Walkabout

There's an ongoing war of words between people who consider themselves generalists and those who consider themselves specialists.

I recall being in the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Washington -- a placement that only lasted a semester, for a variety of reasons -- and my advisor sneeringly referring to generalists as "people who lack the focus, drive, and brains to stay with something long enough to learn it thoroughly."  Countering this is the quip that specialists are "learning more and more about less and less, until finally they'll know everything about nothing."

Although I am squarely in the generalist camp, I'm strongly of the opinion that we need both.  The specialists' depth and the generalists' breadth should be complementary, not in contention.  The focus of specialists has given us most of our detailed knowledge of science and technology; the wide-ranging interest of generalists -- who, in a kinder time, were called polymaths rather than dilettantes or dabblers -- allow them to draw connections between disparate fields, and bring that curiosity and wonder to others.

I'm hoping this doesn't come across as self-defensive, given my B.S. in physics, attempted/abortive M.S. in oceanography, final M.A. in historical linguistics, and teaching certification in biology.  Perhaps my long-ago advisor wasn't entirely incorrect; my "oh look something shiny!" approach to learning would likely have made a Ph.D. in anything unattainable.  But it does have the distinct advantage that I'm still unendingly curious about the world, and almost on a daily basis stumble on cool things in a vast array of disciplines that I didn't know about.

Take, for example, the fact that yesterday I learned about a language I'd never heard of before, belonging to an entire language family I'd never heard of before.  Illustrating, perhaps, that even at the master's degree level, my study of linguistics had already narrowed to the point of excluding all but a tiny fraction of what's out there (my study focused primarily on Scandinavian and Celtic languages; my only real work in a non-Indo-European language has been my recent attempts to learn some Japanese).  But this odd language I found out about has a curious history -- and a possible connection to another language family, on the opposite side of the world.

The language is called Ket, and is spoken by a small number -- estimates are between fifty and two hundred -- people in the remote region of Krasnoyarsk Krai in central Siberia.  It is the sole surviving member of the Yeniseian language family; the last speaker of the related language called Yugh died in 1970, and other members of the Yeniseian family, Kott, Arin, Assan, and Pumpokol, were all extinct by the mid-nineteenth century.

A Ket family, circa 1900 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Here's where it gets interesting, though.  There's some evidence that Ket and the other Yeniseian languages are related to the language spoken by the Xiongnu Confederation, a group of interrelated nomadic peoples who dominated the east Eurasian steppes -- what are now parts of Siberia, Mongolia, and northern China -- from the third century B.C.E. to the first century C.E.  And one hypothesis is that when the Xiongnu Confederation fell to pieces, in part because of a climatic shift that led to severe drought, they upped stakes and moved west, where they became known to history as...

... the Huns.

So an obscure language currently spoken by under two hundred people may be the closest surviving cousin of the language spoken by one of the most feared warrior people ever, who made it all the way to what is now eastern France before finally being defeated.

But it gets weirder still.  Because linguistic analysis has suggested one other possible relative of Ket -- the Na Dene languages of western North America, including Athabaskan, Tlingit, Eyak, and Navajo.  Linguist Bernard Comrie calls it "the first demonstration of a genealogical link between Old World and New World language families that meets the standards of traditional comparative historical linguistics."  Supporting this is a study by Edward Vajda of Western Washington University finding that the Q1 Y-chromosome haplogroup is extremely common in Na Dene speakers, and close to universal amongst the Ket -- but is found almost nowhere else in Eurasia.

How the Ket (and the other Yeniseian speakers) got where they are is a matter of conjecture.  One possibility is that the ancestors of the Yeniseians (including, possibly, the Xiongnu and the Huns) were left behind when the ancestors of today's North American Na Dene speakers crossed Beringia into Alaska during the last Ice Age.  Other anthropologists believe that the split occurred later, as some of the North American migrants crossed back into what is now Siberia, and got stranded there when the seas rose.  It's hard to imagine what evidence could settle this conclusively; but the relationship between the Yeniseian languages and the Na Dene languages, along with the highly suggestive DNA connection, seems to support a relationship between those two now-widely-separated groups.  However the walkabout happened, it's left its fingerprint in three different continents.

So there you have it.  A link between the Huns, the Navajo, and a tiny and declining group of Siberians.  That's our excursion into linguistics for today.  Tomorrow it might be astronomy or geology or archaeology or meteorology or, perhaps, ghosts and Bigfoots or whatnot.  You never know.  I presume you must on some level enjoy my random musings, or you wouldn't be here.  Even if I might well "lack focus, drive, and brains," I still have more fun jumping from topic to topic than I would if I'd buckled down and focused on one cubic centimeter of the universe.

Here's to being a generalist!

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The enduring mystery of the Huns

In 376 C.E., an enormous group of Germanic-speaking Goths, primarily from the Tervingi and Greuthungi tribes, showed up along the Danube River, which had long stood as an uneasy boundary between the Germanic peoples and the Roman Empire.

Most people are aware that the Roman Empire -- especially the western half of it -- would, for all intents and purposes, collapse completely less than a hundred years after that.  What's less well-known is that up to this point, it was doing pretty well; no one, in 375 C.E., would have looked around them and thought, "Wow, these people are doomed."  British historian Peter Heather analyzed all the usual factors cited in Rome's fourth-century troubles, including an uncontrolled and rebellious army, restive peasantry, food shortages from a drop in agricultural production, and conflicts with Persia on the eastern border.  None appear to be sufficient to account for what was about to happen.  Rome had stood for almost a thousand years -- to put that in perspective, four times longer than the United States has been a nation -- and had survived much worse, including the chaotic "Year of Five Emperors" (193 C.E.), which started with the murder of the paranoid and megalomaniacal emperor Commodus, made famous in the movie Gladiator.

The Roman Empire had dealt with border conflicts pretty much during its entire history.  Given its expansionist agenda, it was directly responsible for a good many of them.  But this time, things would be different.  No one at the time seems to have seen it coming, but the end result would write finis on the Pax Romana.

The difference was a group of people called the Huns.

Reconstruction of a Hunnic warrior [Image licensed under the Creative Commons George S. Stuart creator QS:P170,Q5544204 Photographed by Peter d'Aprix & Dee Finning; Owned by Museum of Ventura County, Attila the Hun on horseback by George S Stuart, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Huns are a historical enigma.  For a group so widely known -- every schoolkid has heard of Attila the Hun -- their origins are pretty much a complete mystery.  (For what it's worth, they did not give their name to the nation of Hungary; the name "Hungary" comes from the Oghur-Turkic word onogur, meaning "the ten tribes of the Oghurs."  And the Magyars, the Finno-Ugric ethnic group that makes up the majority of the ancestry in modern Hungary, didn't even come into the region until the ninth century C.E.)

As far as the Huns go, we don't even know much about what language they spoke, because they left no written records.  There are a handful of words recorded in documents from the fourth and fifth centuries, and some personal names, but the evidence is so thin that linguists haven't even been able to determine what language family Hunnic belonged to -- there are arguments that it was Turkic, Iranian, Yeniseian, Mongolian, Uralic, and Indo-European, or perhaps a linguistic isolate -- but the fact is, we simply don't know.

So basically, the Huns swept into eastern Europe from we-don't-know-where.  Certainly they at least passed through the central Asian steppe, but whether that's where they originated is a matter of pure conjecture.  There's even a contention they might have come from as far away as what is now northern China, and that they're allied to the Xiongnu culture, but the evidence for that is slim at best.

Roman chronicler Ammianus Marcellinus, who witnessed many of the events of the late fourth century that were to lead to the downfall of the Roman Empire, was grudgingly impressed by what he saw of the Huns:

The people called Huns exceed every measure of savagery.  They are aflame with an inhuman desire for plundering others' property...  They enter battle drawn up in wedge-shaped masses.  And as they are lightly-equipped, for a swift motion, and unexpected in action, they purposely divide suddenly into scattered bands and attack, rushing about in disorder here and there, dealing terrific slaughter...  They fight from a distance with missiles having sharp bone, instead of their usual points, joined to the shafts with wonderful skill; then they gallop over the intervening spaces and fight hand-to-hand with swords.

Ammianus, though, didn't know any better than anyone else where the Huns had originated; his best guess was that they'd lived on "the shores of the ice-bound ocean," but never provided any reason why he thought that.

When they did explode onto the scene, though -- wherever they'd come from -- the effects were catastrophic.  The Goths, Alans, and Sarmatians of what are now the Balkan countries of eastern Europe were shoved farther and farther west, and all of a sudden, the Roman Empire had a serious problem on its hands.  The emperor at the time, Valens, was ill-equipped to deal with a hundred thousand refugees, mostly from Germanic-speaking tribes who had long been considered little more than barbarians.  (To be fair, it's hard to imagine how anyone would be well-equipped to deal with this.)  His decision to treat the Goths as enemies, rather than joining forces with them against the greater threat of the Huns, led to the Battle of Adrianople in 378.

Valens lost both the battle and his life.

While there was some attempt to come to terms with the Goths (or even turn them into allies) by Valens's successor Theodosius I, the stage was set.  The domino effect of Huns shoving the Goths and the Goths shoving the Romans continued, chipping away at the Western Roman Empire, ultimately leading to the Gothic leader Alaric sacking Rome itself in 410.  The Huns made their way into Gaul, and even into Italy, under Attila.  This forward motion continued until the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, fought in 451 near what is now the town of Châlons, France, at which a combined force of Romans and Goths finally defeated the Huns and forced them back.

Perhaps the most curious thing about the Huns was that after that battle, they began to fall apart themselves with a speed that was just this side of bizarre.  Attila died in 453 -- from what appears to have been an esophageal hemorrhage -- and none of his many sons proved capable as a leader.  They fractured into various factions which rapidly succumbed to internecine squabbling, and their power waned as fast as it had waxed seventy years earlier.  What happened to them after that is just as much of a mystery as everything else about them; most historians believe that what was left of the Huns were absorbed into other ethnic groups in what are now Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania, and they more or less ceased to exist as an independent culture.

So we're left with a puzzle.  One of the most familiar, instantly recognizable civilizations in history is of unknown origin and had an unknown fate, arising from obscurity and fading back into it as quickly.  But what's certain is that after they surged through Europe, the western half of the Roman Empire never recovered.  The last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus, abdicated in 476.  The western half of Europe fragmented into petty kingdoms ruled by various Germanic chieftains, and the power center shifted to Constantinople, where it would remain until Charlemagne came to to the throne three hundred years later.

Historical mysteries never fail to fascinate, and this is a baffling one -- a mysterious people who swept into Europe, smashed an empire that had stood for a thousand years, and then vanished, all within the span of a single century.  Perhaps one day historians will figure out who the Huns were, but for now, all we have is scanty records, the awed and fearful accounts of the people who witnessed them, and a plethora of questions.

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