Glenn Dixon - Pilgrim in the Palace of Words: A Journey Through the 6,000 Languages of Earth

Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

Pilgrim in the
Palace of Words

A Journey Through the
6,000 Languages of Earth

Glenn Dixon

Copyright Glenn Dixon, 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Michael Carroll
Design: Courtney Horner
Printer: Webcom

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Dixon, Glenn, 1957
Pilgrim in the palace of words : a journey through the 6,000 languages of earth / by Glenn Dixon.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55488-433-9

1. Dixon, Glenn, 1957---Travel. 2. Sociolinguistics. 3. Language and languages--Philosophy. 4. Voyages and travels. I. Title.

P40.D59 2009 306.44 C2009-903002-0

1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

The Sappho translation is reprinted by permission of the publisher and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from Greek Lyric Poetry: Volume 1, Sappho and Alcaeus. Loeb Classical Library Volume 142, translated by David A. Campbell, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard University.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Published by The Dundurn Group
Printed and bound in Canada.

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The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Photograph Captions

All photographs were taken by Glenn Dixon.

Part One: Prayers at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

Part Two: A temple in the Monkey Forest Sanctuary in Ubud, Bali.

Part Three: Bora Bora, the most beautiful island on Earth.

Part Four: Painted black with a stylized raven near the bow in white, this Haida canoe is called a tluu. It is the same as the ones the Haida have used for thousands of years.

Contents

3 And Empires, Too, Shall Splash
Across These Pages

PART ONE
At the Gates of the Western World

1
Climbing the Tower of Babel

T he airport security guard hauled me into a back room. Step behind the curtain, please, and take off your clothes.

What do you mean? I asked helplessly. Everything?

Everything.

I stripped clumsily, my two pale feet hopscotching behind the thin curtain. Outside I could hear the guard flipping through my passport. I was sure he was eyeing the stamps from the Muslim countries Id been to, and could well imagine his lips pursing in disapproval.

Its not so easy getting into Jerusalem. The whole place can be something like a war zone. The guard returned, took a quick look, and then asked me to dress and come out to identify my belongings. My backpack had already been hauled out of the plane and its contents had been placed on a long metal table. There was my toothbrush and my underpants neatly stacked in front of me. Id flown in on the Israeli national airline El Al and it wasnt taking any chances. El Al has yet to have an accident, and these extreme measures were one of the reasons why.

The plane had landed at Ben Gurion Airport in the desert past Tel Aviv. Its not actually near anything, so its somewhere you want to get out of as soon as possible. Actually, any airport is a place you want to leave quickly. I snatched my backpack off the table and hustled toward the buses.

Ive been travelling now for more than ten years, slipping in and out of countries, poking my nose into where I probably shouldnt be. Ive been attacked by wild dogs on a high mountain pass. Ive heard jaguars roar in the deep jungle foliage. And once, in the calm blue waters above a coral reef, a shark angled in at me. But in every case the wildlife was protecting its territory, and I was the one who didnt belong.

Humans, of course, tend to section off their land with borders, guns, and barbed wire. But these are only surface markers. In reality we claim our territory with a much more powerful and ancient tool. We mark our place in the world, and even ourselves, with language.

About six thousand languages are spoken around the globe today, and each is a whole world in itself. Before I went off travelling, I was studying linguistics. In fact, Id been doing graduate work and had just been accepted to do my doctorate.

I turned the offer down.

Languages, as one philosopher said, are the Houses of Being. And I wanted to journey to these houses. I wanted to strut up their sidewalks. I wanted to knock on their doors and peek in their windows. I wanted to see what they were hiding in their basements even if it meant a little bit of trouble.

The bus took me into Tel Aviv, the most modern city in the Middle East. It sits on a long beach and could easily pass for a metropolis on Californias coast except that here people carry even more guns than Californians. I saw a young man and his girlfriend walking along a tree-lined street. They were holding hands and obviously much in love, and the whole picture would have made me sigh were it not for the Uzi machine guns draped over their shoulders.

Near the bus station I found a bank to change my money into shekels. In the line something quite strange happened. The windows of the bank began to rattle quite noticeably. It felt as if a minor earthquake was shaking the ground. Then it stopped, and five minutes later it started again. Very odd.

When I got to the cashier, I asked her what had happened. Oh, she said, that means a jet has just broken the sound barrier. Somewhere ten thousand metres above us the cutting edge of military technology was knifing through the slipstream, arcing over some of the most ancient cities on Earth.