Words tell much more than they say
At the southernmost tip of South America, there once lived a hunter-gatherer people known as the Yamana, or Yahgan. I remember reading years ago that, as beaver hunters, they had many specialized words connected with beaver hunting.
One detail especially stayed with me. They apparently had different verbs for spotting a beaver depending on where the observer was: whether he saw it while sitting in a canoe, or while hiding on the shore.
That is fascinating, because it turns our usual way of thinking about verbs upside down.
In our languages, one of the main divisions between verbs is whether they are transitive or intransitive. In other words, the emphasis is often on the object: does the verb need an object, or not?
But for people whose survival depended on the skill of the subject — the doer, the observer, the hunter — the important distinction could be different. Instead of an object, a verb could emphasize the position of the subject.
I can think of only one somewhat similar example from Finnish life.
Years ago, I spent a lot of time with a very enthusiastic group of bird-watchers. They were constantly competing with one another, collecting points according to how many bird species they had seen during the year. And because they were so competitive, they had several different yearly competitions.
One of these was the “window competition.” There was a special category for birds observed through a window. Such an observation earned you a “window point.” Every January, someone was declared the previous year’s window-point champion: the person who had seen the largest number of species through a window.
So here, too, there was a category of observation based not simply on what was seen, but on the position of the observer.
I have one funny memory of this.
One day we were sitting on a pier by the sea when a rare eastern species of eagle was seen approaching from offshore. It was a species that is not observed in Finland every year, so it was a valuable and exciting point for the annual competition.
We all saw it and received a good point for the year. But one of us suddenly jumped up and started running away. He disappeared behind a nearby construction site and came back a few seconds later carrying a loose wooden window frame he had remembered seeing there.
He climbed onto a rock beside the construction site, looked at the eagle through the empty window frame, and triumphantly declared that he had earned a window point.
There was some discussion afterward about whether the point was valid, but in the end it was accepted.
This, I think, is a real example of a “doer in a specific environment” emphasis in the way an observation is understood. Perhaps there are more examples like it, but I would guess they are not very common in our languages or our everyday linguistic habits.
What does that mean, if anything?
Perhaps we are less conscious of our immediate environment than the Yamana were. They had to be. In the beaver example, the position of the observer was not a small detail. It had practical consequences for hunting – and survival.
