyghur, and my intuition for Japanese derives entirely from Uyghur grammar, it seems to be just different enough that there has been no cross-contamination.

There's a similar problem, now that I'm learning Swedish. Swedish, by the way, is a surprisingly helpful language to know for Xinjiang from the 1890s through the 1930s. Anyway, Swedish started off in my head as a dialect of German, and it drew from the same resources. Now it's starting to take over. What I really need is a reason to speak German regularly, which will help me differentiate it.

On the other hand, sometimes a low level of interlinguistic differentiation is helpful. Take the big blue cluster on the left. When I approach a Chaghatay text or a Uyghur conversation, the two languages are in dialogue in my mind. In fact, I couldn't get my Uyghur speaking to improve at all for about a year until I started reading Chaghatay regularly. It's partly, I think, because modern Uyghur writing is often so stilted and dry, as well as derivative of Chinese and Russian styles, and partly because the modern stuff doesn't talk about certain things that are still central to Uyghur life. I've found it helpful to approach Uyghur as part of a big, lumpy Ottoman-Persian-Chaghatay continuum that all sounds more or less like Uyghur in my head. Indeed, to read Chaghatay or anything really interesting in Uyghur, I end up pulling my Redhouse Ottoman dictionary off the shelf or looking things up in the online Steingass Persian lexicon.

This must be tedious, so here's the lesson: It gets easier. After a few languages, some really central ones, they all start to look more or less the same. Your brain gets used to the work of absorbing vocabulary, you develop strategies for learning grammar patterns, and, eventually, you feel like you've seen it all. Now, I still think Armenian would kick my ass, and I have no illusions about learning Naxi. Yet, working my way from language to language has been a good strategy. I'm lucky that I studied Uyghur, which has such a rich vocabulary from Persian and even borrows from Russian. That made it a great starting-point.

Actually, Uyghur might just be the best language in the world, in terms of its utility. Yes, I'm biased, but I'm also getting tired of taking classes. Without learning to speak Uyghur and, over time, differentiating the sound of a Persian word as opposed to a Turkic or Arabic one, scanning through prose would be substantially more difficult. I already know half of the Persian vocabulary I learn, and about a quarter of the Arabic, as well, though I've only just begun that long journey.

Big ignorant roar

It can be difficult to picture the East Turkestani past. Even what lies closest to us, the photographs taken by some missionary in the 1930s or some rioter with a digital camera, are scenes, arrangements of views. The scrapyard that was the Urumchi bazaar in the time of Khoja Niyaz seems as empty as a movie set. It's hard to place Haydar Sayrani or Aitchen Wu in those ramshackle timbers, much less to ask ourselves how their wives and families, so absent from the historical and narrative records, went about their shopping.

Foreign researchers have little access to rural life in Xinjiang, unsurprisingly, and that usually gives them a pass on social history. Ildikó Bellér-Hann's work, both her historical anthropology volume and her other work on oral culture and the law, presents the best research and synthesis to date, I think, of what we do and can know. When I look at Community matters, a very popular volume in every library I've known, I have trouble, however, discerning the signs and mechanisms of change over time that intrigue me as a historian. How do we get from Community matters to Down a narrow road (another amazing book)? For, surely, there is something in between.

Native researchers, Uyghur or otherwise, though they may pose interesting questions about folkways and agriculture in the present day, seem hardly to have considered the consequences of living in a historical world lit only by fire of one sort or another. Partly, there's a been a terrible oversight by which none of the Jarring materials are available in Xinjiang. But it's also due, in part, to the ways that one party or another scrambles to promote a narrative of "development": Whether you're a Uyghur nationalist or a PRC apparatchik, sometimes you want to talk about Uyghurs being poor and backward, and sometimes you don't. On the one hand, the story goes, this place was poor and backward -- but now look what the Party (or Rebiye Kadeer) has done to promote business and growth since the 1980s! On the other hand, you can point to any number of little industrial projects from the 1890s onward and find "proof," after a fashion, that Transhistorical China (or Uyghur entrepreneurs) had the first leather factory, or whatever, in Central Asia. The presence of a factory with 200 employees can imply that Ghulja in 1907 was just like Shanghai in 1948; yet we are faced with the facts of agriculture in the 1930s, which seem not to have changed in hundreds of years.

As things stand, then, it baffles the mind to ask what Baha'uddin Musabayev knew and Amanisa Khan ate. Do we know Tejelli indeed? And is he even worth mentioning, if every time that name arrives, it brings with it heavy inches of flimsy paper imprinted with awkward modern Uyghur?

My education began in earnest, and perhaps ended shortly thereafter, with "Caedmon's Hymn." In Anglo-Saxon, of course, because that's how it sends the best, and my English teacher's mighty leather-clad foot upon his particleboard throne.

Creator all-holy, He hung the bright heaven,
A roof high upreared, o'er the children of men. ... etc.

It became a sort of dhikr for me, as I think it was for him.

Still I feel myself closer to the medievalists, with their photocopies of cramped lines of Gothic script disgorged from the end of a cut feather. Working through manuscripts banishes, for a little while, the questions that preoccupy my time period, trite, nagging issues of modernization, of global movements, of everything contracting and mechanizing. (And, indeed, it can all start to seem very Steampunk, if you're not careful.) It gets me away from the preoccupations of the propagandists, from the two-faced narrative of progress.

Heaney talks about Caedmon.

And all that time he'd been poeting with the harp
His real gift was the big ignorant roar
He could still let out of him, just bogging in
As if the sacred subjects were a herd
That had broken out and needed rounding up.
I never saw him once with his hands joined
Unless it was a case of eyes to heaven
And the quick sniff and test of fingertips
After he'd passed them through a sick beast's water.

Do we know Tejelli indeed?

The man who copied the "Risāla of the camel-drivers," too, ran his fingers through a sick beast's water. I cannot help but wonder what he wanted from his days, if he lived to see his children have children of their own. Maybe his son took over his craft. But did he get to recite the formula that made his boy a master? There is a terrible emptiness here, a space that our eyes are trained to ignore. I wonder if it can be stared into?