|
Around the World in Search of Something
On the Tip of Your Tongue
(OR: Around the World in Half the Time )
INTRODUCTION
To travel aimlessly, in the vague hope of finding sunshine, interesting people, new experiences and a new direction to your destiny, is a waste of your life. Travelling for pleasure, and without a mission, may merely induce disorientation.
It is true that one should not forget that waste, idleness and disorientation can, with just a modicum of luck, land you in deliciously interesting situations. However, circumstances change when it is possible for any clerk to fly round the world in le weekend, spending no more money, and less time, than she or he might spend at the local health farm or in the pub (or as other English-speakers might say: bar, shebeen, inn, drinking joint). Anyone can board a commercial flight on Friday, at any of a thousand points on a visit to four or five continents and be back in time for work on Monday, having spanned the Earth. To what purpose?
We should try to travel off the beaten track - if ever possible in the new era of instant communication from the top of Everest, or sending family snapshots from the Kyzelkum desert. We should travel - though not necessarily in earnest - in search of a goal. (Would it be possible, on such a mission today, to abandon for a moment your cellphone, laptop, ipod, Youtube transmitter, Global Positioning and other electronic devices, perhaps? That would be nice)
I knew a man who travelled 10 000kms in the hopes of catching a glimpse of a single bird in a dark forest. He was in search of a complete collection of every bird he thought it possible to see in all Africa. This particular bird was one of the very last not ticked off his African list and he had viewed more than 6 000 different species of birds around the world. Were there that many varieties on Earth? Yes, he said gloomily. He knew of a woman who had seen more than 8 000 different species. . . but she had the money to charter aircraft, boats and vehicles to reach the Poles and places in Mpumalanga, Nova Scotia, Patagonia and Uzbekistan.
I knew a man and a woman, passionate voyagers, who spent half their lives travelling yet never crossed the boundaries of their own country. They confined themselves to a single stretch of territory below the 42nd parallel South, for they were in search of every type of tree known to exist in their land. [Eve Palmer - author of Camdeboo - was writing her book on SA Trees, and her husband Geoff Jenkins - author of several bestl-selling thrillers - gave up work to join her search]
I know people who travel the sub-world across four continents, either swimming beneath the water examining fish, or scrambling through caves in search of rock art. There are others who visit exotic climes in order to photograph place names, preferably with themselves posing in front of the notice. Some will travel to the ends of the world to find a certain butterfly, or a new style of pornography.
Unfortunately I had none of these obsessions - so I went in search of the English language.
This is an account of my travels around the planet, not in 80 days and not in 80 hours. My journey was a single, fleeting, superficial trip lasting 30 days, which is about the maximum period most people believe they can afford to be absent from their busy, humdrum schedules. Thirty days in real time. But if you follow me on this casual trip, you will travel at several levels, including unmeasured prehistoric times. You will fly back some 40 000 or 70 000 years in some parts of the globe and, perhaps for a micro-second, view the dinosaur crisis 65 000 000 years ago. But mostly you will be joining me on visits to a rich collection of English-speaking communities.
On our journey we shall be meeting very few of the usual local characters who provide the colour in most travelogues. Instead we shall be seeking information and comment from an odd assortment of English-speakers ranging from a Bohemian Jewish Anglican Priest who confusedly dedicated his life to the British Empire, to an innocent farmer who shot a pig a century ago and nearly caused an inter-continental war between English-speakers of America and Britain.
Other characters we shall meet include an English lad whose 300-year-old skeleton was discovered on an American shore in 1996; and an English-speaking proto-Australian, whose forebears spoke 300 other languages a thousand years ago and who arrived in Aussie about 50,000 years before the English. Through these and other incidental witnesses and observations, I hope to bring you random comparisons of, and similarities between, the 500,000,000 or so English-speakers inhabiting this little planet.
But who, precisely, are the English-speakers? And if they are not just those Anglo-Saxon Protestant English, occupying a portion of a small island, what sort of English do the English-speakers speak?
What is there to be learned about our language on a journey with so vague a mission?
Obviously the English language is itself a haphazard thing, constantly changing and adapting to different places and different times. Anything we say about it can be true only of one place at one moment. It is something, with other vague oddities, we can discuss as we travel, chattering along the way. For this is no study tour. It is a haphazard journey, bringing haphazard experiences of people and places. What this inter-continental string of communities has in common is a tongue which speaks with a fascinatingly broad cultural background. We shall circle the globe in search of these kinds of people and as a circle has no beginning and no end, we can start our odyssey anywhere on its circumference.
This round-the-world journey happens to begin where nobody lives. In the middle of nowhere. At dawn.
NOTE:
After I wrote this intro, I twisted the proposed travelogue book into a novel - a sort of chase around the world with villains pursuing our hero and an English-researcher, to stop them from exposing their dastardly international plot. |
