FOREWARD: PHENOMENON: Migrations of Love

	FOREWORD ANIMAL LANGUAGE COMMUTING AND MIGRATION THE ELUSIVENESS OF TRUTH


ANIMAL LANGUAGE
It has been another hot summer day. I sit on my patio after dinner. I had mowed the lawn after work, and now I’m relaxing, having a beer with my wife and my daughter. My granddaughter is playing in her wading pool. Merlin, my dog has a squirrel chattering at him from a tree. My granddaughter is pouring water from one container into another, and talking. Often we can understand her, but occasionally she drifts off into some language none of us can understand. A robin sings his cheer-up cheer-up! from a branch in the black cherry tree. A cardinal sings its beautiful evening song from the top of the Manitoba maple. Suburban domestic bliss. The sliding glass door opens and my son lets the cat out into the backyard. My daughter calls to the cat and he walks up to her chair. “Hi Cosmo!”, she says as she reaches down to pet him.	Cosmo lets out a small meow. It is an answer. This is not his louder meow when he wants to be fed. This is not his “I want to go out now”, meow which is similar to the feeding meow, but a little lower and less urgent. This is definitely not his “It’s about time you opened the door”, talking meow the he saves for the morning when you let him in. My cat has language. Suddenly, the robin's cheer-up has changed to a strident wheep…wheep…wheep! He has seen the cat. He is warning the others that there is danger. A grackle flies from a neighbouring yard to a branch in one of my trees, right above where the cat is sitting. Cosmo looks innocent enough, cleaning himself after dinner, but the birds know he is a killer. (Another day, I wanted to show my son something in the back corner of the yard. We walked past the cat sitting by the gate, playing with a bit of string. We continued to the back corner, looked for a moment, and then turned to walk back toward the patio. As we reached the gate we saw the cat, in the same place. The string had been replaced by a robin in its death throes. Thirty seconds had elapsed since we had seen him playing with a piece of string.) The grackle knows.

In case you haven’t met the Common Grackle before, they can be quite annoying. Their squawk, warning of danger gets on your nerves in about 2 seconds. I used to have a nest in one of my trees. The squawking was so annoying that I used to throw stones, not at the birds directly, but at the branch they were sitting on, close enough to let him get the idea he may be in danger. I had that one male grackle trained. If I bent down, he would fly to a new branch. I didn’t even have to pick up a stone anymore. All I had to do was bend over and touch the ground. By the time I stood up he had moved to a new branch. They nested in a neighbour’s tree the following year. The cat walks down toward the end of the backyard. The grackle flies to the next tree, maintaining his annoying, monotonous squawk. The robin hops and turns around on his branch to watch the cat, still calling out, wheep! Wheep! Wheep! The cardinal flies to another treetop. We have just witnessed animal language. Dogs have different barks for different reasons. Chimpanzees have different calls for different reasons. There are family grooming voices, and danger voices. There are calls to attract mates. The are voices to gather others for food.	Language isn’t unusual. What is unusual, in fact amazing is what humans have done with language. What you are reading right now is an example of what humans together over time have developed. A form of communication that doesn’t require you and I to be in the same place. But, this animal communication, is it language? What is language? Different sounds that signify different things? Yes. Sounds that can be copied by others and taught to children? Yes. Sounds that can be strung together in sequence to create new meanings? Yes. Do animals do this? Well not exactly. Is this the dividing line between animal verbal communication and human verbal communication? I believe this is the case. Can animals string these thoughts together? Yes.

In a New York Times story by George Johnson, a Bonobo chimpanzee named Panbanisha, displayed the ability to string together a series of thought using a special keyboard to gossip with her handlers. She pulled one of the handlers aside and pressed three symbols on the keyboard. When she did not get the response she was after, she tried the symbols again, and again, changing the order, until the handler responded. The three symbols were “Austin” (another chimpanzee in the compound), “Fight”, and “Mad”. The handler, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, finally asked Panbanisha if there was a fight at Austin’s house. “Waa, waa, waa”, apparently chimpanzee for yes, was the reply. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh rushed over to Austin’s house and found out from another handler that there had been a ruckus earlier in the day involving Austin and his mother, fighting over a computer and joystick, used as part of the training program. Panbanisha, who lives about 200 feet from Austin’s house had heard the ruckus earlier and wanted to tell Sue. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh says that the chimpanzees in the program regularly display language skills of a level comparable to a 2 ½ year old child. What had excited her about this episode was the fact that the motivation wasn’t for food, but rather to gossip.	Many language experts have dismissed this type of animal communication as little more than parlor tricks, or circus stunts like dancing bears. As long as the bananas keep coming, the animals will keep performing. Dr. Noam Chomsky, the M.I.T. linguist whose theory that language is innate and unique to people , forms the infrastructure of the field, has commented on this. Dr. Chomsky says that attempting to teach linguistic skills to animals is irrational -- like trying to teach people to flap their arms and fly. "Humans can fly about 30 feet -- that's what they do in the Olympics," he said in an interview. "Is that flying? The question is totally meaningless. In fact the analogy to flying is misleading because when humans fly 30 feet, the organs they're using are kind of homologous to the ones that chickens and eagles use." Arms and wings, in other words, arise from the same branch of the evolutionary tree. "Whatever the chimps are doing is not even homologous as far as we know," he said. There is no evidence that the chimpanzee utterances emerge from anything like the "language organ" Dr. Chomsky believes resides only in human brains. This neural wiring is said to be the source of the universal grammar that unites all languages.

In a book published in 1995, "Apes, Language and the Human Mind: Philosophical Primatology" (Routledge), Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh and her co-authors, Dr. Stuart Shanker, a philosopher at York University in Toronto, and Dr. Talbot Taylor, a linguist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, argued that the feats of the chimps at the Language Research Center are so impressive that scientists must now re-evaluate some of their most basic ideas about the nature of language. The arguments go back and forth between the various factions. What is language? What is the possession of language? Is it in the comprehension, or in the ability to perform, to convey ideas? As these more learned people argue the semantics, the fact remains that at some point in the distant past, our ancestors learned to assign meanings to the various sounds they could produce. As time went by, we learned to string these ideas together to form new ideas. We learned to use words to communicate quantity, things, actions, emotions, the past, the present, the future. We used words to differentiate between things that are, and things that we wished for.	Can animals use verbal communication to create these new sound pictures? They may be able to do so using sign language, or picture cards, or punching a series of special buttons on modified laptop computers, but so far only when trained by people. There is no evidence that they make these new meaning combinations, verbally, or without human intervention. Using that criteria, animals do not possess language. But even this distinction doesn’t matter much in the grand scale of things. What is important is that people can and do possess language, and this story is about people. It is written by a person, and will hopefully be read by a at least a few people. The more people that read this story, the more bananas I can buy. This is a story about the fact that people can talk, and about the way they talk. This story is not about whether or not animals have language. All I know about that, is the fact that I can tell where my cat is by listening to the birds. This is about the development of language, and languages. This is about the introduction of graphic forms of communication, culminating in writing systems and alphabets. This is about the relationships between languages, and the changes that brought about new languages, and the changes within individual languages.

COMMUTING, SEASONAL MIGRATION, TRIBAL AND SPECIES MIGRATION
In addition to language this story is about migration. The migrations of tribes and peoples has altered the landscape of language, so it is difficult to speak of the history of language without speaking of the history of migrations. Back in my back yard, I watch as flock after flock of grackles fly over my house. First a group of 20 or so, then another 50, then a dozen, and then another 50. This goes on for over an hour, every night in the summer. Every morning they fly down to the river where they spend the day, doing grackle things. Every evening they fly back to spend the night at the golf course. Why do they make this daily commute? I suppose that the effect of man on the local environment of the golf course has made this a safe place to spend the night. Wake up in the morning and have breakfast, then off to the river to spend the day playing, practicing their newfound flight abilities. These are juvenile grackles, not paired, and fledglings who fill out the flocks as the summer progresses. The paired adults with young do not take part in this daily migration. They are the ones sitting in my tree, squawking at my cat. This is a daily migration, commuting. People commute every day, to work and back home again, to school, wherever. Fishing boats push out before the sun rises, and return again later in the day. Farmers head out to their fields. People move.	That is what this story is about. This story is about people moving. Daily migration, or commuting is one form of people moving, but not crucial to this story. We are interested in more widespread movement. In some cultures there are yearly migrations. In northern climates fishermen may spend the warmer months by the sea, performing their daily commute, and then as the winter approaches they head to an inland home to spend the winter, away from the cold sea wind. Some aboriginal peoples of North America spent part of the year at the water, fishing and hunting seal and walrus, then spent another part of the year at a favorite caribou crossing filling their larder. Hunter gatherer tribes throughout prehistory followed the same type of pattern. Summer where the gathering was plentiful, winter where the temperature was warmer, and the food animals were plentiful. Alpine cultures would spend summers in the high pastures, fattening their sheep or cattle on the alpine growth, then winter in the sheltered lowlands away from the killing snows. It is only as we began to build permanent settlements and specialize into various trades, that this yearly migration became unnecessary for a large portion of the population.

There are still seasonal jobs, there are still those people whose profession leads them into annual migrations, but in our modern industrialized society these people are now in the minority. Growing up in Toronto, I had the opportunity to work with quite a few young men from Newfoundland. Some of them had a yearly migration. Go to Toronto from March to November (give or take a month here or there depending on the existing regulations governing Unemployment Insurance) and work in a factory or warehouse, then go back to Newfoundland for the winter and collect unemployment insurance (now it is called Employment Insurance, I suppose it was time for new stationery.) It was kind of a joke. “Yes b’y, I comes down to Trawna, gets me stamps then I goes back ‘ome to collect me pogey”. We used to call them stamp collectors. There are some who take exception to this behaviour, because it is a drain on the economy. What these people fail to understand is that, the government has legislated out so much of the traditional Newfoundland subsistence. There is no more seal hunt, no more cod fishery. (Between the fecal bacteria of the overabundant seals, and the amount of fish they eat, there’s no wonder there’s no cod.) But that is a political subject, and I will try to avoid those discussions in these stories.	The thing that most people don’t understand is that this yearly migration is a part of Newfoundland heritage. They were the ones with the summer house down by the water, where they could fish from, and the winter house inland, away from the icy winds. This pattern has gone on in Newfoundland for 500 years. The first “regular” visitors to Newfoundland were Basque, and French and Portuguese fishermen who spent the summer fishing and preparing their catch, and the winter back home on the other side of the Atlantic. Annual migration is built right into the fabric of Newfoundlanders. Old habits die hard. An interesting sidelight. I worked with a Newfoundlander whose great great great great grandfather had lived in the same part of Newfoundland, near present day Botwood. This ancestor by the name of Peyton was the local magistrate, and involved in the care of one of the last Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland, as they were being driven to extinction. He had provided a home, medical assistance, education and a living for one of these last people of a mysterious tribe. This story has a few coincidences like that in it. Here I am researching the extinct Beothuk tribe, and find that this person is related to a friend of mine, who played on my dart team, and worked with me.

Ok. I was talking about migration. Annual migration follows the cycle of the seasons. Food sources change as the seasons pass. Fruit, vegetables, leaves, seeds, birds, fish, grazing animals, sea creatures. What happens when the local population gets too large for the available food source? What happens if there is a decade or century long change in climate? Walrus were once plentiful on the beaches of Britain and Ireland, and as far south as the Bay of Biscay off the west coast of France. The walrus is thought of as a uniquely Inuit staple. Ivory from walrus tusks was once enormously valuable in Europe, traded pound for pound for gold in Russia and Mongolia. Walrus hide rope was the rope of choice for ship rigging until well into the 1500’s when traders and explorers found new fibers in the east. Walrus skins were ideal for use as shelter, shields, and boat skins. Predation by humans is responsible for the current range of the walrus herds. But 2000 or more years ago, when a culture was dependent upon ivory trade to get goods from more southern climates, the dwindling walrus herds were a cause for concern. Sailors began to go father afield to find the walrus. From Britain, to Ireland, to Orkney, Shetland and the Hebrides. Farther afield to the Faeroes and eventually Iceland.	At first these were annual migrations, Spend the summer in the far flung isles and return home in the winter. As time past, and the summer camps became more comfortable, and the surrounding landscapes explored, a few hunters decided to try the winter. Soon settlements were in place. We have migration. Walrus is just one example. Not all migrations were due to a dwindling of prey animals. Some migrations were due to population pressure on available pastureland. Too many sheep, not enough forage. Sitting on an alpine meadow, a shepherd ponders what is on the other side of the mountain. Perhaps he decides to explore. Leaving the sheep in the care of his son and nephew he makes a journey. A month later he returns with a story of a pleasant valley. A year later, a couple of families decide to strike out in the new direction. A few years later, another couple of families join them. Two generations later, population pressure causes another shepherd to explore beyond the next ridge. They say the grass is always greener on the other side. People have always moved around. Even the pre homo sapien hominids had migrated over much of Europe, Africa and Asia. As the ice ages came and went, climate caused primitive man to move northward and southward, and often the paths along rivers and coastlines took them east and west. Interglacial periods are not just warm periods. There are various climactic patterns that are associated with the ice age cycle. Warm moist periods, cold dry periods, cool moist periods, warm dry periods.

You might say that migration is our heritage. Usually the reason is the search for food. A drought, a flood or some other climate change forces a move. Population pressure on food or forage causes the need to move on. A dispute between neighbours or factions. Earthquakes, and volcanos. Migrating populations come into contact with other populations moving the other way. Sometimes there was war, sometimes there was enough to go around. Populations mixed, dialects mixed, and changed. Ten generations later, there has been so much change that the children returning to the old homeland find that the language is unusual. Twenty generations later it is difficult to understand each other. Thirty generations later they have two different languages. An interesting comment on the above is the names that two neighbouring Ontario First Nations tribes had for each other. The Huron called the neighbouring Iroquois : Attiwandaron" (Attionondaron or Attiwandaronk) meaning "those who speak a little differently." The Iroquois name for the Huron ," Hatiwantarunh," had a similar meaning. The Huron referred to themselves collectively as the Wendat "dwellers on a peninsula." The Iroquois called themselves the Haudensaunee, "dwellers in the extended long house." The Wyandote of Kansas are the surviving members of Huron and Neutral tribes who migrated due to Iroquois wars and American expansion. Wyandote comes from the same root as "Wendat" or "Ouendat".	There are some who believe various things about the ancient Great Lakes region. One theorist holds that the Great Lakes were the site for the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts, and has put together a lot of research to substantiate his claims. Another researcher believes that the Vikings may have sailed up the St. Lawrence from Newfoundland and traded with one of the native Ontario tribes for Lake Superior copper, amongst other things. He believes that the petroglyphs near Peterborough, Ontario show evidence of this ancient trade route. Still another researcher believes that the Peterborough petroglyphs show Phoenician and Celtic ships, and may be a remnant of an even more ancient trading empire. There are carved stones all over North America, chiefly around the major waterways, that some researchers believe show evidence of Hebrew, Egyptian, Carthaginian, Norse and other cultures, having visited the continent long before Columbus. While the main focus of the book is the development and migrations of language, and peoples, I hope also to explore some of these unusual claims in this book. This is a story about people on the move, where they came from, where they went, why they went, and the changes that this movement caused in both culture, but more particularly language.

THE ELUSIVENESS OF TRUTH
What is truth? Various religions and philosophies claim to be the truth, even when their claims are at wildly at odds with each other. Newspapers, television network news, radio, all claim to present the truth, although they all have a slightly (or widely) divergent editorial slant. Ask any American school child, and they will tell you that Columbus discovered America. What about the people who were already here? Had they missed discovering it? Columbus never set foot on the North American mainland, yet he is revered in the U.S. as a national hero, even having a holiday named after him. You see there is a certain editorial bias even in the history that is taught. Leif Eriksson is mentioned as an afterthought, like Roger Maris, with an asterisk after his name. Granted, Columbus' voyage was followed up with colonization, where the Norse colonization initiative was relatively short-lived, but it just irks me to see the truth so downplayed. Everything seems to be about money. The Vikings didn't make North America a paying proposition, so they get shunted to the back of the history books. What about the people who got pushed aside to make America a lucrative experiment? What about their story? What about the people who tried and failed? What about the people who tried and succeeded, but had their efforts buried because they raised uncomfortable questions?	Media packaging We are an entertained society, so much more than at any period in human history. Television, movies, books, radio, sports, theatre, magazines, the internet. Because of our industrialisation and labour saving devices, western society has more leisure time than ever before. The production of our entertainment, however, is increasingly in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Large media conglomerates swallow up smaller media conglomerates daily. There are some large cities in America where every single radio station is owned by the same company, the editorial slant is dictated by the board of the same corporation. Only the target market segmentation is varied. One station aims at the high school kids, another at the 20's and 30's, another at those in their 40's and 50's. It looks like competition, but it isn't. Over 80 percent of the world's media is under the control of a handful of corporations. These corporations own television networks, radio networks, magazine and newspaper empires, publishing companies, movie studios, bookstores, video stores, internet service providers and search engines. Not only that, but these same corporations own manufacturing companies, that produce the products that are advertised in their media. If there was something inherently dangerous or harmful in their products or manufacturing processes, do you think these facts would be leading off the six o'clock news on their networks?

The vast majority of people look no further than a local newspaper, radio station, and TV network for their news and information.What stories make it to the front page? How are the headlines written? What is the lead story on the newscast? These decisions are in the hands of increasingly fewer people. People are blindly following the leader, but who is the leader? Every day that passes, the world resembles more and more the Orwellian distopia of 1984. My mother has always said that it will all come out in the wash. When is the wash? Where did that phrase come from? Let's take that phrase and apply it to our modern media, and advertising. You wash something that is dirty, let's say a white shirt. The dirt is covering or hiding the true nature of your shirt. The white is not so white, it is brown in places, or red from a spagetti sauce stain, or black from grease or oil. You put the shirt in clean water with some soap, and run it through the cycle. Now the shirt is white again, but what colour is the water now? You can make the shirt clean, but the evidence of the dirt is in the water. In the old days of wringer washing machines, you could see the dirt in the water. With our modern automatics and spin cycles etc., that dirty water goes down the drain before most people see it. Where does the dirty water go? Sooner or later it will build up somewhere and get noticed.	This is the news. This is your advertising. This is modern society. The dirt disappears down the drain before many people can see it. Things are swept under the rug. It takes time, but sooner or later the dirt begins to filter through the rug, back to the surface, or people begin to notice a bump in the rug where the dirt has built up over time. The dirt will show up eventually, despite the media continually laundering and hiding it. Scandals are often discovered years after their occurence. Information is buried for decades under the pretense of 'national security', and shows up many years later under the freedom of information act, if it ever shows up at all. By this time the major players are dead, or no longer in power, or somehow beyond litigation. On the one hand we have the milk marketing board telling us all the wonderful things that milk can do for you. On the other hand we have some nutritionists telling us to stay away from milk, because of growth hormones etc., that are fed to the cows to increase production. Obviously these nutritionists are those not employed by the milk marketing board. The same goes for eggs, white bread, meat etc. Which expert do you believe? Which expert will get the most air time in the media? Follow the money.

Sugar is sold to us in so many forms, soft drinks, candy bars, gum, to name a few. Sugar is one of the worst things you can do to your body, but every day billions of advertising dollars are spent getting us to buy it and consume it. It is okay to air these commercials, but you're not allowed to see a woman breastfeeding a child. All the glitz and glamour accompanies a commercial for a soft drink. No glitz for a simple apple. Huge mountains of advertising dollars are spent by the major soft drink manufacturers, to advertise products that are largely sugar and water. When finally the pressure is on, they release a sugar-free variety, sweetened by a chemical that in the long run is likely more dangerous than sugar. When cyclamates were shown to cause cancer, they changed to aspartame, or something else. Aspartame is under study now, as being a substance your body is better off without. The problem is that a great many people care more about how they look, than their actual inner health. Billy Crystal's hilarious character Fernando reinforced this idea with his, "When you look good, you feel good, and you look maaavalous!" Advertising and media is all about looks, and very little about real value or substance. Unfortunately it is also pervasive. Every where you look, everything you touch, or hear. It is an extremely dangerous form of propaganda.	Propaganda is a word that carries an evil connotation, and people don't even like to hear the word. Much of our advertising is little more than the dictionary definition of propaganda. The continual pressure of this advertising amounts to a very subtle form of brainwashing. What is the purpose of all of this? Somebody is raking in huge stacks of money. These processed foods etc. have caused and continue to cause an epidemic of obesity in our consumer society. The same corporations that offer these foods can now market hundreds of miracle exercise devices to help people shed those extra pounds. The circle is unbroken. These are fundamental items. We are talking about the very things we eat. We live in a packaged society. What we eat, what we wear, where we live, what we watch on TV, what we read, what we learn in school. Who is doing the packaging? So who do you believe? Whenever you read something in our modern information society, you have to ask yourself, "Who wrote this? What do they hope to gain from writing this?"

So who wrote this, and what does he hope to gain from writing this? I am writing this. I am just a guy, in his 40's, who has a wife, 3 kids,a granddaughter,a dog and a cat. The bank holds the mortgage for my house, and I drive a 10 year old car.. I work in a warehouse for a living, and it almost pays the bills. I work in a warehouse for a living, partly because I want to. I have moved up into the office in several jobs, and found I don't like sitting behind a desk. The exercise I get in the warehouse is good for my metabolism. I got fat sitting behind a desk. I don't have to pay for a gym membership. I get my workout daily. I have been the warehouse manager at some of the companies I worked for, and that is about as high up the corporate ladder as I would like to go. As a warehouse manager, I can translate the corporate line to the common folk, and translate the concerns of the common folk to the suits. It's something I'm good at. Ensuring that the job gets done, without my crew getting stepped on in the process.	I have raised some hackles along the way, and had my wrists slapped a few times, but by going to bat for my crew, I gain their respect and loyalty (for the most part), and out of that respect and loyalty, the job got done, and it got done well. Management has to be happy about that. What do I stand to gain by writing this? Well if it's any good, maybe I can sell a few copies to supplement my income. I can't pretend to think that this will make me rich, and I am not sure that's what I'm after anyway. In the same way that I translate the corporate line to my crew, I would like to take the high-fallutin' gobbledeegook that the researchers and experts spit out, and translate it into the common tongue. There are things in this book that everyday people might want to know about, but don't have ready access to. Later on in the book I will quote a few paragraphs from some linguistic treatises. You'd think people, talking about language, would write words that other people could understand. It ain't so. I find the subject matter fascinating, although I have to read some of the materials through a few times before I understand it myself. I think there are a lot of people who would find the subject matter interesting, if it were only presented in a manner that was readily accessible.

That's what I hope to gain. A few bucks, and to share this stuff to a wider audience than it currently gets. Do I have any ulterior motives or hidden agenda? Not that I know of. I have always been this way, I thought I'd just write it down for a change. When we were kids, in our early teens, sitting out on the porch at night, I was the one who knew a little about the stars and planets. I was the one that they would ask about stuff like that. I have always been an avid reader of more than just fiction. When I was a child, I used to read the Golden Book Encyclopedia at night for something to do. I'm the guy that nobody wanted to play Trivial Pursuit with any more. I have opinions and beliefs, and they will come out in this story. Am I being paid by anyone to present them? No, unless you buy this book. I represent myself and nobody else. If I make a bit of money at this, fine. If not? Fine. It's not about the money, but I'll take it if it comes.	In fact, if the book were to sell and make a lot of money, it wouldn't bother me at all to share a large portion of it with someone who needs it more than me. By the same token, if it makes enough, I could afford the time to write more and not work in a warehouse any more. I'm sure I could get enough exercise working around the house and in the garden, and walking my dog, and taking my son fishing. These things would be more important than working in a warehouse, if I had enough money coming in. There's my ulterior motive, exposed at last. I would like to spend my time doing what I enjoy, rather than working for somebody else. Sure I enjoy what I do for a living to some degree. I enjoy the people, and the drive to succeed in the industry. But don't kid yourself. If I had the opportunity to read, research and write for a living, and set my own schedule that would be great. If I decided the weather was to nice to sit at the computer, and it was a much better day to be fishing with my son and granddaughter, and I had the freedom to make that decision, that would be better than hoisting plumbing supplies around a warehouse all day.


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