The Aymara people of the Andes think of themselves as standing with the future behind them and the past in front.
Only those things that have been witnessed can be claimed with any certainty, and the Aymaran language has markers to distinguish things that have been seen by the speaker and things that haven’t: "Yesterday my mother cooked potatoes (but I did not see her do it)."
If you leave these eyewitness markers out, you’re either boasting or a liar.
My first thought when I read about this on the Test weblog written by Matt Locke was, “What nice, modest people”, and the second was, “I wonder how much longer that language is going to last?”
There are differences between languages because of physical limits on communication. When the next valley was a long way away, cultures headed in different directions, and we ended up with dozens of folk names for a single common flower, let alone the thousands of spoken languages.
Now that we’ve removed those limits altogether (with tanks as well as telephones), the names of flowers have gone with them. This must be for the best, overall, and is certainly unstoppable, but if we face the past for a while (and though I shouldn’t presume, I think this is part of what Matt Locke is writing about) we’ll notice that we’ve lost some richness.
We can’t put physical limits back, but maybe we should put them back for good manners. For the Aymara truth is a far as the eye can see, and history a chain of witnesses: “I saw my grandfather say that he saw his grandfather say that he saw that as a child.”
Being there is what counts, and maybe we need to be modest enough to put that limit back on some of our channels of communication. Only the people who are here can talk.
