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Article Excerpt
Comcaac quih Yaza quih Hant Ihiip hac: Diccionario Seri-Espanol-Ingles, compiled by Mary Beck Moser and Stephen A. Marlett. Illustrated by Cathy Moser Marlett. Published by Plaza y Valdes Editores, Mexico City. 947 pages. ISBN: 970-722-453-3.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once mentioned that to imagine a language was to imagine a form of life (Wittgenstein 1953: 19). A comprehensive dictionary of any language exemplifies Wittgenstein's point, but none more than the trilingual dictionary of the Seri language compiled by Mary Beck Moser and Steven Marlett. The work represents more than fifty years of research and over thirty years of living with the Seris in El Desemboque, Sonora, Mexico, in connection with the Summer Institute of Linguistics of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. The entries are in Seri, Spanish, and English, making the work of value to speakers of all three languages.
The roughly six hundred Seris are already using the dictionary. Outsiders visiting them would be well advised to use it as well. The authors included Seri consultants at every step of the compilation. Seris reviewed the entries, suggesting changes and additions. Part of the dictionary's usefulness lies in its incorporation not merely of single-word or phrase translations, but also of sentences or short paragraphs typically generated by Seris. This is critically important, since meanings are frequently so complex that a simple word-by-word translation simply will not do. As Moser and Marlett have realized, languages are vehicles by which cultural meanings are conveyed in text and context (Brown and Vibert 2003). Languages are not a neutral medium but remain fluid, ever changing, and holophrastic. In them, single words can connote different processes, allowing a speaker to compress a multitude of meanings into a single word (Sable 2006: 169). We cite an important entry as an example of this depth of understanding: hant and its meanings are many and conceptually complex. The first reading is
Hant 1. tierra, earth, dirt, land. Hant corn ihtsaailxim, hast hax hax cooxp oo zo hyooho. Escarbe en la tierra y encontre una punta de flecha muy blanca. I dug in the dirt and found a very white arrowhead.
The entry continues with four other readings of the same word. In addition to the above, hant can also be translated as (1) "mundo," world; (2) "lugar," place, as in the English expression "Where do you live?"; (3) "ano," year, or time when speaking about tomorrow, or next year; as well as (4) "tiempo," weather or climatic conditions. This single Seri word encompasses their universe: dirt, place, earth, world, weather conditions, and time.
But this is only part of the meaning of hant. Moser and Marlett follow with nine pages of entries in which hant combines with dozens of other modifiers with varied meanings to describe everything from a burrowing owl, a daddy-long-legs arachnid, a waterhole, a campsite, or a submerged reef, to the end of the world, and even the creator of the world. Some interpreters may conclude from these multiple meanings of a single word that the Seri language lacks the semantic complexity of other languages, since Seris (who refer to themselves as Comcaac) do not have specific and distinct terminology for concepts and uses that one finds in, say, Indo-European languages. We, however, see this linguistic shading as reinforcing for every Seri speaker the depth to which his or her identity is tied to the landscape. We also see the linguistic complexity of hant as a reminder to Seris of the connection and interdependence of all things in the natural world (Sable 2006; Cajete 2006; Brown and Vibert 2003).
Our reasons for this belief are not merely academic. Students of the Seri agree that they are distinct from all other peoples, not merely in their language (which is unrelated to any other), but in their way of life. Other indigenous groups of Mexico's northwest--Guarijios, Pimas, Mayos, O'odham, Yaquis, and the extinct Opatas--share many cultural and linguistic characteristics with one another, but almost none with the Seri. So who are these people who call themselves Comcaac, and we call Seri?
Linguists formerly classified the Seri language as vaguely related to a Yuman language once spoken in Baja California and around the mouth of the Colorado River. Students of the Seri language no longer accept these older connections. They recognize that the Seri language is a linguistic isolate--it demonstrates no apparent connection with any language in the United States or Mexico. This isolation itself distinguishes Seris sharply from other peoples. Their language is sui generis, either because all speakers of related languages have long since vanished, or because their tongue is of such antiquity that no connections with other languages have been documented. We believe the same can be said for many of their customs and myths.
How long have the Seris lived in the gulf coast region of the Sonoran Desert? Quantitative linguistic techniques are of no assistance for dating the longevity of the Seris' settlement on the Gulf Coast or hinting at their origins. DNA studies seem to relate them genetically to the Warao Indians of Venezuela and perhaps to some groups in Argentina (Infante et al. 1999), indicating the Seris' ancestors may have been part of an original wave of "founder" migrants into the "New World." But these similar gene strings may simply demonstrate that genetic structures may vary under the influence of environmental factors (the other peoples inhabit similar coastal ecosystems) rather than resulting solely from ancestral connections transmitted through mitochondrial DNA. In another study researchers comparing Seri genetic distances to those of twenty-nine other Western Hemisphere populations in order to trace their migration patterns detected connections to early Paleolithic people of northeast Asia (Alaez et al. 2002). The conclusions are tentative but tantalizing.
Due to the Seris' extreme isolation until the eighteenth century, they never suffered the wholesale attacks on their lands experienced by native peoples in the surrounding areas. Their lands were not arable, were nearly devoid of water, and had no exploitable deposits of gold or silver, and their numbers were insufficient to make slave raids worthwhile. In a nutshell, to the European mind they contained nothing of real value. Seris were mercilessly persecuted beginning in the early eighteenth century, and their population dipped into the low two hundreds during the late 1910s with the arrival of cattle ranching along the Sonoran coast. Yet they never had occasion to defend their culture and language per se. While most cultures of the Americas were being uprooted by the European juggernaut, the Seris that survived military and paramilitary attacks continued to practice their way of life in isolation, living off the land and sea as their ancestors had done for thousands of years. Attempts at reducing them to missions were only temporarily successful and ultimately complete failures. Fortunately for us, the Seris have been isolated from the outside world for so long, holding out in their desert refuge that their language, traditional knowledge systems, and "cultural spirit" have never been completely broken, minimized, or Europeanized. Opatas and their close relatives to the east, probably sixty, thousand strong at the time of Contact, have vanished along with their language. Seris endured. Their numbers are perhaps one-third the number at Contact. Their language and way of life are largely intact.
Moser and Marlett's dictionary gives the best insight of any work published...
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