Shigudo warriors showing off their ceremonial finery.

In 1963, at the tender age of 24, I found myself on an expedition deep in the Amazon Basin, up a smallish tributary of the Río Ucayali. There we encountered a well-established tribe of indigenous people, numbering close to 400 and living in relative isolation, who called themselves the Shigudo. Several members of the tribe spoke nearly fluent Spanish,¹ and we were able to communicate quite effectively with them. As our expedition was chiefly anthropological in nature, and the Shigudo were, anthropologically speaking, unremarkable,² we only stayed with them long enough to trade for supplies and to wait out a remarkably heavy rainstorm that lasted several days.

The Shigudo were excellent hosts, and generally found us much more curious than we found them. I spent most of my time with the Shigudo in the company of a young man named Shiyatauo, who, eight years my junior, was already expecting his first child. Shiyatauo spoke excellent Spanish, and I, having a more linguistic bent than my fellows, engaged Shiyatauo to teach me some Shigudo.

The first few lessons I learned were as follows:

My very preliminary analysis was fairly unexciting.³ I wasn’t sure if ki/gu/ku were pronouns or

Shiyatauo, a respected adult member of the tribe at age 16.

inflections—the Spanish translation provided for each did not include pronouns, but that didn’t really mean anything. do looked a little more interesting, since it seemed to mean “be”, but do ki shilolo puzzled me. The lack of determiner in do ki shisu’u held some small promise of interest. The omnipresent shi- prefix was confounding, but I’d only been at it for a few moments. I knew I had several days to wait while the storm blew over, and I had found a pleasant way to pass the time.

A few more minutes of data brought more interest:

Well, I thought, shikabayo is clearly and unsurprisingly a borrowing from Spanish caballo, and ing a preposition or genitive marker. i’- might be a case marker of some sort. shi- still confounded me. Then everything spun completely out of control.

Concision is clearly not a feature of Shigudo.⁴ Baffled, I asked for a translation of the new phrases independently:

This did not clear up my understanding of Shigudo at all. shi- still made no sense (and almost seemed to have no meaning); do seemed to be losing its meaning as well.

Young Shigudo warriors participate in “Do Ku Shipunto,” or, “Arrows Fired Upwardly,” an adolescent initiation rite and test of bravery and archery skills.

Fascinated but perplexed, I spent much of the next three days eliciting as much data as possible from Shiyatauo. I didn’t really understand any of it, but I bonded closely with Shiyatauo.

By odd happenstance, the key to my eventual understanding of Shigudo came from Shiyatauo’s younger brother, Shiyati’e. Shiyatauo confided to me that Shiyati’e, a mere lad of eight, had been studying Spanish with Shiyatauo for some time, but wasn’t making the kind of progress he had hoped for. Shiyati’e had been listening to Shiyatauo and me, and mistaking our exchange for Spanish lessons; at one point he tried to show off his command of the language by translating do ki shikabayo shilolo into Spanish before Shiyatauo could.

At the time, we laughed, and Shiyatauo said of his brother, “Él habla con un acento shigudo pesado.” He speaks with a heavy Shigudo accent. We left the subject of Shiyati’e’s poor translation, and instead debated whether acento pesado was the right way to say “heavy accent” in Spanish. Neither of us was sure, and to this day I don’t really know.⁵

A few days later, we left in search of anthropologically more interesting indigenes. My notebook was crammed with data I could not understand, and my heart full of admiration for my new friend Shiyatauo.

Months later, looking over my Shigudo data, I saw Shiyati’e’s poor translation among the marginalia of my notebook. Like a thunderclap it struck me—Shiyati’e’s “poor translation” was in fact the Rosetta stone I needed.

My conclusion, back in my closet of an office in London, was that shi- was correctly translated by Shiyati’e as Spanish -mente (roughly English -ly). Shigudo was, inexplicably, a language with only one open class of words: adverbs. It was a horrible idea, pointlessly whimsical, but the data all fit. I could not construct any historical linguistic path, plausible or not, to evolve any sensible language to such a state. But the data all fit. The data all fit.

I spoke briefly of my analysis of Shigudo to my flatmate, a linguistics grad student, and she ridiculed me mercilessly. She also believed that either I had not recorded my data correctly, or that

“Do Ku Shiflota,” or , “The Ceremony,” in which present-day Shigudo ensure a good harvest and fast internet connections by burning an effigy of Shipali, the demon-bird who hunts agricultural pests and network gremlins.

Shiyatauo had lied to me, or both. I did not want to believe I had recorded the data incorrectly, and I would not believe that Shiyatauo would have misled me. I resolved to return to the Shigudo and learn the truth.

It took me almost six years to save as much money as I thought I would need to travel around South America, but I still could not afford passage to that far-away continent. Mere months before I was slated to defend my dissertation and, shortly thereafter, to get married, I was offered a position⁶ in an anthropological expedition to Brazil.

I will admit that I used several people badly in the weeks that followed. I abandoned my academic program and my fiancée in London. And after arriving in Brazil, I abandoned the expedition that had brought me there, setting out on my own to find Shiyatauo and the Shigudo. After nine weeks of trekking, trading, and traveling my way across Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru, I found myself once again in a small boat heading up the Río Ucayali. I was terrified that I would not be able to find the right tributary, or even if I did that I would not be able to find the Shigudo again.

My fears were misplaced. Like a salmon, I knew where to go as if by instinct. Walking into the Shigudo village and seeing Shiyatauo again was like coming home, though I was shocked to learn that he now had four children, and was practically an old man at 22. We caught up like old friends should: we reminisced, and we spoke of the future. Shiyati’e had mastered Spanish,⁷ and Shiyatauo had become reasonably fluent in Portuguese. Their broadened linguistic horizons crucially informed our discussion of Shigudo.

Despite their linguistic naïveté, their instincts were finely tuned, and our conclusion was as inescapable as it was inexplicable. Shigudo did in fact have adverbs as its only open class of words. The old data made even more sense:

I spent several months living and working with Shiyatauo and Shiyati’e, their wives, and their children. We spent much of our leisure time analyzing Shigudo further. The results were stunning.

Below I present the numbering system, which it is helpful to understand before approaching Shigudo pronouns in their full glory.

The system is oddly regular and compositional even though it is quite limited. It would merit a study of its own⁸ were the rest of the language not so much more interesting.

After considering several translations of Shigudo into Spanish, and probing Shiyatauo and Shiyati’e’s intuitions, we collectively came to the conclusion that do and ing had been bleached of all semantic content, and are best glossed as “verb” and “prep(osition)”, respectively. I translate do as “be/exist/have/do” as needed, and ing as whatever preposition best fits.

While adverbs carry all of the semantic load of a Shigudo utterance, the pronouns have a very complex role to play as well, since they have to link subjects and objects from phrase to phrase. In the examples used so far, the number or person of each pronoun was sufficient to link it properly and unambiguously from phrase to phrase, as only I/me, he/him, and it were used.

Consider, though, the sentence Yatauo’s father’s best friend is Yati’e’s wife’s father. I offered the following attempt at a translation to Shiyatauo:

I was very proud of this utterance, especially the use of the compound ’au’poru meaning “brother-friend” or “best friend”. Yatauo⁹ told me that I sounded like an over-eager three year old child, and that my utterance was all but incomprehensible—for all the reasons anyone would find it so: all those ka’s are exceedingly unclear. And by stringing things together the way I did, I subtly altered the focus of the sentence as well. What I said was more an attempt at Yatauo’s father’s best friend’s daughter’s husband is Yati’e.

Yatauo explained¹⁰ that pronouns can be¹¹ numerically indexed. As the astute reader will have noticed,¹² compounds in Gudo are formed by joining two forms with a glottal stop. Numerically indexed pronouns follow the same pattern: ku’a, ku’a’a, ku’ti; ka’a, ka’a’a, ka’ti; For ease of reading, I will translate these forms as the first one, the second one, the third one; the first guy, the second guy, the third guy, etc. They could just as readily be glossed it₁, it₂, it₃; he₁, he₂, he₃, etc., but that seems much more difficult for English speakers to process.¹³

Note that since only one woman is involved (Yati’e’s wife) ga does not need to be indexed.

Let us look at one last detailed example from the copious data I gathered that spring, all those years ago:

After I felt that my understanding of Gudo had really progressed to a new level, I knew that it was time to return to London. Upon my return, I fabricated a story about getting separated from the expedition, and wandering lost in Brazil for months. My thesis committee understood, and I received my degree. My fiancée was not so forgiving, as she had already taken up with someone else.

Dejected, I threw myself into my work. This only deepened my depression as I came to realize that no one would believe my data. Only one person did. I told my former flatmate, who had previously derided my initial data, about my adventure. To my surprise, she not only came to believe me, she married me less than two years later!

I made several more visits to Yatauo and Yati’e and the other Gudo over the years. At the ripe old age of 42, with my wife and two young children in tow, I visited the Gudo yet again. Yatauo, now a tribal elder at 34 and a grandfather several times over, decided he should leave the

Yatauo, an honored elder of the tribe at age 34.

Gudo for a time and pursue a degree in linguistics at the Universidad Nacional del Centro del Perú. Yati’e followed a few years later, to study archeology.

I’ve been sitting on our data for decades, afraid that attempting to publish it would irreparably damage my credibility and my career. But a number of things have happened recently that have changed my stance on this matter. Firstly, I have retired from Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University—thus my career is in many important respects over, and my credibility no longer so important to me. Secondly, Yatauo completed a very detailed grammar of Gudo some years ago, and this article is essentially a mere preface to its publication. Thirdly, Yati’e has recently led an extensive archeological expedition into the jungles around the Gudo village. There he discovered one of those trendy dirt-covered ziggurat temples that have been disguised for years as unexpectedly placed hills.¹⁴ Inside the temple, Yati’e’s team unexpectedly discovered a treasure trove of written records in a language obviously closely related to Gudo. Yatauo believes he has deciphered these writings, and has finally uncovered the story of his unusual language.

According to the best translation Yatauo has been able to piece together, about 400 years ago, inspired by a chance encounter with Spaniards, the Gudo developed their writing system and established a monarchy.¹⁵ Seven generations later (about 100-110 years), the crown prince of the Gudo had unknowingly managed to emulate the worst of the European monarchs, doling out violent retribution for minor faux pas, both real and imagined. In particular, he had a knack for executing his grammar instructors when they criticized his usage. The thirteenth Gudo Royal Grammarian devised an ingenious scheme to save his own neck. He convinced the prince to blame his grammatical shortcomings on those around him, for failing to provide adequate examples from which he could more easily learn. Shortly thereafter, the prince decreed that there would be a Royal Noun Day, followed by a Royal Verb Day, a Royal Adjective Day, a Royal Preposition Day, and a Royal Adverb Day. On each Royal Day of a particular part of speech, the courtiers and others in the prince’s presence were expected to maximize the number of instances of the designated part of speech in their own discourse. Those who pleased the prince with their verbal acrobatics received royal favors. Those who failed to please the prince where often exiled or executed. The royal court was soon dominated by two types of people—the verbally skilled and the silent.¹⁶

Over time, the need for Royal Noun Day and the others decreased, and almost every day was Royal Adverb Day—the prince apparently never did properly master the use of adverbs. A decade later, the young prince had ascended the throne.¹⁷ The new young king’s own son had grown up hearing almost exclusively maximally adverb-heavy Gudo. The new crown prince considered anything else to be a grave insult to his father. He also had trouble understanding anything else himself. And so the new Shigudo language was established, and firmly entrenched after the younger prince, in turn, ascended the throne.¹⁸

From what Yatauo and Yati’e can piece together, it seems that the ensconcement of Shigudo damaged the previously thriving Gudo tribe beyond repair. The civil war to establish the original monarchy had reduced the Gudo population from around 17,000 to a mere 8,000. Seven generations later, they had rebounded to a respectable 12,000. The establishment of Shigudo, and the royal declaration that it should be used not only in the royal court, but also in the everyday life of all Gudo, wreaked havoc on this once thriving and noble people. Communication failed everywhere. Crops failed. The underpinnings of civilization failed. Chaos ensued. Many Gudo fled, to be assimilated into nearby societies, usually without having ever mastered Shigudo (thus explaining the uniqueness of the language in the region). Those who remained were generally the most cunning linguists of the royal court. They eventually rebelled, and established a democracy.¹⁹ For better or worse, most had been raised speaking Shigudo and could not leave it behind, even though the absurd reasons for speaking it had finally evaporated.

A Gudo dwelling from the 1960s. Four decades later, Gudo dwellings are pretty much the same, except for the addition of aerial antennae and satellite dishes.

Epilogue

Now it’s more than forty years since my original encounter with Yatauo and the Gudo.

The Gudo, whose numbers have now grown to over 1000—all descended from royal linguists—have a preternatural knack for learning languages, and are doing well as translators, both throughout Brazil and Peru, and even on the internet. Few others can provide flawless translations from, say, Mohawk into Scottish Gaelic and back—a surprisingly common need in our ever more interconnected world.

I now have young grandchildren of my own, and I delight in watching them continually discover their mother tongue. Yatauo, having attained a previously unheard of life span for the Gudo thanks to his access to modern medicine in Lima, is a newly minted great-great-grandfather, and he despairs at the linguistic change he sees all around him. Several of his great-grandchildren, adults in their mid to late teens with children of their own, speak primarily Spanish and Portuguese,²⁰ and have only an academic acquaintance with Shigudo. On the other hand, he has acquired a number of dedicated students who want to learn Old Gudo from the texts he and Yati’e have found and deciphered.

Yatauo also has several great-grandchildren who are quite fluent in Shigudo, but the influence of the omnipresent Romance languages is taking its toll. He is not unhappy at the borrowing of many Spanish prepositions to replace ing when appropriate. However, many other aspects of Shigudo are changing rapidly in the mouths of these relative babes. Compare the youngest adult generation’s typical rendering of My brother’s wife wants me to find her lost dog to (24) above.

Word order is closer to Spanish, and many of the strict rules of Shigudo are flagrantly violated. Phonetically, the vowel in shi- is often reduced to a schwa.

In a couple of moderately radical dialects, there is evidence that the schwa is completely gone, and -sh- (sometimes reduced further to -s- in rapid speech) is being reanalyzed as something of a liaison-like, purely phonetic linking between certain words within the same (usually noun or verb) phrase, without any other significant syntactic or semantic import.

Yatauo sometimes decries these changes as linguistic degradation, though I know he tries to suppress his prescriptivist tendencies. I, however, see such changes as the Gudo reclaiming their linguistic heritage from the legacy of a mad prince—which is a good thing.

I wish them all well.

	Special Supplemental Letter from the Editor
	SpecGram Vol CLII, No γ Contents