“Language is at the Centre of Culture” An Interview with Prof. Geoffrey Khan
Geoffrey Khan is quite possibly the world’s most prominent living expert on Semitic languages. Arriving in Cambridge as an academic researcher over 40 years ago, Khan is now in his final year as Regius Professor of Hebrew, the oldest academic chair for the study of a Semitic language in Britain. His career has been characterised by variety and prolificity; he has, among other endeavours, written on the grammar of classical Amharic, edited reams of medieval Arabic documents and worked extensively on Biblical Hebrew. In recent years, Khan has dedicated significant time and energy to Aramaic - not studying fragments of ancient manuscripts but travelling all over the world to find the last surviving speakers of neo-Aramaic dialects, work he is deeply passionate about.
We interviewed him last month in his office in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
How did you begin working with dialects of neo-Aramaic?
GK: I did a degree in SOAS in Semitic languages, because I was fascinated by languages as a teenager. I studied classical Arabic, classical Hebrew, Akkadian, Ethiopian Semitic, all these being classical literary varieties, and I did my PhD in classical Semitic languages. But in 1991, I was in Jerusalem, and I’d heard from my colleagues about speakers of Aramaic. After some investigation and phone calls, I found a speaker. I asked him to speak to me in his dialect and I was completely bowled over. I thought, this man is speaking to me in an ancient language; not only is it very ancient, but it has never had a grammar written of it, never - it was totally undocumented, nobody had ever described it. This man was very elderly. When he died, there would be no possibility of writing a grammar of his language - it would be extinct. That hit me very forcefully. I realised how important it was to describe this language while he was still alive.
So, I sat down with him and started working with him. I was myself learning the ropes as I went along – I hadn’t really prepared for this. I myself did not have any training doing fieldwork. I just threw myself in at the deep end, which, looking back on it, was probably the best thing. What I learnt quite rapidly is that when you’re dealing with elderly speakers who haven’t had an academic education, the way to establish the grammar of the language is quite tricky, as speakers would imagine it as a real-life situation and would not understand things in the abstract. I would say “how do you say: you want to go” and they would reply “I want to go”. I would say “I am hungry”, expecting them to translate it, and they would invite me to help myself from the fridge.
It took me a long time to get around the problems of speakers assuming we’re having a normal conversation… You can’t just assume that somebody will be able to produce any sentence based on rules of syntax and grammar. For example, I was working on imperative constructions, and I asked an elderly man who came from the village of Ruwanduz in the northeast of Iraq, “How would you say ’open the window“? He repeated the phrase in his dialect. Then I asked: “How do you say ’you, and another person, and a friend, open the window’”? I hoped, by this question, to learn what the plural imperative form was. ? He looked at me and said, “No, no, in my village, you don’t need more than one man to open a window!”. It occurred to me that speakers typically only accept constructions that have become embedded in their experience. This idea that the brain just generates language like a machine isn’t correct.
It must be difficult, purely from a practical perspective, to find speakers of dialects that are only spoken by a handful of people.
GK: Mine is not the sort of fieldwork where you can just walk into a village and talk to everybody. I’m typically talking to very elderly people, sometimes in hospitals and care homes and often in the final weeks of their life.
I find most speakers through networking. Jewish dialects are mostly spoken in Israel now, but Christian dialects are spoken by a diaspora all over the world. There are various ways to find speakers of Christian dialects, but the obvious place to go is the church. If you get friendly with the priest, the priest will often help you. I wouldn’t call myself an extrovert, but you have to throw off all the inhibitions and go up to people and talk to them. I've tried sometimes walking into cafés where I knew there were some Aramaic speakers and sitting down at somebody's table – it feels a bit audacious, but that's the only way to start sometimes.
Generally, speakers are quite happy to help and they’re very pleased that I'm doing what I'm doing. Occasionally you have to deal with difficult situations, and there are speakers who don't really want to cooperate, or who are a bit suspicious of what I'm doing. There is a sort of sense that they might be politicised or something like that, and particularly since they've often had very, very traumatic experiences in the Middle East, some are a bit suspicious of unknown people. But then you know, some get suspicious about other things. They don't understand what academic research is, for example, they think that I'm just here to make money. For example, one of the things I've done over the years is record stories and storytellers. Typically in these villages there are several storytellers of the village and they're very important for documenting the language. I think it’s very important to record these stories, which are an important part of the oral heritage of the communities. I met one really good storyteller some years ago in Sydney, Australia, and I recorded him. He told me a brilliant story and I tried to fix the next meeting with him, and he kept putting it off. I found out from some other person later that he thought I was going to sell all his stories to Hollywood and make thousands out of them. But, in general, I'm very well received.
Do you have any particular memories of people you’ve met during your fieldwork?
GK: I had a very emotional experience when I went to the Caucasus to do some fieldwork with Aramaic speakers in Tbilisi. Most of these speakers originally came from northwestern Iran, where Aramaic was spoken, and they moved up into the Caucasus in the 19th century and settled in Tbilisi. And there's one particular dialect, the dialect of Salamas, which was spoken by Christians and Jews, which is pretty endangered. After a lot of adventures, I did find a few speakers. I was told there were three good speakers of Salamas. I went to the first speaker, and it turned out he'd had a stroke a few weeks before and he couldn't speak - he could hear, but he couldn't respond. Then I went to the next speaker. It turned out she was a very nervous woman… She lived with four Rottweiler dogs and said “Oh, we have lots of burglars round here”! After about 10 minutes of the dogs barking, I was eventually allowed into the house, very nervously. We had tea together and I said, well, can I get my microphone out? And as soon as I got the microphone out, the dogs came in and thought it was some sort of weapon and started barking and wouldn't let me do any work. So I had to give up. And the third - I was getting a bit desperate at this point - was an old lady in her 90s. I was taken to see her, and she was living up in some rooms in a kind of great Kafkaesque, Soviet-style apartment block. She opened the door - a tiny little lady, very frail. We sat down and we had tea, and her hand was shaking as she was pouring. And of course, one of the issues about doing fieldwork with old people is they get tired very easily. You know, often you can't go beyond about half an hour. I said to her look, I'd like to ask you about your language, but I don't want to tire you. And then her little frail hand came and grabbed my wrist, and she looked at me and she said “biqir, biqir” which means in her dialect “ask, ask”. She said “I want you to know, I want to tell you everything. Because I know my grandchildren will not know of my language - I want you to record everything for them”. So, I started asking questions and after about an hour I asked if she was getting tired and she said “biqir, biqir”, holding my wrist. After about two or three hours, I myself was getting tired, but she was insistent. I felt very strongly that this woman clearly felt she had something very valuable, a long linguistic heritage, which she really wanted to pass on to somebody to preserve. I felt very privileged by this experience. I realised that there are many speakers who really want their heritage to be preserved, and I think that's one of the most uplifting parts of the work I've done.
How does it feel having worked on languages that have since become extinct?
GK: It was a life changing experience for me back in 1991 when I first met a native speaker of Aramaic in Jerusalem, and it became clear to me how important it was to document endangered languages. The more descriptions of languages we have, the better we'll understand human language in general. So with the extinction of every undescribed language we lose a part of human language.
Furthermore, with fieldwork, you get very involved with the people you work with. I’ve got involved with the communities that spoke these languages. I became very conscious of the fact that the people I work with generally carried a trauma, and the trauma had two dimensions to it. One of them was loss of property, particularly for Christians. In recent years, many have been forced to leave the Middle East, their villages have been destroyed and they’ve lost their homes. But typically, they can reconstruct the material loss. Aid agencies are usually quite good with that in situ, and people might migrate and do well materially. But all along, they've got the trauma of losing their culture, at the centre of which is their language. So, I feel that linguists can play a very important, human role in helping communities cope with this trauma of loss of language and culture. Even if the language is lost, if you have a record of it, you can help address the trauma of communities who've been displaced.
Would you say your role in documenting endangered languages is the part of your career you’re proudest of?
GK: It is certainly what I’ve enjoyed the most. I feel strongly that certain aspects of linguistics are more important than others. There couldn't be anything more important, in my opinion, than documenting a language, and especially if it’s endangered – this is urgent work, and the most important thing a linguist can do.
