Ziggy Stardust

“The New World” has always struck me as being nothing more than a pretty euphemism or a piece of Renaissance-style Latin hyperbole. Reading Lockhart’s work on American languages last week, and now this week reading native texts has shattered this notion for me. I now appreciate that the Americas were in fact an alien land to Europeans, that the Americas might as well have been Mars.

Language shapes the way we see the world. Terms for abstract concepts, social structures, and complex relationships necessarily convey information beyond merely providing a convenient label for a thing. Grammatical forms, especially those expressing states of being, the possession of attributes and characteristics, and the relationship between objects and action vary from language to language, and these forms contain an inherent (and typically unconscious) cosmology. By learning a language, especially a first or native language, one is indoctrinated into a way of viewing the world.

Recording a language by means of graphic symbols complicates this. For one thing, we tend to label this process “writing,” and then impart onto it all of the subconscious meanings associated with “writing” in our own culture. For example, we automatically assume that language recorded by means of graphic symbols is meant to exactly mirror spoken language, or we assume that it is mean to be read silently by an individual reader, or that it is intended to have a single meaning. These, of course, are false assumptions, and as we learn more about how pre-modern societies employed “writing,” it is becoming clear that the modern concept of “writing” is an aberration.

The encounter between the Spanish and the various indigenous people of the Americas, then, really was the meeting of different linguistic and cognitive worlds. Reading about native languages from Lockhart, and now reading native language texts, I now appreciate the alterity of the Americas. Additionally, it strikes me that the Conquest brought with it a linguistic imperialism, that even allowing for double mistaken identity, the Conquest was in part the imposition of an Italic cognitive world onto a Mesoamerican society.