Thirty-two words for field, 50 for penis. What the Irish language tells us about who we are

Thirty-two words for field, 50 for penis. What the Irish language tells us about who we are

Manchán Magan has travelled across Africa in an army truck, almost been shot by the Columbian army, lived “in a hermitage in the Himalayas, drinking my own piss” and once found himself shouting “buail abhaile” to a black bear in British Columbia. (He doesn’t know if it worked, because he got nervous and used pepper spray.)

I expected him to suggest we meet by Coumshingaun lake in the Comeraghs or at a bothy in Dingle, but instead he suggests Kinnegad. And so we meet at a cafe on the main road through town.

The reason for Kinnegad is pragmatic: it is accessible to me and within striking distance of home for him, the 10 acres of land he had the foresight to buy in 1997 with £10,000 left to him by his grandmother.

“I rang all the auctioneers in the southeast and I said, ‘I have £10,000. I want to buy 10 acres’. They laughed me out of it. I went to west Cork and east Clare where all the New Age communities were, but they were just a bit too intense for me. Then I rang an auctioneer in Castlepollard and he said, ‘look no further’ ”, he laughs.

My life has been absolutely free, because I don’t have a mortgage because I don’t need to earn anything.

The house he built on the land he bought in Westmeath was made of straw bales and it was the first of its kind in Ireland. It cost him €6,000 and took six weeks to build. In 2002, when cracks started to appear in the walls, he replaced it with a similarly simple construction of concrete plastered in mud, straw and cement, with a grass roof, this time at a cost of €26,000. He was just doing what he had seen people all over the world do on his travels, he says – build simple homes for themselves using whatever materials they had around them.

“In Tibet, it’s stone; in Bolivia, it’s reeds, in Africa it’s mud, and no one gets a mortgage. That concept of tying yourself and your savings up to a mortgage doesn’t exist,” he says, over green tea and cake.

“My life has been absolutely free, because I don’t have a mortgage because I don’t need to earn anything.”

He still lives on very little; the fees for a single TV series can see him through for months and months. Given his well-documented wanderlust – although pre-pandemic he had already, in a column in this newspaper in January, sworn off travelling by plane unless absolutely necessary – I wonder how he has coped with lockdown. I needn’t have worried. “Lockdown has been brilliant for me,” he says. He bought another 10 acres and “finally I’ve been able to do all the things I wanted on my land. Four years ago, I started growing vegetables, but nothing had been done to the scale or level I wanted it to be.”

He has come armed with some of the actual fruits of that labour – a bag of his delicious kale, green beans, cucumbers, and another large leafy veg I haven’t been able to identify. “It’s producing enough food for a village and it’s going to waste unless I give it to people.”

We’re not meeting to talk about self-sufficiency, but his new book, Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape, a riproaring, archaeological and anthropological exploration of the lyricism, mystery and oddities of the Irish language, and the layers of ancient knowledge encoded within. You won’t have to speak Irish – you don’t even have to be Irish – to be wholly absorbed by this unique, enchanting book, which has been six years in the research and writing.

We used to spend all our time on breaks, sitting in the bushes, playing these very otherworldly games

He offers, for example, 21 different words for holes, 45 for stones. There are, he reveals, 70,000 Irish place names and more than 4,300 words to describe people’s character. And there are many ways to express the changing qualities of the ocean, light or the wind.

His love of the language came from summers spent on the Blaskets and from his grandmother, Sighle Humphreys, who would pay him and his siblings money for every proverb they learned. The niece of The O’Rahilly and a “bellicose” republican, “she was just desperate to connect us to the Irish language in any way she could, whether it was the political side, the local side or the story side”, he says.

Manchán Magan overlooking the Colca Valley and Rio Colca in the central Andes, Arequipa Region, Peru. Photograph: Karoki Lewis

Irish was introduced to him “as a weapon of war”, but what he would grow to love about it were the clues it offered to who we are as people; answers to the existential questions he has been asking himself since childhood.

He was a thoughtful child, who fitted in everywhere and nowhere. His life was split between Donnybrook, where his family home was, and the west Kerry Gaeltacht where he spent chunks of each year. When in Dublin, he went to Mount Anville primary, where his best friends were former Barack Obama adviser Samantha Power and chief executive of the Irish Youth Foundation Lucy Masterson.

“We used to spend all our time on breaks, sitting in the bushes, playing these very otherworldly games. But then I joined Gonzaga” and though it was progressive, there were no girls, and totally different types of games being played. “I just couldn’t understand competing.”

Even as a boy, he was a pacifist, more interested in growing herbs than playing rugby. The political baggage surrounding Irish held no appeal for him. Its magic only came alive when he began to see it as the key to decoding who we are. “We talk about everything about the language, except what is vital about it: that it has preserved this ancient knowledge about being in the world, and our connection with the landscape,” he says.

Now, more than ever, he says, “we are on this desperate search for our psyche; [to know] who the hell am I in this world? It just happens to all be contained within the language. It’s really trippy.”

And it is really trippy – whether he’s talking about how Irish can provide a rich vocabulary to describe lust in animals, throw up insights into what our ancient forebears might have instinctively understood about physics, or allow us to express emotions we don’t even recognise in English, such as “iarmhaireacht, the loneliness you feel at cockcrow, when you are the only person awake and experience that existential pang of disconnection, of not belonging”.

The book was born partly of his frustration with the fact that we keep having the wrong conversations about Irish.

“It was the paucity of arguments about the Irish language that did my head in. We say the same things: it was taught badly in school; it was beaten into me; what’s the use of the Irish language? I realised there’s a million other things to be said about the language, particularly if you look at it through the prism of ancient languages.”

Manchán Magan in Togo with the truck in which he travelled across Africa in 1990-1991.

In the book, as well as chapters positing whether the tales of Cú Chulainn might have been inspired by magic mushrooms and a comet, he explores the links between Arabic and Irish (which includes the word for shamrock – seamróg, from seamair/clover, which came from pre-Islamic Pagan Arabic, “shamrakh”, which means “three gods in one leaf”). He also dives into the fascinating connections between Irish and Sanskrit, and the parallels between systems of law, social hierarchy, divine worship and mythology in Irish and Hindu culture.

Of the Irish spoken on the Blaskets, he writes: “It was a form of the language that retained traces of its roots in the Indus Valley in central Asia; you could hear echoes in their dialect of words and phrases that had veered off from Sanskrit, Persian and Hebrew millennia before.”

One of the most visible things we have lost is something that must have struck many of us racking up miles on country roads this summer: our original place names, which told us so much about the history, topography and folklore of the land, and have been brutally anglicised, “rendered into garbled and discordant forms”.

Sex in Irish was dealt with in a less prudish and more honourable way than other cultures

Our place names aren’t all we lost. Our folk knowledge of traditional herbs and remedies vanished too over the years – perhaps, he suggests, because these were known amongst women, and scholars tended not to ask women. This may also explain why Irish has over 50 words for penis (he cites everything from bliúcán (wild carrot), to feirc (hilt of a dagger),) and 21 different words for sexual intercourse, though is much more limited when it comes to describing women’s experience of sexuality or their bodies. He can find only about 10 words for vagina or vulva (pís, gabhal mná and bléin mná, the latter two, he notes, the latter two meaning “women’s groin” and “women’s crotch”. )

But that doesn’t mean a much richer variety of language to describe the female body or experience of sexuality doesn’t exist, just that it has not yet been recorded.

“Finding a sensitive, female-centric view of sexuality in older Irish texts is just not possible,” he writes, going on to theorise that women may have been reticient to share, or perhaps just weren’t asked by scholars. What we have managed to divine from the very few existing texts is that “sex in Irish was dealt with in a less prudish and more honourable way than other cultures. For example, menstrual blood was bláthscaoileadh (bloom release) or bláthdhortadh (bloom shedding). An t-ádh dearg (the red luck) was also used, as was tá brúdáin orm (I’m being crushed)” – phrases that strike me as far more useful and body positive than the coy, American “Aunty Flo is visiting” many of us grew up with.

Does he feel a sense of loss at the vanishing of so much of the language? No, he says immediately. “I just happen to be of a very sunny disposition. I see the world progressing, becoming more positive and becoming more enlightened every single day over centuries.”

In terms of the language, “we know all about the oppression. We know there are so many more words for enslavement in the Irish language” than in other languages, but you won’t find a chapter on that in the book. He wanted to write something other than the story of the 800 years. Something more hopeful.

In its closing pages, he writes: “I am not despairing about the gradual fading of the richness of the language, because Irish is as much a story as a language, and most stories never really die. Even if they are not retold every day, they linger in the depths of our mind. Every speaker is a narrator of this epic tale, and every word carries within it a piece of the plot.”

Tale of two villages

The Brahmins of Mathur and Hosahalli lead a Vedic lifestyle, chant the Vedas and keep Sanskrit alive.

Mathur is a tiny village on the banks of the perennial river Tunga. It is near Shimoga in Karnataka. It has a population of around 1500. Situated in its inner circle are about 256 Brahmin houses in a square type agraharam. It is an agrarian village, which has arecanuts as the primary crop and one acre of it yields a net profit of Rs 90000 on an average per year.

It is one of the two villages in India where Sanskrit is the official language. The villagers speak a dialect called Sanketi, which is a mixture of Sanskrit, Tamil and Kannada. It has no written script. They read only in Devanagiri script and some in Kannada.

It all started around 500 years ago, when scholarly Brahmins migrated from Pudukottai in Tamil Nadu and settled here along the river bed of Tunga as was customary. King Krishnadevaraya, the then ruler of this place, wanted to donate land to these Brahmins, which they refused because accepting Dhaanam would mean accumulating sins. They felt the sins of the King would pass on to them. They only accepted charity from other Brahmins. So the ruler sent his emissary dressed as a Brahmin and donated vast tracts of land to them on which the arecanuts are now grown.

The entire village is a square, like a typical Mada street, with a temple. This area is called Brahmanaru Mane. Great respect is shown by the rest to these Brahmins. There is a village paatashala, which teaches chanting of Vedas in the traditional way, especially Krishna Yajur Veda along with other ritualistic rites from Bodhayana sutras and Aabhasthamba sutras. Other rituals for yagnas are conducted for learning purposes.

Private funds used

The students learn these meticulously under careful supervision of the elders. At present there are only eight students in this paatashala. Most of them come from nearby villages and they stay at the paatashala till they complete their five-year course. The food and other expenses are funded by the Brahmins as they do not receive any donations.

The ground floor and the contiguous houses of the paatashala are occupied by Venkatesh avadhaani (avadhaani is a family title for a very learned person ) and his brother Kesav avadhaani. These two brothers come from a family of Sanskrit scholars and they are engaged in the research of Vedas and rituals. They collect old Sanskrit palm leaves, expand them on the computer and rewrite the damaged letters. They then rewrite these scripts in present day Sanskrit for the sake of publication to make it available to the common man in text form. On certain palm leaves work has been going on for the last one year. They are keen to get in touch with persons either from the Orissa University or similar places, from where they can obtain old Sanskrit palm leaves.

Special mention has to be made about a sannyasi (in his purvaashrama he was known as Theagarajan, a chartered accountant from Mumbai, who took bhiksha from Jayendrar Swamigal of Kanchi and became a sannyasi in 2001). He lives in a small hut near the paatashala and writes, edits, and translates these old palm leaves. His knowledge of Sanskrit is amazing.

Venkatesh avadhaani has team members who are very well versed in CAD /CAM and other computer tools. They create on the computer, after interpreting from the palm leaves and the shulba sutras (published from Delhi by Sri Sharma), the types and designs of bricks to be laid for the various kinds of yagnas. While I was there, they were developing a Garuda type of Homa Gunda for a special yagna to be conducted on the river bed.

His team consisted of purohits and students and everything was done with precision.

An example of their brilliance was seen when I asked them about this famous verse from Bodhayana Sutra of the Shulba Sutra (around 4000 BC) in Mathematics, ‘Deergachatursasyaa akshanyaa rajjuh: Paarsvamanischa Thiryakmani cha. Yatpruthagbhute kuruthasthatubayam karoti.’ It is nothing but a Pythogaras’ theorem stated in Shulba Sutras, 1000 years before Pythogoras wrote it. Venkatesh avadhaani explained it by drawing a rectangle and a diagonal with a chalk on the floor of his house and showed how these Sanskrit words state that the area of the square on one side of the diagonal is equal to the area of the sum of squares on the side and base of that rectangle.

At the paatashala, the students chant Vedas from 10 a.m. till noon, repeating the same line under the leadership of a senior student.At noon, the students and guests are served simple food consisting of rice, sambar or a kootu and curd. They have light tiffin for breakfast. The dinner is also simple.

After lunch, the students continue the chanting either at the paatashala or at their guru’s house.

There are no fixed gurus for the students as they are taught varied subjects by different scholars.

There is a government school called Saraswathi Vidyalaya adjoining the Brahmin agraharam, where they teach the state board syllabus having Sanskrit as the second language in one section and in the other, pure Sanskrit and the conventional Vedic literature. In the evenings, the students play cricket on the school grounds or in the streets.

A Japanese gentleman has been attending the classes of Chenna Kesava Upadhyaya for the last couple of years, learning and writing advanced Vedic scriptures.

On the other side of the river lies another village called Hosahalli. Hosa in Kannada means new. There too resides Brahmins with a paatashala mainly funded by Sringer Mutt, which also has eight students. Most of the sons of these scholars take to western education and get jobs in Bangalore.

Spoken Sanskrit

There is a Sanskrit scholar, Laxmi Kant Upadhyaya, who comes from Tamil Nadu. He wants to propagate spoken Sanskrit. According to him, Pejawar Mutt Swamiji wanted spoken Sanksrit to be popularised and so he promoted the Hindustan Seva Sangh. But due to lack of funds it was eventually taken over by Samskriti Bharaati, an organisation involved in the propagation of spoken Sanskrit.

The main idea to make Sanskrit an easy language to speak in, is to adopt regional language words (as they are already present now) and use Sanksrit grammar along with these words in conversation. But conventional mutt heads only wanted Sanksrit to be spoken in the prescribed Vedic way, he says. But here the exception prevails in order to propagate Sanskrit.

The Brahmins of these two villages live their lives in the true Vedic sense such as bathing in the river, performing rituals such as sandhya vandana and so on. If they are invited for special discourses outside their villages or perform special poojas inside their villages, they accept whatever is given to them. They never demand monetary compensations. Marriages also take place among the people of these two villages.

On the other side of Shimoga city (about 10 kms ) lies a village, Koodahalli. This is called Sharada Peetam Shaaka. The present senior acharya who lives at this place is 94 years old.

History mentions how the Shankaracharya of Sringeri His holiness Chandrasekara Mahaswami appointed this senior acharya as his successor. But for some reasons the acharya could not be found for 10 years, so His holiness Abhinavateertah was appointed as the successor.

Ironically, the acharya returned after 10 years only to find another successor in his place and so preferred to stay put in this place as the head of the Shaaka of Sringeri Mutt. This Mutt is situated on the banks of Tungabhadra, the sangamam point of Tunga and Bhadra rivers and a dip here is believed to cure all sins.

(The writer can be contacted at sbdiaries@gmail.com/ Venkatesh avadhaani -09481405166 /Lakshmi Kant Upadhyaya of Hosahalli-09482029200/ Chenna Kesavan -09449917350)

Rare Ancient DNA Provides Window Into a 5,000-Year-Old South Asian Civilization

During the last few millennia B.C., beginning roughly 5,000 years ago, great civilizations prospered across Eurasia and North Africa. The ancient societies of Mesopotamia and Sumer in the Middle East were among the first to introduce written history; the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms of Egypt established complex religious and social structures; and the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties ruled over ever advancing communities and technologies in China. But another, little understood civilization prevailed along the basins of the Indus River, stretching across much of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan and into the northwestern regions of India.

This Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), also called the Harappan civilization after an archaeological site in Pakistan, has remained veiled in mystery largely due to the fact that scholars have yet to make sense of the Harappan language, comprised of fragmented symbols, drawings and other writings. Archaeological evidence gives researchers some sense of the daily lives of the Harappan people, but scientists have struggled to piece together evidence from ancient DNA in the IVC due to the deterioration of genetic material in the hot and humid region—until now.

For the first time, scientists have sequenced the genome of a person from the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilization, which peaked in today’s India-Pakistan border region around 2600 to 1900 B.C. A trace amount of DNA from a woman in a 4,500-year-old burial site, painstakingly recovered from ancient skeletal remains, gives researchers a window into one of the oldest civilizations in the world. The work, along with a comprehensive analysis of ancient DNA across the Eurasian continent, also raises new questions about the origins of agriculture in South Asia.

The ancient Harappan genome, sequenced and described in the journal Cell, was compared to the DNA of modern South Asians, revealing that the people of the IVC were the primary ancestors of most living Indians. Both modern South Asian DNA and the Harappan genome have a telltale mixture of ancient Iranian DNA and a smattering of Southeast Asian hunter-gatherer lineages. “Ancestry like that in the IVC individuals is the primary ancestry source in South Asia today,” co-author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement. “This finding ties people in South Asia today directly to the Indus Valley Civilization.”

The genome also holds some surprises. Genetic relationships to Steppe pastoralists, who ranged across the vast Eurasian grasslands from contemporary Eastern Europe to Mongolia, are ubiquitous among living South Asians as well as Europeans and other people across the continent. But Steppe pastoralist DNA is absent in the ancient Indus Valley individual, suggesting similarities between these nomadic herders and modern populations arose from migrations after the IVC’s decline.

These findings influence theories about how and when Indo-European languages spread widely across the ancient world. And while shared ancestry between modern South Asians and early Iranian farmers has fueled ideas that agriculture arrived in the Indo-Pakistani region via migration from the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, the ancient Harappan genes show little contribution from that lineage, suggesting that farming spread through an exchange of ideas rather than a mass migration, or perhaps even arose independently in South Asia.

“The archaeology and linguistic work that had been carried out for decades was really at the forefront of our process,” says Vagheesh Narasimhan, a Harvard University genomicist and co-author of the new study. “These projects bring a new line of genetic evidence to the process, to try to show the impact that the movement of people may have had as part of these two great cultural transformations of agriculture and language.”

The large, well-planned cities of the IVC included sewer and water systems, as well as long-distance trade networks that stretched as far as Mesopotamia. But despite its former glory, the civilization was unknown to modern researchers until 1921, when excavations at Harappa began to uncover an ancient city. The Harappans have remained something of a mystery ever since, leaving behind extensive urban ruins and a mysterious language of symbols and drawings, but few additional clues to their identity. What ultimately befell the Harappan civilization is also unclear, though a changing climate has been posited as part of its downfall.

Scientists have a notoriously difficult time recovering ancient DNA in South Asia, where the subtropical climate typically makes genetic preservation impossible. It took a massive, time-consuming effort to produce the genome from remains found in the cemetery at Rakhigarhi, the Harappans’ largest city, located in the modern Indian state of Haryana. Scientists collected powder from 61 skeletal samples, but just one contained a minute amount of ancient DNA. That sample was sequenced as much as possible, generating 100 different collections of DNA fragments, called libraries, each of which were too incomplete to yield their own analysis.

“We had to pool 100 libraries together and sort of hold our breath, but we were fortunate that that yielded enough DNA to then do high resolution population genetics analysis,” Narasimhan says. “I think if anything, this paper is a technical success story,” he adds, noting that the approach holds promise for sourcing DNA in other challenging locales.

A single sample is not representative of a widespread population that once included a million or more people, but a related study published today in Science lends some wider regional context. Several of the same authors, including Narasimhan and Reich, and dozens of international collaborators, authored the largest ancient DNA study published to date. Among the genetic sequences from 523 ancient humans are individuals from sites as far flung as the Eurasian Steppe, eastern Iran and Iron Age Swat Valley in modern Pakistan.

The team found that among many genetically similar individuals, a handful of outliers existed who had ancestry types completely different from those found around them.

Eleven such individuals found at sites in Iran and Turkmenistan were likely involved in interchange with the Harappan civilization. In fact, some of these outlier individuals were buried with artifacts culturally affiliated with South Asia, strengthening the case that they were connected to the IVC.

“This made us hypothesize that these samples were migrants, possibly even first-generation migrants from South Asia,” Narasimhan says. The IVC genome from Rakhigarhi shows strong genetic similarities to the 11 genetic outliers in the large study of ancient humans, supporting the idea that these individuals ventured from the Harappan civilization to the Middle East. “Now we believe that these 12 samples, taken together, broadly represent the ancestry that was present in [South Asia] at that time.”

The first evidence of agriculture comes from the Fertile Crescent, dating to as early as 9,500 B.C., and many archaeologists have long believed that the practice of growing crops was brought to South Asia from the Middle East by migrants. Earlier DNA studies seemed to bear out this idea, since South Asians today have significant Iranian ancestry.

“I really found their analysis to be very exciting, where they look at ancient DNA samples from different time scales in Iran and try to correlate how the Iranian ancestry in South Asians is related to those different groups,” says Priya Moorjani, a population geneticist at UC Berkeley not involved in the Cell study of the IVC genome.

However, the new analysis shows that the first farmers of the Fertile Crescent appear to have contributed little, genetically, to South Asian populations. “Yet similar practices of farming are present in South Asia by about 8,000 B.C. or so,” says Moorjani, a co-author on the wider population study of South and Central Asia. “As we are getting more ancient DNA, we can start to build a more detailed picture of how farming spread across the world. We’re learning, as with everything else, that things are very complex.”

If farming did spread from the Fertile Crescent to modern India, it likely spread via the exchange of ideas and knowledge—a cultural transfer rather than a significant migration of western Iranian farmers themselves. Alternatively, farming could have arisen independently in South Asia, as agricultural practices started to sprout up in many places across Eurasia during this time.

Ancient IVC ancestry holds other mysteries as well. This civilization was the largest source population for modern South Asians, and for Iron Age South Asians as well, but it lacks the Steppe pastoralist lineages common in later eras. “Just like in Europe, where Steppe pastoralist ancestry doesn’t arrive until the Bronze Age, this is also the case in South Asia,” Narasimhan says. “So this evidence provides information about the timing of arrival of this ancestry type, and their movement parallels the linguistic phylogeny of Indo-European languages, which today are spoken in places as far away as Ireland to New Delhi.”

The authors suggest Indo-European languages may have reached South Asia via Central Asia and Eastern Europe during the first half of the 1000s B.C., a theory evidenced by some genetic studies and similarities between Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages.

Narasimhan hopes that more genetic data can help clear up this ancient puzzle—especially by exploring where DNA dovetails or differs with findings from other lines of evidence.

“We’re trying to look at when and how archaeological cultures are associated with a particular genetic ancestry, and whether there’s any linguistic connections,” he says. “To understand human history, you really need to integrate these three lines.”