From Taiwan to Aotearoa

Not any particular language. More the way language seems to sit on top of the human experience.

It describes things.

It names them.

It sorts them into categories.

But it can never quite be the thing itself.

The word cold is not cold.

The word pain does not hurt.

The word dog is not a dog.

A dog simply is.

That got me thinking about whether animals experience some things more directly than we do.

Death, for instance.

I have no idea what a dog understands about dying, and I am certainly not about to claim expertise on the inner life of dogs before breakfast. But I wondered whether a dog simply gets to the end of its cycle and accepts what is happening without constructing a whole story around it.

Humans are different.

We have language.

We can think about death long before it arrives.

We can imagine it.

Fear it.

Give it meaning.

Argue about what comes afterwards.

Write books about it.

And perhaps make something already difficult even heavier by carrying it around in words for years beforehand.

That led naturally to another question.

What came first?

Thinking or language?

It seems difficult to argue that thought requires words entirely. Babies appear to think before they can speak. Animals solve problems, remember things, anticipate things and make decisions without discussing any of it afterwards.

So perhaps language arrived later.

Not as thought itself, but as a way of shaping thought and passing it to somebody else.

Somewhere in there I wandered into the stoned ape theory.

Terence McKenna's idea that early humans ate psilocybin mushrooms and that it helped kick language and self awareness into gear.

It has never become an accepted scientific explanation.

But I liked what it did as a thought experiment.

It puts the experience first.

Something raw, wordless and enormous.

And then language turns up afterwards, scrambling to describe what has already happened.

Which is more or less where I had started that morning.

Then, because apparently my brain had no intention of staying on one road, I found myself thinking about the value we place on language.

There is a kind of currency attached to being articulate.

Someone who speaks well is very easily assumed to be intelligent.

Often they are.

But not necessarily.

There are extraordinary craftsmen, leaders, artists and specialists who may struggle to explain exactly what they know.

Their intelligence may live somewhere else.

In their hands.

In pattern recognition.

In experience.

In thousands of tiny judgments made without needing to be translated into sentences first.

Put the tool in their hand and they know what to do.

Ask them to explain exactly how they know, and you might get a shrug.

Perhaps that is why so many old traditions seem to contain some variation of the idea that it is better to speak less.

There is wisdom that does not need to announce itself.

I thought I had probably wandered far enough down that path, so I put a bow around it and changed direction.

The night before I had watched a documentary about the Austronesian expansion through the Pacific.

That turned out not to be changing direction at all.

It was just another path.

The broad story, as we currently understand it, begins thousands of years ago with Austronesian-speaking peoples moving from Taiwan into the Philippines and through Island Southeast Asia.

From there, people continued east into the islands around New Guinea.

In the Bismarck Archipelago they encountered populations whose ancestors had already lived in that region for tens of thousands of years.

They mixed.

Culture mixed.

Genes mixed.

Language mixed.

And from that world emerged what archaeologists now call the Lapita cultural complex, recognised partly through its distinctive pottery.

Then people kept going.

Vanuatu.

Fiji.

Tonga.

Samoa.

And eventually farther east again.

The Cook Islands.

The Society Islands.

Tahiti.

Raʻiātea.

Hawaiʻi.

Rapa Nui.

And, much later, Aotearoa.

When you see it on a map it looks almost tidy.

A sequence of arrows across blue water.

It cannot possibly have felt tidy from inside the canoe.

What interested me most was not just the distance.

It was what travelled.

People obviously carried plants, tools, stories, skills and ways of understanding the world.

But language travelled too.

And language left tracks.

That became particularly interesting when I started thinking about te reo Māori and Cook Islands Māori.

You do not need much knowledge of either language to hear the relationship.

There are words and sounds that seem immediately familiar.

Tahitian is part of the same close family, but it followed its own history and changed in its own ways.

One thing I came across was the Tahitian practice known as piʻi, where words resembling the names of people of very high rank could become restricted and alternatives adopted.

That is not the whole explanation for the differences between these languages, of course.

Languages change for all sorts of reasons.

Distance.

Isolation.

Culture.

Chance.

But I loved the idea that history can happen to a language.

A word can disappear because somebody important had the wrong name.

A sound can shift over generations.

A familiar word can travel hundreds or thousands of kilometres and arrive sounding just different enough to make you stop and look at it again.

Hawaiian provides lovely examples of this.

Words that initially seem quite different can reveal themselves once you understand some of the sound changes.

tangata and kanaka.

aroha and aloha.

Not identical.

But recognisably family.

And suddenly I was back where I had started that morning.

Language sitting on top of experience.

Except now I could see that language itself has a history.

It travels.

It changes.

It inherits things.

It loses things.

It carries small pieces of where it has been.

Then I started thinking about ancestry.

Which, as rabbit holes go, is not a small one.

My own DNA results contain Māori and Hawaiian ancestry, along with Northern English, Scottish and a smaller Scandinavian component.

What struck me was that those are not really separate boxes.

They are labels placed over movement.

The Polynesian side alone represents thousands of years of people moving gradually across an almost unbelievable amount of ocean.

Not one migration.

Many.

One group settles.

Generations pass.

Someone leaves again.

Another island.

Another language shift.

Another mixing of populations.

And eventually there are people living in Hawaiʻi and Aotearoa whose ancestors once belonged to populations thousands of kilometres away.

It occurred to me that genes and words were doing something oddly similar.

Both were being carried forward.

Both were copied from one generation to the next.

Both changed slightly as they travelled while still retaining traces of where they had come from.

The northern European side has its own version of the same story.

From the late eighth century onward, Scandinavian raiders, traders and settlers moved heavily into northern and eastern England.

Norse settlement also became deeply established in parts of Scotland, particularly in the north and west.

Over time, these people did what humans seem to have done everywhere.

They met.

They traded.

They fought.

They stayed.

They married.

They had children.

They became each other.

So Northern English, Scottish and Scandinavian ancestry do not necessarily represent three perfectly separate lines.

Those populations had already been sharing the same part of the world for centuries.

It would be very easy to turn a little Scandinavian DNA into a heroic personal Viking story.

I am trying to resist that.

For now.

But the broader point remains.

The populations were mixing long before any of us arrived to put names around the percentages.

And then, because apparently several thousand years of migration were not enough for one morning, I went farther back again.

Neanderthals.

When Homo sapiens moved into areas where Neanderthals were living, the two populations encountered each other.

And among the things they apparently decided to do was reproduce.

I described this as a hot soup of genetics.

I am fairly sure that is not the technical term.

But it works for me.

Many people alive today still carry small amounts of Neanderthal DNA.

Which means even the boundary between what we once imagined as entirely separate human groups turns out to have been more porous than the tidy diagrams suggested.

At some point I wondered about the word mongrel.

Which felt appropriate by then.

Humans spend a lot of time organising themselves into categories.

Race.

Nation.

Language.

Tribe.

Region.

Percentage.

And yet when you follow any population far enough backwards, the boundaries start getting fuzzy.

People move.

People meet.

People mix.

Then their descendants give names to the mixture.

And somewhere in there, the thought arrived that we are all mudbloods.

The idea of purity starts to fall apart the moment you look closely at human ancestry.

It is mixing and migration all the way down.

There is even a related idea in genetics called heterosis, sometimes called hybrid vigour.

Greater genetic diversity can, among other things, reduce the chance of two copies of the same harmful recessive variant meeting.

Humans are considerably more complicated than a breeding experiment, so I would not push that too far.

The science is not nearly tidy enough for that.

But I rather liked the direction of travel.

Difference meeting difference does not necessarily produce something diminished.

Sometimes it simply produces something new.

The funny thing is that after a couple of hours of this, I did not feel any need to work out what it all meant.

That may have been my favourite part of the morning.

There does not always have to be a grand conclusion.

It was simply interesting to follow.

Language made me wonder about thought.

Thought wandered through psychedelic apes and into intelligence.

Intelligence led to silence.

Silence somehow led to Taiwan.

Taiwan led across the Pacific.

The Pacific led to Māori and Hawaiian.

That led to DNA.

DNA led to northern England, Scotland and Scandinavia.

And eventually Neanderthals wandered in.

A perfectly ordinary Monday morning.

What stays with me is how much arrives with us before we have any say in the matter.

Genes.

Language.

Family.

Culture.

Old migrations.

Old mixtures.

Bits of programming written long before we were born.

And then we get on with it.

We make coffee.

Go to work.

Love people.

Lose people.

Change our minds.

Wonder about dogs.

And continue being ourselves.

Completely, wholly ourselves.

With perhaps a little inbuilt programming running quietly underneath.