This article reads like a thriller, the title begs us to question who "we" really are though:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23931972-600-we-thought-the-incas-couldnt-write-these-knots-change-everything/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23931972-600-we-thought-the-incas-couldnt-write-these-knots-change-everything/
Imagine a friend hands you a bundle of knotted thread and you smile without breaking eye contact as you "read" what it says without looking. This is what the Incan knot system, qhipu, likely let people do--you could "read the threads" by looking, and probably "read" simpler threads by feel too.
It's also why it's silly to judge others and assume "written language" and "thinking in words" is the only form of tangible or abstract path for communication or the only way to think. A good chunk of the time, people often make hasty calls choosing convenience over learning the nuances -- only to live in the irony of their own arrogance when time makes its final call.
"English is the first form of programming most of us learn."-Onyx Ashanti
Language is the first form of programming that people learn, and it often reveals a lot about how people tend to think, how they organize, and what governance tends to look like too. We can only infer, but from the article it sounds like the government and economy functioned very similarly to the way the qhipu is made and organized: federalized with a control economy, much like how one core thread serves to anchor lots of other pieces in place.
When you look at how English (and likely other Western, especially Romance, languages) is written and constructed, much of it points toward consolidation and objectification--about 70% of the language exists as nouns --"people, places, or things" -- relationships are frequently couched in transactional terms, and how we refer to non-people also lends it to "thingness".
i.e. "Who owns that dog?" remains reflexive vs. "Who leads that dog?"
We're still in an age that, for most U.S. Americans, comfortably refers to other living things from a frame of ownership -- just a few percentage points away in DNA from chattel slavery.
In an excerpt from the book, Braiding Sweetgrass, the author notes that Potawatomi (an Aanishinaabemowen language -- so related to Ojibwe and shares some common roots with Algonquinaak* [the name for the Algonquin language?] ) is comprised of about 75% verbs. Lots of the things we consider as things in their noun-form are described in states of being. The rock is being, a river is being, etc.
So imagine referring to a trail or road as a noun and verb at the same time--"I MichiganAvenued [to] work today." would mean you drove on Michigan Avenue, which might imply all of its potholes, construction, and traffic patterns that are typical of the avenue for where you live. The place and thing has its own dynamicism while maintaining a degree of specificity to it that doesn't need to become an abstract geographic fact to memorize disconnected from the rest of its social and physical context. One beauty of a language with this orientation offers is that it suddenly puts almost everything we engage into context as a relationship--things suddenly have a degree of action, dynamicism, and maybe even agency to them.
Verbs are the grammatical abstraction of a relationship -- it's an action which implies cause, consequence, and something or one as a party to initiate or orient around the action. Relationships invite the opportunity for more nuanced ethical consideration -- we're literally called to reckon how an action to a relationship might affect an entity that's likely connected to its own set of behaviors and relationships.
There are more examples which you can read from the Braiding Sweetgrass book or hear at a discussion from Dylan Atminer who introduced it to many Detroiters this year, but for now let's return to news about the quipu and the research connected to it.
What's also exciting about this research that helps us relearn the literacy and thinking behind the quipu is that the techniques for decrypting it likely translate well into physical gestures too--know how to communicate using common syllables, words, or general concepts and you can assign them to physical movements. That's something my friend Onyx is playing with as he develops his own sono-cybernetic system.
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| From http://ciencias.pe/sites/default/files/styles/slide_principal/public/field/image/quipu-wari.jpg?itok=vPsFV8mw |
NOTE: this post was edited part way on Nov. 30th when I realized I forgot to finish a sentence that actually connected to an entire section about other languages hehe .
References:
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass
Dr. Dylan AT Miner, a Metis native artist and scholar
http://www.wiisaakodewinini.com/
Debt: The First 5000 years by David Graeber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
[I've yet to read it though suspect it's very relevant given how transactional everything is--"owe a life", "forgive us", "I'm indebted to your kindness", etc.:]
Conversations and observations (plus probably some essays on his blog which I haven't yet read) with Onyx Ashanti
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