Language and Conquest: A Guilt-Free History Lesson

October 20, 2014

We don’t know a lot of history these days, but we do know that we ought to feel guilty about something; in our secular age, we can’t feel guilty about original sin, so we feel guilty about history instead. It might seem like it doesn’t make sense to feel guilty about something we’re usually clueless about—but in reality, that just makes it easier.

The guilt of conquest is our version of original sin, secularized and localized down to the White man. Building the United States, you see, was very bad, because there were already people on it—never mind that almost all of them died off from smallpox before Massachusetts’ Protestant Wahhabis even thought of washing up on Plymouth Rock. Even PBS admits that “more victims of colonization were killed by Eurasian germs than by either the gun or the sword”.

“Smallpox!”, you may think. “Isn’t that what those bad White men put on those blankets?” Sure, the British Army tried that once, in an area where there was already a smallpox epidemic—as there would have been. The New World had been separate from the Old for a long time; they didn’t have smallpox until the Spanish landed there. Since they didn’t have smallpox, they didn’t have immunity; since they didn’t have immunity, most of them died. Just like the Black Plague, which the Mongols brought to Europe; just like syphilis, which the New World gave to the Old.

But that’s just history, and history can never be relevant. We have progress these days: things get better and people get more moral, and they learn that conquest is the White man’s original sin. I once met a guy—a sociology major, of course—who thought justice demanded that the White man get out of South Africa and leave the place to the natives. Never mind that there aren’t a whole lot of natives anymore: the Bantu came in, killed most of them, and enslaved the rest. The White man is not so exceptional as his leaders think.

The real South African natives—well, the people who have been there the longest—are the San, hunter-gatherers who make up the first half of the term Khoisan. (The other half, the Khoikhoi, came later from Botswana.) You can see where they are today by looking at a language map: the Khoisan speak Khoisan languages, the yellow parts of the map to the right, whereas the Bantu speak Bantu languages.

Notice how their languages are broken up across three different areas. That isn’t because the Sandawe, that dot off to the northeast, decided to go all the way over there to Tanzania. It’s a common pattern in linguistics—compare this map of Austro-Asiatic, a language family that contains Vietnamese, Khmer (the official language of Cambodia), and a few dozen minority languages spoken by highland montagnards splattered out everywhere from Meghalaya to Malaysia—and it’s never because some people decided to go all the way over there.

Actually, it is. It’s because a bunch of people decided to go all the way over there, and decided to go to all the places along the way, and then another bunch of people decided to go to some other all the way over there and to all the places along that way. And then another bunch of people decided to go to another all the way over there and all the places along the way, and so on for thousands of years. And when those next bunches of people come along, sometimes they don’t bother with the worst places to live, like the Kalahari Desert (the big yellow blob on that map), the montagnards’ mountains, the two parts of Nepal that still have some speakers of Kusunda (the language spoken in Southeast Asia before the Austro-Asiatics came along), or the Indian reservations here.

The only exception to that is Austronesian, which came out of either Taiwan or—more likely—Sundaland, a place you’ve never heard of, because it no longer exists, because it sank.

You’ve heard of the Vikings, right? How they sailed from Denmark to Norway and Scotland, and from Norway and Scotland to Iceland and Greenland, and from Greenland to Newfoundland? The Austronesians were better sailors than the Vikings; they had to be, to get off of Sundaland. They sailed all the way to Madagascar, and to Hawaii, and to the western coast of South America.

When you ask Google to tell you the distance from Madagascar to Peru, it draws a line across South America and Africa. They didn’t go that way.

You’ve heard of Cthulhu, of course, so you’ve heard that ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. What you probably haven’t heard is that R’lyeh is based on Nan Madol.

Nan Madol is on Pohnpei, an island somewhere between here and Australia where they tell stories in Pohnpeian, an Austronesian language, about how one day some guy came to Pohnpei and did some shit. One day some guy Pali, a great engineer, came to Pohnpei from the southeast and decided to build an artificial city. So he got some people together and they used magic to fly some stones into the right sorts of piles in the right part of the ocean, and that’s Nan Madol.

(You can’t do that anymore, of course. Magic was much stronger in those days.)

After this guy Pali came to Pohnpei to build Nan Madol, some other guy, the first Sau Deleur, came to Pohnpei and decided to start a dynasty and base it out of Nan Madol. That’s the Saudeleur Dynasty. That lasted for a few hundred years, before some other guy, Isokelekel, the son of the god of thunder, came to Pohnpei, thought the palm trees were giants, ran away, came back to Pohnpei, decided to overthrow the Saudeleurs, lost an eye in the process, founded a confederacy, got old, and killed himself by hanging his penis from a palm tree.

Anyway. Pohnpeian is an Austronesian language. Which means Pohnpei was settled by Austronesians—but of course it was. People don’t just go from Taiwan or Sundaland to Madagascar and Peru; they go from Taiwan or Sundaland to Madagascar and Peru and everywhere along the way. Pohnpei was along the way to Peru. It was also probably uninhabited—as it would be, since not even the Vikings could sail like the Austronesians. That’s why they’re the exception.

A place that was on the way to Madagascar was Vietnam. You’ve probably heard of that; we lost a war there a while back, and now we eat their soup. Some Austronesians came there and started one of those kingdoms that tens of thousands of people sacrificed their lives for and now no one’s heard of them: Champa.

The Chams came along, conquered some land, and made Champa. Then the Vietnamese came along, conquered some land, and made Vietnam. Then the French came along, conquered some land, and made French Indochina. Then the two great modernist empires came along, conquered some land, and made North Vietnam and South Vietnam. Then the one great modernist empire beat out the other, conquered some more land, and made the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which still exists today, and will continue to exist until someone else comes along, conquers it, and makes something else.