In the Beginning Was the Word

Language as a marker

My first search for a linguistic trace of sapience was The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns. First-person pronouns should resist borrowing, yet related forms for I cover the world. The Eve Theory of Consciousness proposes that the new word for I travelled with sapience itself.

The bullroarer is the second marker. Joseph Campbell placed it inside a Paleolithic complex that moved out of northern Eurasia with shamanism, totemism, x-ray art, initiation, and a body of sacred law:

“Passing eastward across Siberia into America, as well as southeastwardly to Australia, shamanism traveled as but one element of a living compound that included — besides the x-ray style of animal painting and engraving, the atlatl, and the bullroarer — an elaborate complex of social regulations, ceremonials, and associated mythological ideas, which scholars have designated by the very broad term totemism.”

— Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Vol. I: The Way of the Animal Powers (1983)

The bullroarer cults of Papua New Guinea and Australia turn Campbell’s route back into language. Nggwal names ancestors and the highest initiation; the Djanggawul are sea-crossing ancestors who bring people, law, ceremony, and language. Both names fit the Proto-Borean word for tongue.

The resemblance makes Campbell’s travellers startlingly literal: Hyperborean lawgivers bringing language, remembered in the tongues of Indigenous peoples today. The trail of that word runs from the Paleolithic into every part of the world.

KVLV: the Paleolithic word for speech

Borean is the superfamily at the outer edge of long-range linguistics. Historical linguists Harold Fleming and Sergei Starostin built different versions from correspondences among reconstructed proto-languages. KVLV belongs to Starostin’s model. His collaborators dated that horizon to about 15,000–17,000 years ago, when Ice Age survivors were spreading from their refuges into newly habitable lands. The family reaches from North Africa through Europe and Asia into Island Southeast Asia; Eskimo-Aleut and Navajo carry branches into North America.

Starostin’s KVLV means “tongue; to speak”; V stands for an unspecified vowel. Beneath it he placed Eurasiatic KälHä, “tongue; speak”; Afroasiatic qa(wa)l, “speak”; Indo-European (s)kale, “shout; call”; Uralic kele, “tongue; language”; Dravidian kil, “cry; sound”; Altaic kiali, “tongue”; and Amerind kʷala, “say.”

Allan Bomhard’s neighbouring Nostratic roots sharpen the sound into action: QWAL, “call, cry, shout,” and WAL, “call, cry, wail.” The root turns sacred. Elamite kulla means pray; Finnish vala, oath; Yukaghir wolme, shaman; Greek kiklēskō, invoke or beseech; Hurrian kul, speak solemnly. Prayer, oath, invocation, and proclamation are language acting upon the world.

The same root enters thunder and omen. Hebrew qōl is both voice and the thunderous voice of Yahweh. Old English hlynrian means thunder. In the Rigveda, an auspicious bird krands and “speaks good fortune”; another hymn commands the rain god Parjanya to krand — cry aloud and thunder — until the earth rejoices.

Nggwal and Djanggawul in Sahul

In the Middle Sepik of Papua New Guinea, Iatmul nggwail and Manambu gwa:l join grandfather and grandson in one reciprocal term. Nggwail also names clan ancestors; Nyaura ngwal means ancestors. The name travelled east into the Abelam, Kwanga, Wam, and Ilahita cults, where Nggwal became the highest initiation and an ancestral power that spoke. At Ilahita, hidden bullroarers joined the roar of distant thunderstorms, and a thunder-being emerged from the Nggwal spirit house to teach humanity how to give birth.

Across the Arafura Sea in northern Australia, the Djanggawul make a speaking world. The sisters and their brother cross the sea, open wells, name the country, establish law and ceremony, and give birth to the first clans. Peoples and languages emerge along their route. The Rirratjingu call their arrival “the birth of a people.”

Nggwal and Djanggawul are joined by sound, ancestry, movement, initiation, and the generation of speaking peoples. Nggwal: The Cult That Crossed Sahul follows that name-road across New Guinea and Australia, through the stolen rites and the drowned landscape between them. Here Sahul supplies the southern branch; KVLV supplies the world tree.

KVLV across the world

The Paleolithic root remains audible in familiar words. Latin clāmāre, “cry out; summon,” became Spanish llamar: call, summon, name. Greek kaleō, “call,” produced ekklēsia, the called assembly, and Spanish iglesia, church. English claim came by the same Latin road: a cry became a demand that establishes a right.

One branch calls a person by name; another calls a people into a sacred body. The wider family moves through prayer, oath, omen, thunder, song, war cry, ordinary speech, and ancestral power.

Echoes in the Amazon

Borean reaches the Americas in both major long-range models. Starostin carries branches through Eskimo-Aleut and Navajo; Harold Fleming extends the chain through Amerind to the southern tip of the New World. The ancestors of Native Americans belong inside the Borean speech world.

Among the Apinayé of Brazil, me-galo means soul, ghost, shadow, and the image of a dead person. The same name belongs to the bullroarer. By Curt Nimuendajú’s visit, the instrument had become a toy, but its name still joined the dead spirit to the roaring wood. Among the neighbouring Sherente, shamanic pupils carried “the howling of Hiepãro-wawẽ” into the woods and whirled it; the spirit appeared. Beside Starostin’s Amerind kʷala, “say,” the Amazon preserves the closest bullroarer echo beyond Sahul.

In the beginning was the word

Campbell’s travelling Paleolithic compound and Starostin’s Borean tree describe the same northern world at the end of the Ice Age: dispersed peoples carrying shamanism, initiation, sacred law, the bullroarer, and a word for the voice that made those powers present. Across the surviving branches, KVLV becomes prayer, oath, shaman, invocation, omen, thunder, language, summons, church, and claim.

At the southern edge of that history, Nggwal speaks as ancestor and initiation; Djanggawul crosses the sea and gives birth to peoples, laws, and languages. Along the American road, me-galo joins the dead spirit to the roaring wood. These are the Hyperborean lawgivers remembered in Indigenous tongues at the far ends of the world.

Nggwal and Djanggawul are the Sahul branch of KVLV, the Paleolithic word-family for voice, prayer, oath, and shamanism — carried south with the bullroarer cult and kept alive in the rites that build the speaking self.