Sumerian, Aztec, !Kung Metaphor
Metaphor is everywhere, and not just in English. You can’t prove a cultural universal – no collection of data necessitates a hypothesis – but it’s beyond sensible doubt that all language is imbued with it. One compelling argument – that of 'conceptual metaphor' and its spin-offs – applies primarily to 'dead' metaphor; it is outlined in Chapter 4 of the book. 'Live' metaphors abundant enough to suggest universality can be found by simply to looking about, across culture and time.
Here is the eponymous hero of the Gilgamesh Epic, one of the earliest written narratives (early versions were incised on clay tablets about 4000 years ago):
A mighty bank, the protection of his troops, a violent flood-wave that smashes a stone wall!
Wild bull of Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh, perfect of strength ... [1]
The civilizations of the New World were from a cultural matrix that split, while still at the hunter-gatherer stage, perhaps 15,000 years ago, with a linguistic divide at least that deep[2]. Among the many parallels between the Old and New World civilizations, which we’re not as amazed by as we should be – stone-built cities, aristocracy, temples and priesthoods, imperial expansion, monumental statuary – is the presence of poetry, chanted or recited to musical accompaniment, charged with themes of personal and cultural concern (some remarkably familiar), and associated, in its more poised and formalised versions, with higher rather than lower social caste. The ‘flowery words’[3] of Aztec poetry used an ‘ensemble of recurring
metaphors’[4] – feathers, music, flowers, precious stones, foaming chocolate, the ‘divine flesh’ of hallucinogenic mushrooms. To our ears the metaphors can trip each other:
Sweet woman,
precious flower of toasted maize [5]
Open the corolla of your heart
let it tread the lofty heights [6]
Your words rain down
Like jades and precious feathers![7]
And Aztec metaphor, like ours, was rich in ordinary speech as well as in poetry, often with striking parallels. A tlamatini, a ‘wise man’, is the path, the true way for others, he opens their ears, he applies his light to the world[8]. A troublemaker stirs up dirt, is two-faced or fork-tongued; an arrogant person treads on people, tramples them underfoot, walks on their faces[9].
Even more remote from ours than the Nahuatl of the Aztecs are the ‘click’ tongues of the Khoisan peoples[10]. Here is Nisa of the Kalahari !Kung, informant for and subject of a popular anthropological study:
I’ll tell you another story now. I’ll break open the story and tell you what is there. Then, like the others that have fallen out onto the sand, I will finish with it, and the wind will take it away.[11]
[1] George (ed. The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, 2003) 540-1, Tablet I lines 29-35. The Gilgamesh Epic seems to have consolidated into a single story around 1800 BC, though the ‘standard version’, from which the translation is taken, was written in Akkadian between 1300 and 1000 BC.
[2] Pagel et al. (http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full.pdf , 2013) propose a Eurasian language superfamily with a common origin around 15,000 years ago – putting the divide from all Native American languages (apart from those of the Inuit) either there or earlier. All such estimates are of course speculative, but it fits the archaeology and I think the genomics.
[3] Leon-Portilla (Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, 1992) 3
[4] op. cit. 52-60
[5] op. cit. 68, capital added – the poet is the fourteenth century Tlaltecatzin addressing an ahuiani, a woman of pleasure.
[6] op. cit. 109. By the fifteenth century nobleman Cuacuauhtzin, addressed to his ruler Nezahualcoyotl who, lusting after Cuacuauhtzin's young wife, has sent him to certain death in warfare – as in the biblical David-Uriah-Bathsheba story, 2 Samuel 11. 'Corolla' is a collective term for the petals of a flower.
[7] op. cit. 212. The poet is the lord and sage (tlamatini) Tecayehuatzin of Huexotzinco.
[8] Leon-Portilla (Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, 1956/63) 10 – quoting the Franciscan Bernadino de Sahagun (1499-1591) whose careful account-taking (running to 12 volumes), imbued with missionary zeal but surprisingly attentive and respectful towards his informants and their world, gives us the best window we have on pre-conquest Aztec life.
[9] Sullivan & Knab (A Scattering of Jades: Stories, Poems, and Prayers of the Aztecs, 1994) 226ff, quoting the sixteenth century grammarian and early Nahuatl scholar Andres de Olmos.
[10] The presence of click phonemes in the Khoisan languages follows genomic differences that date back, on one estimate, somewhere around 80,000 years, forming the deepest genetic divide in modern humanity (Tishkoff et al. ‘The genetic structure and history of Africans and African Americans’ Science 2009). Clicks are found in all Khoisan languages and no others, with two exceptions: the languages of three more northerly peoples who turn out to be genetically linked to the Khoisan (at least remotely: Tishkoff et al. op.cit.; Scheinfeldt et al. ‘Genetic evidence for shared common ancestry of East African hunting-gathering populations and insights into local adaptation’ PNAS 2019); and a number of Bantu languages which picked up clicks as they spread south.
[11] Shostak (Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, 1981) 40, slightly edited