How did Columbus or Marco Polo or Magellan or any of those explorers communicate with the new civilizations they encountered? I don’t think I ever saw this aspect covered in my school’s history books, on the History Channel or in movies.
There must have been a lengthy period where the two parties were unable to communicate whilst they worked out basic communications. Did these explorers bring along scholars who were adept at learning new languages? And how exactly did they communicate? Did Columbus make the “indians” learn Italian or Spanish, or did Columbus learn their language, or was it some other method entirely? Did Marco Polo pick up interpreters along the way?
BTW, I suppose the same questions would apply to the conquistadors and the slave traders. How did they communicate? Or was that more of an issue of brute force and terror?
One of disappointing aspects of “El Dorado” was that they all spoke fluent Spanish (with English subtitles :)) instead of having problems.
Now I’m NOT claiming historical accuracy, but the Gerard Depardieu (sp?) version of Columbus has a guy that learned languages easily. I don’t imaging it had to be a “scholar” as regarless of education, some people have the innate ability to easily learn languages. Quickly enough, though, one of the Indians had learned English (well, err, Spanish I suppose) and served as the principal interpreter. Later when the Indians rebelled, including the interpreter, one of his sore points was expressed more or less so to Chrissy: “Did you even bother to learn a word of my language?”
As many tourists who left their phrasebook in the hotel can attest, you can communicate a surprising amount of the essentials without language. Pointing at one’s mouth and making chewing motions is “I’m hungry”. Crossing one’s legs, hopping around a bit, and looking around anxiously is “where’s the bathroom?”. You could probably arrange trade by pointing at some of what you’ve got and some of what they’ve got, and the exchange rate could be worked out by the two parties adjusting the sizes of piles of the materials until both folks are satisfied.
Have a gander at James Clavell’s Shogun - it has several bits, all quite fascinating, where an Englishman is trying to learn to become an interpreter, when the only people at that time with fluent knowledge of Japanese (in the book, but it may have basis in reality) were one Frenchman, a ‘smelly Dutchman’ and a few Chinese fishermen. Several problems were caused by the Englishmen and Japanese being unable to communicate, some involving deaths. It’s a good book, but it’s quite long. It’s one of the best books I’ve read, and the longest one that’s held my interest from cover to cover.
I recall that in Columbus’s journal he recounts how he sent someone who spoke Greek, Latin, and Hebrew (IIRC) to speak to the natives. It never occured to him that it was unlikely that they spoke any of these languages. He seems pretty oblivious to the language barrier overall. He claims that the natives provided detailed information, such as “We believe you are Gods descended from heaven and we will take you to where there are large quantities of gold,” but there’s no way this could have been understood by hand gestures alone. (Keep in mind that gestures are also culturally specific.)
Colombus is claimed to have been trilingual (Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese), but these languages are very similar, and were even more similar in the 15th century. It looks to me like Columbus didn’t distinguish between the three languages, based on the few copies of original documents I have seen. Columbus strikes me as the George W. of his time. He never learned any native languages.
Cortes was aided by the services of la Malinche, who spoke her own Maya language as well as the Nahuatl of the Aztec conquerers and quickly learned Spanish.
I don’t think the original explorers, gold-fiends that they were, cared much about the babble the savages presented them with. As long as they could find gold and keep their backers happy, they couldn’t care less about the sentiments of the people they had to go through (sometimes literally) to get it.
The issue of needing translations comes up often in Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis and Clark expedition. They came into contact with dozens of different Indian tribes and communication was always chancy. They did have along speakers of several Indian languages along with an expert in Indian sign language, which allowed them to build translation chains. One went from the original language to sign lanuage to Shoshone to Hidatsu to French to English and then back and who knows how accurate the end result might be. When the signing specialist was sometimes off hunting Lewis would try rudimentary sign langauge and guesswork to converse with Indians. At one point he even sets down a vocabulary for a language he didn’t speak. How he did that and how accurate it was isn’t known.
But there are several times in the book in which Lewis faces Indians whose language he could not speak and signs and gestures seem to suffice for basic communication.
It’s likely that he didn’t speak all these languages very well. I seem to recall reading that Columbus was not literate in Italian, even though it was his mother tongue. I believe that he wrote in Castillian with Portuguese spellings.
That’s interesting, because I remember reading somewhere that North America had an incredible amount of linguistic diversity pre European contact. Lewis and Clark may well have encountered more unknown languages in their travels than Marco Polo or one of those dudes.
Keep in mind the time factor involved in early exploration. It sure wasn’t like today where you land in the airport and a few hours later you’re 500 miles gone into the furthest reaches of the country.
Often these explorations would take months or years just to go in a short distance, if they even did that. Sometimes you’d set up a camp or fort from which to work out of for years to come… you could get bogged down during the winter and just sit around, all the while with scouts or representatives coming and going trying to find out what the hell you were doing there and where you came from.
If you have an hour at the American embassy in China to pick up a few words of chinese before the bus shows up, you won’t be able to communicate much if at all. If you have 4 months sitting in a sod shack with nothing to do waiting for the ice to melt or another ship to show up you can pick up plenty from the natives who’d come around now and then.
New Guinea, which has less than 10 million people, has over a thousand languages. The Americas had somewhere between 20 and 50 million people at the time of Columbus (and that’s as close as we can get to an estimate without getting into a major academic debate). So while pre-Columbian America was fairly linguistically diverse, it wasn’t the most diverse place in the world, even compared to the present, where there’s less diversity than there was back then. (I think the usual estimate is that there were about 10,000 languages in the world in 1492, while now there’s somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000.)
You’re thinking of Luís de Torres, who spoke Arabic and a little Chinese. That was the best guess Columbus could make at languages that would be useful once he arrived in the Indies.
Arrived in the Indies… Or what he assumed would be China. So Chinese would be a good guess.
Guns, Germs, and Steel records an interesting communication breakdown, with the diary account of Pizarro’s capture of the Inca emperor Atahuallpa. After positioning his 168 soldiers for an ambush, Pizarro awaited the arrival of the emperor’s army of thousands. Before attacking, they sent a Friar to speak to Atahuallpa.
“The Friar thus addressed him: ‘I am the Priest of God, and I teach Christians the things of God, and in like manner I come to teach you. What I teach is that which God says to us in this Book.’”
The Friar then handed Atahuallpa his Bible. Of course, the Incas had no writing except for a type of knotted string to keep records. So the emperor didn’t know how to read the book (or even what it was, probably). He tore pages out of it, which incensed the Friar, who then called out Pizarro’s soldiers to attack.
They then captured Atahuallpa despite his large army, held him for ransom, then killed him anyway even after they were paid. Thus the largest empire in the New World fell to a small band of Europeans. (No, not ABBA.)
Incidentally, the easy dismissal of communication barriers is one of the reasons I quickly tired of the new Star Trek series.
Communication wasn’t always so easy. In my history class we read a primary source describing a conquistador (I can’t remember which) handing the leader of the natives who they encountered a crucifix. Obviously, the natives hadn’t heard of Christ and were scared/angry about seeing a bloodied man dying on a cross, so the leader threw the crucifix to the floor. The conquistador took it as a sign that the natives had rejected God, so he slaughtered them - leader and all.
Columbus definitely did not mention the guy speaking Chinese. It’s possible he mentioned Arabic, but I don’t think so. I wrote a paper about this (Colombus’s views of the Indians), but it was years ago. It’s one thing for Columbus to be stupid enough to think that he was in Asia, but he’s even more of an idiot to think that East Asians spoke European/Middle Eastern languages.
If you Google “Torres Arabic Columbus” you get a large number of hits, from which I quote:
Jewish-American Hall of Fame – Virtual Tour
… The only known Jew on Columbus’ voyage was Luis de Torres, though he had to be baptized
shortly before sailing. Torres knew Hebrew, Aramaic and some Arabic. … www.amuseum.org/jahf/virtour/page2.html
Columbus: What If?
… It is probably for this reason that Columbus, in his own words, considered Arabic … on
his first voyage to the New World, he took with him Luis de Torres … users.erols.com/gmqm/columbus.html
History of the Luis de Torres Synagogue, Freeport Bahamas
… Torres was engaged by Columbus as the linguist for the fleet of three ships, the
Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. The man was supposedly fluent in Arabic, … uahcweb.org/congs/ot/ot031/History.htm
Ole to Allah: New York’s Latino Muslims
… be spoken in the New World was Arabic – Columbus set sail for the Americas, the
story goes, with a crew of Moriscos and a Jewish translator, Luis de Torres, … www.africana.com/DailyArticles/index_19991101.htm
Guardian Unlimited | World dispatch | What’s in a word?
… In those days Arabic was very much an international language, and Columbus had been
looking for a new route … So he took with him Luis de Torres, an Arabic … www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/ story/0,7792,398072,00.html
The Christopher Columbus movie has a scene with Torres trying to speak Arabic and Chinese with an Indio. He gets nowhere, of course. In exasperation, he says the man doesn’t speak any language. Columbus objects: “He must speak some language.” Torres is at his wits’ end: “Yes, but not a civilized one!”
The excuse they gave to kill Atahualpa was that he had ordered his brother killed. The conquistadors were lucky that they arrived in the middle of a royal dispute and the empire was divided.