Claude Levi-Strauss contacted the Mondé tribe in the Amazon in 1938. Weakened by his journey through the Brazilian outback, the legendary French anthropologist gave up on properly studying the group he called “my savages” – the very sort of subjects he’d been seeking, an isolated tribe not then found in ethnographic literature. He described their language as pleasant. In his classic book “Tristes Tropiques,” Levi-Strauss added that many words ended with accented syllables: zip, zep, pep, zet, tap, kat. The Mondé peppered their speech with sounds that evoked the clash of cymbals, he said.
More than a half a century later, linguist Denny Moore sits in a ramshackle house in a poor section of Porto Velho. A two-time Amazonian boomtown (first rubber, then mining), the city of 350,000 has devolved into a sleepy state capital and reputed way station for cocaine. The celebrated Madeira-Mamoré, the “nowhere-to-nowhere” railway that cost hundreds of construction workers their lives a century ago, begins here on the bank of the Madeira River.
Across a small table Maria Salomãy sits patiently. Moore tapes Salomãy’s halting efforts to recall and articulate words in Mondé. Salomãy forgets most verbs, but manages to come up with something for sun, moon, forest and sundry animals, body parts, and household and hunting implements.
One of the last three known semi-speakers of Mondé, Salomãy is older than 60 and hasn’t exercised her native tongue in decades. Following a familiar script, the Mondé were plagued with disease, death and diaspora after coming into contact with western civilization. Neither of Salomãy’s two adult sons speaks a word of the language.
“The only existing Mondé tape in the world,” announces Moore, the director of the Amazonian linguistics center at the Goeldi Museum, a leading Brazilian research institute. “And it reveals the truth about reduplication.”
As suggested by Moore’s tag line, the sessions with Salomãy could do more than preserve vestiges of a dying language. Reduplication is a morphological process in which a root or stem or part of it is repeated in a word. When reduplication appears in a language but not in a related one, the phenomenon can provide evidence about how the languages have developed over time. By comparing Mondé vocabulary with those of other tribes, Moore and his team of researchers hope to unlock some of the mysteries surrounding the origins of the little-studied native Amazon languages. They also hope to dig up clues about the region’s prehistory.
Moore’s research may ultimately mark the current epoch in linguistic history, as did Franz Boas’ groundbreaking studies in North America in the late 19th century, predicts Michael Silverstein, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Psychology at the University of Chicago. “[Moore’s work] is different not just in terms of consciousness of the languages, but also in terms of the self-consciousness of the people who speak them,” he says.
Wearing a sleeveless Michigan Wolverines t-shirt, a nod to his undergraduate alma mater, Moore reveals a pair of wiry arms. They no doubt afforded him a valuable reach advantage during an aborted college boxing career. Now a fan of “Vale Tudo” (Anything Goes), an often bloody Brazilian creation adapted elsewhere as Ultimate Fighting, Moore takes a no-holds-barred approach to helping give the languages and cultures of Amazonian Indians a fighting chance. For three decades he’s sparred with all comers. He’s survived everything from tropical sprue, a rare malady of the small intestine, marked by imperfect absorption of food, to a murder attempt by a couple of guys from a tribe at odds with one he was studying.
For his efforts, Moore won a $365,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1999. Though suddenly flush with cash, Moore sticks to a spartan regimen worthy of a graduate student – watching every penny of the Goeldi research budget. Eschewing costly air travel, the 57 year-old scholar recently spent two weeks crisscrossing the Amazonian state of Rondônia by bus to seek out informants like Salomãy. One 17-hour leg was marked by a bridge that partially collapsed underneath the bus; later the vehicle ran aground in a gully and nearly capsized. After each mishap, Moore waited patiently as the bus was towed back onto the muddy thoroughfare. “If I keep my costs down, other researchers at the museum have to watch themselves, too,” Moore explains. “They’ll be embarrassed if they outspend me.”
Snuggled up against landlocked Bolivia, Rondônia state is home to half of the ten branches of the Tupi language trunk - one of four most important of lowland South America. Thus, suspect most scholars, it is probably the original site of the Tupian people. As Moore and co-author Luciana Storto put it in one paper: “It is much more probable that these five families that are now outside Rondônia had left that region than that the other five had gone there independently (if the original homeland had not been Rondônia).”
A Moore-led team of Brazilian linguists plans to use what is called diachronic research to reconstruct Proto-Tupi, the extinct mother language of the modern tongues. Also known as historical linguistics, the diachronic approach identifies certain phonological, morphological and syntactic features peculiar to a specific time period. (For instance, diachronic linguistics recognizes four stages of English: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and present-day English.) Proto-Tupi probably dates back at least 2,000 years, estimates Moore.
The researchers find themselves in a race against time. Mondé already appears on many lists of extinct languages. At least three of the nine target languages in the Goeldi Comparative Tupi project are similarly endangered. One of the two or three known semi-speakers of a language called Puruborá recently suffered a stroke.
Brazilian government officials have continued to make contact with isolated indigenous groups in recent decades. Their languages almost always count among the post-contact casualties. Of the estimated 1,200 languages spoken in the Amazonian basin 500 years ago, at least three-quarters have disappeared. Of an estimated 160 indigenous languages still holding on within Brazil’s national borders, one-quarter of them are spoken by 50 or fewer individuals.
A decent linguistic description – which would consist of a reasonably complete and insightful analysis of phonology, morphology and syntax - exists for only a small fraction of these languages. Even fewer can boast a dictionary and a collection of texts.
The Amazonian experience reflects a global trend: of the nearly 7,000 languages spoken around the globe, between half and 90% are expected to disappear by the end of this century. “It is a parallel to biology,” said Norvin Richards, assistant professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who works with endangered languages in Australia and the United States. “There is a lot to learn and you have to be quick.”
As languages vanish, with them go indigenous expertise on soil conditions, animal behavior and the medicinal plants. A recent study by Stanford Zent, a researcher in the Department of Anthropology of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research, revealed that the knowledge of the names of plant names in the native language is strongly correlated with the knowledge of the traditional use of those plants. “An entire body of knowledge is being lost,” said William Balée, an anthropologist and former department head at Tulane.
To counteract the perhaps inevitable loss, Moore and his Goeldi team hope to videotape 10 hours of standardized linguistic data on every native language in Brazil. Like everything else collected by the Goeldi, these tapes will be made readily available to Indians themselves as well as to linguists. “The videotape archive is interesting to those who speak the languages,” said Silverstein. “Things like this are few and far between. The depth of this project will set it apart when seen 25 years from now.”
Partly thanks to the work of archaeologist Anna Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, the Amazon’s human pre-history can now be dated much further back than once thought. A Roosevelt-led team found remarkably well-preserved evidence of prehistoric settlement in a cave near the Amazon River. She concluded that Paleo-Indians lived there as many as 11,000 years ago. Published in 1996, her research challenged the conventional wisdom among anthropologists who believed that people had first crossed a land bridge from Asia to Alaska around that time and only made it to South America thousands of years later.
The Roosevelt site was unique in another fundamental way. Piecing together Amazonian pre-history is complicated by a hot and humid climate that accelerates decay and destroys much archaeological evidence. Using linguistic techniques to reconstruct ancient language forms, scientists can compensate for this problem and identify many ancient human behaviors. “The vocabulary of a language is an inventory of the culture of its speakers,” wrote Moore and Storto in their above-mentioned paper. “For example, the existence of words for “acaí” [a tropical fruit] and “ax” in Proto-Tupi indicate that the speakers who inhabited a region with acaí trees and that they used axes.”
When his bus reached a city called Ji-Paraná during his recent trip, Moore stepped back into his personal history. He first set foot in the town in 1975, en route to a forest village of the Gavião Indians; there he would conduct his PhD research over the next three years. An insignificant settlement when Moore used it as his doctoral supply center, Ji-Paraná has climbed the backs of mining and lumber to become Rondônia’s second city, with a population of 150,000.
Contrary to the consensus opinion at the time among linguists, predominately missionaries, Moore discovered early in his Gavião research that it is a tone language like Chinese. Tone refers to the relative pitch of a syllable or word; a difference in the tone of an otherwise identical word results in a difference in meaning. Moore was terrified. “People think I’m good at this because I figured out that Gavião was tonal,” he says. But he pleads tone deafness.
To overcome this handicap, Moore convinced his Indian informants to help him by whistling the tones – a technique they sometimes utilize for unobtrusive communication while hunting. His dissertation at the City University of New York became the first modern description of the syntax, the sentence structure, of a native Brazilian language. When he published his grammar of Gavião, it became just the eighth grammar for a Brazilian Amazonian language.
Gavião will play a key role in the Comparative Tupi project. But Moore’s schedule in Ji-Paraná, where many of the Indians now hang out, did not include research. Instead he delivered an inverter for a solar energy project that the Goeldi is sponsoring in a Gavião village. He also discussed a pro bono consulting arrangement to help the Gavião community organization improve its effectiveness. Gavião counts among the seven languages, all previously unwritten, for which the Goeldi has implemented literacy projects. “They’re always questioning me at the museum about why I run around doing these things. They say I should be doing research,” he says. “But if you don’t maintain a good relationship, you’re out.”
Ethical brownie points should also be awarded, says MIT’s Richards. “There is a kind of field linguistics where people just go into the field, come back, and are never seen again,” he said. “The kind of work he does is more responsible.”
Another apparently altruistic aspect of Moore’s work has been his willingness to devote extraordinary time and effort to encourage promising Brazilian linguists. Rather than use his institutional position at the Goeldi to leverage support for his own research, Moore put much of his own agenda aside after he took the position in 1986. Instead he concentrated on developing a program to train Brazilian linguists. “I haven’t been able to get out into the field much over the last 10 years,” he admits.
Though the Goeldi offers no formal courses, Moore has employed a federally-funded program to obtain research fellowships for talented college students. A Goeldi fellowship now pretty much represents a ticket to a good graduate school: 17 students left the Goeldi directly to pursue their PhDs. Eleven of those went to top schools in the U.S. and Europe; no other program in South America has sent so many students to study abroad. “He’s trained a lot of people,” notes Tulane’s Balée. “He built a whole linguistics program, perhaps now the leading program in Brazil.”
“These folks are all terrific,” says Silverstein, whose University of Chicago program has taken its share of Moore protégés. “They would not have this opportunity if he were not there as a mediator.”
Says Moore: “It is a different way of going about it. But now we can do research that one scientist could never do alone.” The seven linguists signed up for the Comparative Tupi project are all current or past Goeldi fellows.
The list includes Vilacy Galucio, a native of the Amazon who, as Moore never tires of repeating, earned her PhD with distinction from the University of Chicago.
At the time of Moore’s recent tour of Rondônia, Galucio was holed up in Costa Marques, a backwater town across the Guaporé River from Bolivia. She was trying to collect a word list in Puruborá. Her informant, Paulo Aporeti Filho, was the Puruborá semi-speaker who had recently suffered a stroke, and his memory was failing. He suggested that it might help if they shipped in a friend, another semi-speaker with whom Moore had worked briefly several years ago. José Evangelista agreed to come. Galucio got him on an airplane.
This group approach is unorthodox among linguists. Moore isn’t aware of any previous examples of the strategy. Yet the banter between the two informants seemed to be producing results, as they prodded each other into remembering words and phrases. “We thought that it would be nice to do in human terms, at least,” says Moore. “And now it seems to have contributed to linguistic methodology.”
One preliminary result of Glaucio’s research: Puruborá seems to have seven vowels instead of the five or six found in most Tupian languages. This provides some important insights into vowel correspondences in the Tupi language stock, says Moore. Specifically, it provides evidence suggesting that the Puruborá family is closer to a related family, called Ramarama, than previously thought. “Depending on what happens with Glaucio’s test case, I think we may try to bring together as many of these old people as possible,” says Moore.
After Costa Marques, Moore took the bus to the town of Cacoal, where he needed to consult with a tribal leader. Coincidentally this guy had accompanied a friend who tried to clock Moore from behind with a wrench some 25 years ago. The duo apparently had chosen Moore for extinction to make a point about a disagreement their tribe had with the Gavião, with whom Moore was living.
The Cacoal meeting produced an accord to collect data and perhaps develop a good written form and literacy program for the tribe’s language. Nothing strange given the culture of constantly shifting alliances among tribes, Moore says: “You have to look at it in the Indian way.”
More about Denny Moore on the Goeldi Museum website.
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