Burying the past with language

removes it from the usual patterns of evolution, as would deliberate gene splicing. The Dravidian languages of southern India deliberately remove Sanskrit influence while ignoring similar influences from English, which would certainly be easier to locate and remove because of their obvious foreignness. Local politics and petty jealousies weigh heavily. ‘Aryanization’ carries with it the connotation of ‘civilization’, at least in Thai, notwithstanding the fact that the same people now called ‘Dravidians’ have ancestors who created one of the world’s greatest early civilizations in the Indus River valley. They undoubtedly left much DNA in the current bloodlines of both northern and southern India. Unfortunately for them, this is the darker-skinned lower-caste bloodline that was ripe for Islam to enhance their status. It’s no accident that that same Indus River is now in Muslim Pakistan, though linguistic traces with their forbears are long gone. The lingua franca of Pakistan, Urdu, in fact is mutually intelligible with Hindi, the closest thing India has to a national language, and the local language of no one in Pakistan. Once again, efforts are continuous to separate the two for political reasons. The same has not yet happened, but could, with India’s other major language, Bengali, also known as Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh.

Written language pulls together what spoken language splits apart.

For probably the first time in history languages are no longer dividing and multiplying and declaring independence at the same time that more and more nations are. Go figure. Dialects are disappearing under the onslaught of mass media and standardized education, in favor of a national standard language. A language is a dialect with a book and a sword. National languages are themselves in danger of disappearing in favor of international standards, once the national languages become deviant or pidginized to the point of incomprehensibility. Already French and Chinese movies offer subtitles in their own language. IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE! This is understandable with mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects that share the same written language, but French has no convenient excuse. It’s just hard to understand in the vernacular, like subtitles for senile mumblers in documentaries.

I consider Slavs to be the broad mass of Indo-European stock,

the population pool from which the others spun off and never came back. They are to the European race what chimpanzees are to the great apes, the most direct descendant of that common ancestor who was father to them all. The other large pool was the Aryan/Iranians, who occupied Central Asia before the Turks. To me, the descendants of the Aryans who invaded India in 1500 BC look more European than the Aryans who stayed behind and became Iranians, in the process of mixing with Arabs and Turks. But for the darker skin, the average northern Indian could be mistaken for someone hailing from Hackensack or Peoria. Interestingly, descendants of Portuguese who settled Malacca in the modern state of Malaysia, now mostly fishermen, look darker than the predominant Malays. They can trace their descent and know a smattering of the language, but more closely resemble Indians or Australian aborigines than modern-day Portuguese. Their first language now is English.

The French get so righteous about the spread of English

at the expense of French (maybe French is just more expensive), but they do the same with Dutch/Flemish and others. All of Belgium, and especially Brussels, used to be a political and linguistic entity with Holland to the north and its Germanic language. That all changed with Napoleon and the Flemish had to wait long and fight hard just to regain parity. Of course, long before that, all Franks were part of that same entity before they became ‘Romanized’ and proceeded to butcher Latin. Apparently not all of Charlemagne’s progeny were in agreement on that issue, as the domain became divided, and the French/Latin-speakers became a centralized nation long before the rump Holy Roman Empire of independent principalities became Germany. Whether the centralization of ancient Rome was somehow transmitted through the vestiges of its language while the Germans were stuck in the proud but ultimately feudal heritage of its own tribal past would be an interesting thesis. Whether the individualism and de-centralization of ancient nomadic Germany was the basis of capitalism and industry is another. Throughout the entire Germanic Europe to this day the dialects spoken are mutually intelligible from one village to the next, though the national standard dialects have become mutually unintelligible.

By my linguistic and culinary comparisons,

I’d estimate that Thais and Viets diverged from a common source probably about three thousand years ago, coincidentally about the time that Han Chinese began emigrating southward in heavy numbers. Austronesian Proto-Malays probably diverged from that same common source about four to five thousand years ago before sailing the seas and settling islands as far away as Madagascar and Hawaii and New Zealand. Very few traces remain of that distant association, if indeed the theory is correct, but as they say, “What goes around comes around,” and Malays and Thais were destined to meet once again in the Isthmus of Kra along their current national borders. Thai curries probably come from this association. Most words in common between Thai and Malay result from the common pre-Muslim flirtation with India and Sanskrit. After their conversion to Islam, Malays even became re-established in Southeast Asia as an inter-bred race with their long-lost Cham brethren in Cambodia, also Austronesian and supposedly the original link between the Tai and Malay languages. This happened after their once-proud culture was nearly annihilated by the land-hungry Vietnamese at about the same time that Columbus was discovering America. Whether they remained on the mainland or came back is uncertain, but their aboriginal cousins are heavily intermixed with aboriginal Khmers in the central Vietnamese highlands, they also presumably a product of that original southern Chinese proto-race.

It may be that a people emerging from the shadows of history

and an aboriginal past adopt the first ‘high culture’ and language they come in contact with, as Thais with India and Sanskrit. Or maybe the last, as with Indonesia and Islam and Arabic, displacing the previous Indian and Sanskrit. Or perhaps a mixture works better, in the case of the Philippines’ Spanish Catholicism, but wide facility with the more recent English language influence. It’s probably no accident that Southeast Asia is the prime example for this phenomenon, given its long history of ‘cultural relativity’ and frequent position as a playing field for the great powers of China, India, Europe, and Arabia. Still they retained their native language in most cases, the notable exceptions being the far-flung and vastly outnumbered Polynesians in Hawaii and Easter Island. Southeast Asia and the South Pacific Islands are good examples of what I consider feminine cultures, ultimately flexible and looking to marry up, making up with makeup what they lack in logic.

I’m a bull in the Thai astrological system and a Gemini in the Western system.

They’re the same system really, only the dates aren’t exactly the same, though they overlap. The Thai system comes from India, as does most of Thai high culture even though genetically they’re closer to China. The Indian system either came from Greece or directly from Mesopotamia, from which the Greek system also came originally. The signs have exactly the same meanings- the ram, the bull, the twins, the crab, the lion, the whole schmear. Days of the week follow a similar pattern, the English system deviating farther from the Latin norm than the Thai even. In Spanish and Thai, and presumably others, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are the days of Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus, respectively and respectfully, while English worships the old gods. Saturday is Saturn’s day in both Thai and English, while Spain takes an early Jewish Sabado Sabbath. Sunday is the sun’s day in both Thai and English, while Spanish is the Lord’s day, Domingo. In all of them Monday is the day of the moon. It would be interesting to see how many others follow suit. I only know that Indonesian also takes a Saturday ‘Sabtu’ Sabbath and a Minggu Sunday, so they must have got that from their Portuguese proto-tourists, taking the others from Arabic if the Islamic Jumat Friday Sabbath is any clue. You can’t get the fuckers to work. They’re like Thais, celebrating every holiday they can find in the world, even if they can’t pronounce it correctly. Portuguese, on the other hand, now counts the mid-week days on their fingers two to six, as if they learned something from the Vietnamese and China in all their Asian travels. Hey, sex is fun, and more than body fluids can be exchanged in the process. The Indonesian months are clearly pig Latin, as are all the other Romance languages and English, of course, while Thai months are conveniently cognate with the Indian astrological signs which begin within them, a nifty mnemonics device. This system has been in effect for some hundred and fifty years, part of the Siamese effort to outrun European insults to their intelligence. The Vietnamese and Chinese, of course, are still sitting there squatting on their haunches, counting months on their toes when they run out of fingers, smoking cigarettes, drinking tea, and spitting.

Last names can tell a tale of betrayal and collusion.

A culture diametrically opposed to the one conquering it might nonetheless borrow the language and adopt the names of the conqueror. Interestingly, even when the reign of the conqueror is long past and the language is but some stains on the bed that just won’t come out, still the surnames live on proudly defining the bloodlines and the entire nation as collaborators and sleepers with the enemy. Not unsurprisingly, the best examples of this are to be found in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, where little else remains of three hundred years of Spanish colonialism except peoples’ names. Certainly most Spanish Americans adopted the names of the Spanish conquerors, but there Spanish is without question the predominant language today. The strongly indigenous country of Guatemala is a notable exception, where the majority of Maya-related natives have retained their native names, even when they adopt the Spanish culture and move to the cities. Interestingly, Mayan women, and to a lesser extent, men, have largely retained native dress in the same circumstances, while others in Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia have not.

Beyond language, sausages, architecture, and textiles,

lies the DNA of currency, or the name of the unit of currency at least, usually based on weight at its origin, silver or gold, once cattle became too cumbersome. Thus the Spanish word for weight, ‘peso’, yields modern-day Philippine pesos and the same with much of Latin America except where they adopted names with nationalistic overtones, such as sucres, bolivianos, colones, and cordobas, etc. Meanwhile Spain itself kept the concept in a diminutive form with pesetas, perhaps to distinguish itself from those same banana republics. The British are still using pounds, as do a handful of other countries under that influence in Africa and the Middle East. This is just like a Roman pound, libra, then the Italian lira and Romanian leu. Like banana republics, the French needed a franc to prop up their egos, bolstered especially when Belgians and Swiss and half of Africa followed suit, all of dubious worth now, with Europeans united by currency itself, not just the name. After the demise of the franc, the widest name of currency in modern use derives from the tiny Bohemian silver-mining town of Joachimstaler, living on in the dollars of the US and most of the English-speaking world and such pretenders as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Brunei, and Singapore. Joachimstaler was also formerly famous for its radioactive thermal baths. Yep. That business has slowed down a bit these days. Stranger than fiction and in true DNA quantum-leap mutation fashion, the lowly pre-Islamic Roman denarius, now as dinar, and its cousins dirham and riyal live on as the currency of a dozen countries in North Africa and the Mideast. This is not to mention the reales of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world, nor el dinero itself. Scandinavians also pay tribute to their royalty with crowns as currency as Portuguese do with their escudo. Rupees and rupiah cross borders and oceans in India and Indonesia, even more so if you hypothesize a connection in rubles. Germans left their mark and Greeks their drachma. If there’s no better way to put a value on the world and its many and varied things, then let it be money, regardless of the language.

Beyond the DNA of languages and the DNA of sausages is the DNA of architecture,

the landscape of cities and culture, sky-lines crossing borders and leaving traces where people themselves feared to tread. The red tile roofs of Rome live on not only in Italy, Romania, and Spain, but in a whole continent of bastard South American children. Likewise the columns and the arches that still stand in tribute to Rome and Greece. Medieval churches taking orders from Germans and cues from Arabs still set the tone for the religions of antiquity worldwide. The same principle operates on the village level, the best example in mind being the pueblo architecture of the American southwest and parts of Mexico. This is almost the spitting image of the African desert architecture of Morocco and Mali, just enough water to hold the mud together in bricks and the buildings together in recognizable shapes of temples, mosques, and churches. Is this coincidence, or is it more? The only historical connection between the two cultures is via a third, the Spain of the Spanish and previously by code-sharing agreement, with the North African Moors, mostly Moroccan, that era coincidentally brought to an end precisely the same year that Columbus first set sail for India and found America. That sounds like some hippies I know. To be sure, there are enough similar buildings, at the Spanish village level, possibly of Moorish inspiration, to postulate a tentative connection, regardless of the fact that Spanish cities continue heavily in the Roman architectural tradition. Though there are pueblos that pre-date Spanish arrival in the Americas, certainly the classic cliff-dwelling pueblos were long discontinued and the Arizona pueblos use much stone, like Mexican ruins, rather than adobe. The New Mexican style is much closer in time and style to the Spanish, and some southwest ‘pueblos’ are in fact purely Spanish in origin. Given the fact that the word ‘adobe’ itself is of Spanish-Moorish origins, via Arabic and Egyptian Coptic, and the fact that Pueblo Indians themselves are of diverse groups and languages united more by desert lifestyle than common culture, the line of transmission across continents is probably legitimate.