And then the silence fell between them.
Not the silence of the empty land—
The silence of the cousin who could not condemn
Or greet, because the contraband
Of meaning had been lost between
The two camps on the river's opposite banks:
The word for "water" that had been the clean
And universal currency—the ranks
Of shared vocabulary—had shifted,
Vowel by vowel, consonant by consonant,
Until the grandfather's speech had drifted
Beyond the grandchild's recognizant
And puzzled ear.
Ten thousand years
Before the common era, the great
Diversification of the hemispheres'
Languages began—the weight
Of geographic separation pressed
Upon the tongue like a glacier on the stone:
Slowly, inexorably, the stressed
And unstressed syllables were overblown
And ground and polished into new
And mutually incomprehensible forms.
The process was as old as language knew
Itself—the same divergent storms
That split Proto-Indo-European into
Sanskrit and Greek and Latin and Germanic
Worked their patient alchemy onto
The first Americans' volcanic
And unified speech—but here the distances
Were greater, the barriers more absolute:
The Rocky Mountains' vast insistences,
The Amazon's impassable and mute
Green labyrinth, the Atacama's
Rainless centuries of sand—
The continent's geographic dramas
Built walls that no human band
Could easily traverse, and behind each wall
A language grew alone.
Na-Dené—
The great northern family whose call
Echoed from Alaska's Tlingit bay
To the American Southwest's canyon floor:
A language family so distinct
From its neighbors that it bore
The evidence of a separate and linked
Migration—a second crossing from Asia,
Later than the first, the Na-Dené
Speakers carrying their aphasia
Of the southern tongues, their own résumé
Of grammar and of sound.
Algonquian—
The vast and whispering family
Of the eastern woodlands and the guardian
Of the Great Lakes' shore, the calamity
Of whose diversity stretched from the Cree
In the subarctic birch-forest
To the Blackfoot on the windswept free
And open plain—each one the harvest
Of a thousand years of separation
From the common ancestor whose words
Had fractured in the isolation
Of the forest path, the herds
Of caribou that drew one band north
While another followed the deer south.
Siouan—the family that poured forth
Across the Great Plains from the mouth
Of the Missouri to the Carolinas'
Eastern piedmont—the Lakota,
The Dakota, the Crow—the finer
And more lyrical iota
Of the plains-speech, the language shaped
By the grassland's open sky
And the bison's herd, the draped
And wind-carried syllables that fly
Across the prairie like the grass itself.
Uto-Aztecan—the thread that ran
From Idaho's volcanic shelf
To Mexico City's urban span:
The Shoshone and the Comanche in the north,
The Hopi in their mesa villages,
The Nahuatl-speaking peoples pouring forth
To build the Aztec empire's pillages
And pyramids—one language family
Stretching three thousand miles of latitude,
The proof that the Americas' homily
Of connection ran beneath the multitude
Of surface difference.
Mayan—
The language of the glyph, the written
Word that no other American clan
Had mastered—the bitten
And angular syllabary carved
In limestone, painted on the codex page,
The only indigenous script that starved
The illiteracy of the age
And gave the Americas their first
And only pre-Columbian reading.
Quechuan—the tongue that nursed
The Inca empire's speeding
And administrative reach from Quito
To Santiago—the language of the road,
The language of the quipu's veto
And accounting, the mother-lode
Of Andean speech that the Inca
Spread as the lingua franca of the spine
Of South America—the stinker
Of a problem for the sign
And the spoken word: how does an empire
Govern without writing? With the knot—
The quipu's colored string and wire
Of encoded information, the plot
Of the accountant's fingers reading
Data from the dangling threads.
And hundreds more—the ceding
Of one tongue to many, the shreds
Of Penutian and Hokan on the Pacific coast,
Tupi spreading down the Amazon,
Chibchan threading the volcanic post
Of Central America's phenomenon
Of narrow land and tangled speech—
Six hundred languages at contact,
Perhaps a thousand once, within the reach
Of two continents whose compact
And original unity had shattered
Like a stone struck by the knapper's hand—
Each fragment beautiful, each scattered
Piece a cutting edge, a stand-
Alone and perfect instrument of thought.
Honor the tongues—the six hundred
And more that the Americas wrought
From the first migration's hundred
And unified speech: each one a world,
Each grammar a philosophy,
Each lost language a flag furled
Forever, a sealed prophecy
That no one now can read—
For when a language dies, a library
Burns, and the catalog of the creed
And the dream and the ordinary
Daily naming of the world
Goes silent—and the silence
Is the saddest flag ever unfurled
Over the ruins of the alliance
Between the human mind and the human tongue.