Step Seven

So I'm sitting here figuring that Seven is an Important Number and should thus have something vaguely scholarly attached to it, when my computer pops up with a reminder that I have programmed into my calendar: Practice Sanskrit. Languages are not my forte. But doing anything with Buddhist or Hindu studies really requires at the very least Sanskrit, and other languages are pretty helpful. Islamic studies'll take Arabic, but I figure: ONE new alphabet at a time, right?

And I'm having my little pity party as I pull out my practice notebook and my list of words and phrases to transliterate, and suddenly it strikes me: for anyone travelling the Silk Road(s), language would've been an issue, too.

I mean, for starters, even if Christian is wrong about the pastoralists, you've still got quite the large difference between people in different cities. Think about India! Or pre-colonial North and South America! Or England for most of the Middle Ages! The idea that people who are essentially next door neighbours can't understand each other takes on huge significance when we look at it from the perspective of people who lived significantly further apart, and probably had a bare minimum of common cultural practices to provide some context for conversation. And when you update the issue to the heyday of the Silk Road, when there really were only a few giant cohesive routes stretching from the Mediterranean to the Gobi Desert, well. You've got quite the conundrum.

What I want to know is: were there translators? I mean, aside from buying slaves/indentured servants along the way and hoping that
a) they spoke your language
b) they were fluent enough in their own language to function as an interpreter
c) they knew the language of your next destination
AND THEN: would you sell them when you got to your next stop and buy someone else who fit the criteria, but for the city after? And do the same coming back?

Would you communicate through signs? Body language is super different East to West, so would there be tons of miscommunication and offensive behaviour to one side or the other, and eventually gruesome death for ticking off the wrong person?

Because communication is important - not just for successful trade (although it's kinda key there as well) but also to avoid the kind of misapprehensions that come from poor communication. Orientalism is something that's come up a lot in modern scholarly work focusing on the world west of the Mediterranean, and where did Orientalism come from? The root of the problem, it seems to my untutored eye, is the lack of real communication.

And not just on the part of, say, Chinese national to Venetian dude. No, Venetian dude'll tell the rest of his trade caravan what Chinese national said, and a Genoese dude who splits from the party to head back early with a half dozen other guys + entourages, encounters a Ladakhi guy on his way back. And he tells this story to the Ladakhi, who goes on his way to wherever he's headed. He stops in an inn on the way and talks to a Buddhist pilgrim who's on his way to Bodghaya, re-telling the story. The Buddhist, in Bodghaya, stays with a Muslim who's on his way to Mecca for his own pilgrimage, and tells him the story one night when it's too hot to sleep. On his way to Mecca, the Muslim stops at the home of a distant cousin, a trader who's on his way to Venice, and recounts the story to him because they don't have much else to say to each other. The trader cousin gets to Venice, and is sitting on the quay watching the sunset one evening when a Venetian dude sits down next to him. They start to talk, and the trader cousin tells the Venetian dude his story, and the Venetian dude - the same one from the beginning - doesn't recognize the tale. Information getting ANYWHERE along the Silk Road must've been a massive and disgustingly confusing game of Broken Telephone, and a dangerous one, too.

The last time I played Broken Telephone, I didn't end up believing what I heard at the end because I knew that it was inevitably distorted. But trading information and stories along the Silk Road(s) was not a game, and nobody knew that everything would be inevitably distorted.

Obviously, miscommunication happens even when people speak the same language. But, really: how much worse is the situation when hundreds of languages are in play?

Therefore, logical Step Seven is hereby christened Learn some languages. Or hire an amazing translator who knows everything.