How words from far-flung tribes reveal a 10,000-year-old connection

'The verb," says Edward Vajda, linguistic adventurer. "The key to all this is the verbs."

"All this" is Mr. Vajda's announcement of a linguistic link between Asia and the Americas, a discovery that has sent a wave of celebration - and controversy - throughout his field.

In 1987, Mr. Vajda was a new professor of Slavic studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., where he came across a book in Russian about Ket, a nearly extinct language spoken by only 1,000 people in a remote area of central Siberia. It belonged to a language family called Yeniseic, of which Ket was the only survivor.

Reading the book, Mr. Vajda noticed the Ket verbs - a complex string of particles attached to a root that made up almost an entire sentence. "It was intriguing," he says, "because the verb is completely different from anything else in Asia." In fact, they reminded him of verbs in a Na-Dene language he had studied: Navajo.

Although traces of tools and genes have shown that humans migrated from Siberia to North America between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, no one had ever found evidence of a linguistic connection between Asia and the Americas.

Mr. Vajda set out to do just that. Over the next 10 years, he learned as much as he could about Ket, publishing articles about its extraordinary verbs, and met with experts on American languages. On a trip to Siberia on a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 1998, he met Yeniseian scholars and native Ket speakers. (Mr. Vajda figures that he may be one of the only non-Ket people in the world who can carry on a conversation in the language.) Throughout it all, he says, "the more I found out about the Yeniseic verbs, the more I saw parallels."

By seeking such parallels, Mr. Vajda knew that he was flouting academic convention. Any link between Asian and American languages would be at least 10,000 years old - a span of time almost twice what mainstream historical linguists consider plausible. He risked being dubbed a "long ranger," one of a small group who construct big language families mainly by comparing lists of words.

In 1996, Mr. Vajda invited a long ranger, Merritt Ruhlen, to speak at Western Washington. In 1998, Mr. Ruhlen published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that put Ket and Dene in the same family based on 36 similar pairs of words.

Mr. Ruhlen received some media attention for his article, including a report on CNN that attracted the attention of Raymond Yakeleya. "That got us thinking," says Mr. Yakeleya, a television producer in Edmonton and a member of the Dene First Nation. "Were the Ket our ancestors? Were they our people?"

He contacted Mr. Ruhlen, who put him in touch with Mr. Vajda, by then known as a Ket expert.

"It's exciting," Mr. Yakeleya says. "If you're Scottish, you know where the Scots came from, but, as Dene, we always wondered about that too." Asked about aboriginal myths of autochthonous origins that contradict the scientific story of a cross-strait migration, Mr. Yakeleya says he has heard such stories, but "it's difficult to see because each of the Dene tribes has a piece of the puzzle."

But just comparing lists of words, Mr. Vajda says, isn't proof of anything. "You'll just come up with science fiction if you do that," he says.

He turned to the verbs, learning as much as he could about them in modern Ket from its native speakers. Eventually, he was able to show that they have the same structure and sounds as the verbs in ancestral forms of Na-Dene languages that other linguists, such as Jim Kari and Michael Krauss, had reconstructed.

"I'm not passing myself off as a great discoverer," he says. "If I had to start from scratch, I don't know if I could have gotten anywhere."

Finally, he showed that an unusually high number of Yeniseic and Na-Dene words are similar. In modern Ket, for example, the word for finger is t/schwa/q; in ancestral Athabaskan (a Dene language), it's ts'[schwa]q. He credited Merritt Ruhlen for discovering the shared word for "birchbark."

Late in February, Mr. Vajda announced his findings at the annual Alaska Anthropological Association meeting in Anchorage. Afterward, linguistics blogs and listservs sizzled with news of a bona fide linguistic discovery: the first demonstrated linguistic link between Asia and the Americas. For a field in which big discoveries don't happen often, it was celebration time.

Mr. Vajda's work does more than just reaffirm the archeological and genetic evidence for migration across the Bering Strait. "The news isn't the Siberian connection, but the successful demonstration of a long-distance, temporally deep connection," says Johanna Nicholas, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on the world's families of languages. At the same Anchorage meeting, she presented a statistical analysis that supported Mr. Vajda's evidence.

What's more, says Bernard Comrie, the director of the department of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, "he has succeeded in convincing a number of linguists who are normally quite skeptical about long-range comparisons, as well as specialists in Na-Dene who are normally skeptical about attempts to relate 'their' languages to others."

But not everyone is popping the champagne. In a telephone interview, University of Utah linguist Lyle Campbell remains skeptical. "I think the evidence isn't as compelling as they think it is," he says.

For one thing, the two language families are now 8,000 kilometres away from each other. "That fact alone says probably a connection doesn't seem very likely."

For another thing, Mr. Vajda matched very short items, like the prefixes of verbs, some of which are only a consonant long - short enough to have occurred by chance. "I think he's made a very good case," Mr. Campbell says, "but I don't think he's demonstrated it conclusively in my mind."

Another critic of Mr. Vajda's work is Mr. Ruhlen, who wants credit for suggesting the connection first. In a heated e-mail correspondence, Mr. Ruhlen defended his work as Mr. Vajda scrambled to acknowledge work done as early as 1923 by an Italian, Alfredo Trombetti.

In 2005, Raymond Yakeleya helped to organize an international Dene meeting in Calgary that gathered Canadian aboriginal people as well as Navajo and Apaches from the U.S.

"It can't only be the white man digging in our past," Mr. Yakeleya says. "We have to start doing some of the digging too."

The goal is to invite Ket people to a Dene elders' meeting in Yellowknife in 2009.

When Bruce Starlight, an elder in the Tsut'ina First Nation, met Navajo attendees at the 2005 gathering, he felt attached to them. "There's a kinship that is just like, you feel it, it's a feeling. It's a brotherhood feeling," he says.

Will he have that feeling when he meets any Ket? "Very sure. I'm very sure," he says.

Michael Erard writes about language and linguistics from Portland, Me.

Most linguists approach language as just another kind of natural fact, like cells or rocks. Most of the intellectual action takes place in chairs, and it ends less often in triumphant discovery than in quiet revelation.

Then there’s Derek Bickerton. One of the field’s old lions, he has spent the last four decades studying pidgins and Creoles and writing a few novels on the side. A self-described macho “street linguist” for whom fieldwork is part pub crawl, Bickerton has a penchant for big ideas and a “total lack of respect for the respectable” that, judging from his new memoir, has put him at odds with bureaucrats and colleagues. “Bastard Tongues” is gossipy, vain and pugilistic — in other words, all the juicy things an academic memoir should be but too rarely is.

The book opens with Bickerton wading ashore on a remote Pacific island. If we discount bar stools, little of the subsequent action takes place in chairs. In fact, Bickerton always seems to be leaping out of them. After finishing his doctorate, he writes, he’d gotten all the nonsense out of the way and “could now get on with the serious business of life. Which is, of course, finding out stuff.” With this same irresistibly headlong tone, he describes jetting off to Guyana, Hawaii, Mauritius, Suriname and elsewhere to explore his ideas about languages without pedigrees.

Pidgins are contact languages invented by people who don’t share a language to use. Pidgin speakers, Bickerton explains, will “use words from your language if they know them; if not, they’ll use words from their own, and hope you know them, and failing that, words from any other language that might happen to be around.” Some pidgins, like Chinese Pidgin English (once spoken along China’s coast) or the Chinook jargon of the American Northwest, originated in voluntary trade contexts. Others arose from the slave trade and plantation economies.

Compared with pidgins, Creoles have bigger vocabularies and more grammar; the conventional view is that they are pidgins that became someone’s native language (though some linguists disagree). Many Creoles — like Saramaccan, an English/Portuguese Creole spoken in Suriname, and Seselwa, a French Creole spoken in the Seychelles — have more features in common (like their verbs) than you’d expect from languages that have never been in contact. Is this because they were created when English, French or Portuguese words were laid onto the same bed of grammar as African languages? Or because later generations learned both the pidgin and their parents’ languages, mingling the two? Or because a pidgin was created once, perhaps in a West African slave trade outpost or by sailors, and then transmitted elsewhere?

Bickerton swats down all these theories and explains how he arrived at his own solution, the language bioprogram hypothesis, which he elaborated in the book “Roots of Language” (1981). According to this idea, a pidgin becomes a Creole when children learn it, filling in the grammatical gaps with patterns and words that come not from any specific language but from some universal language template they all carry in their heads. This was an extension of Noam Chomsky’s influential claim for an innate universal grammar possessed uniquely by humans.

You’d expect an idea like the bioprogram hypothesis from someone with the habit of jumping out of chairs. Nailing it down, however, requires more “sitzfleisch” (literally, flesh for sitting) than Bickerton acknowledges having. Amid all the tales of partying with beautiful Brazilian graduate students and bouncing though the Colombian mountains in the back of trucks, he neglects to mention that other scholars (including some of his own students) have delivered some heavy blows to the bioprogram idea in the last decade. They’re unlikely to write memoirs, however, especially ones as diverting as “Bastard Tongues.” Bickerton invokes local histories, social factors and other variables to defend the bioprogram from the claim that all those grammatical bricoleurs in diapers didn’t push their Creoles in the same direction. Here’s where a peculiarity of Creole studies, which has rumbled in the background of the book, comes to the fore: evaluating any claim means whacking through a jungle of detail in which arguments about, say, verbs in some Dutch Creole depend on data about population crashes in Suriname in the late 17th century.

Bickerton may yet be proved right, especially if some reality-TV producer or billionaire philanthropist gets behind an experiment he hatched in the late 1970s. Bickerton proposed marooning six couples speaking six different languages along with children too young to have learned their parents’ language on a Pacific island for a year, to see what language the adults might figure out and how the kids might alter it. The National Science Foundation objected to the project on ethical grounds, and the experiment was not financed. Bickerton is happy to let someone else take up his idea and finally put a stop to all the “word wastage” of arguments about “how much language structure the brain can create.” “I’m out of it,” Bickerton writes — though the reader hardly believes his modesty. “I’ll consult, if asked. ... All I care about are the results.”

Words are the most familiar part of language, because it's words we're most conscious of learning and forgetting. Only certain words, though. Your word-of-the-day calendar will never list "the" or "but." You boast about knowing French numbers, not the pronouns. What draws our fascination is the words for things, actions, properties and the other stuff of the world, not archaic prepositions.

This is how those words are put together: Take a word, any old word, and say it to yourself 20 times out loud, until it loses its meaning and becomes just an absurd string of sounds. A word that has fallen far from its Latin source works very well for this: "fluff." Fluff. Fluff. Now restore this absurd string (f-l-u-f) to its meaning (fuzzy, feathery dust or fibers). Now you've glimpsed what a word is: a grafting of the arbitrary onto the utterly conventional.

If you were to forget that a word has these two halves, you would become vulnerable to thinking that words have mystical properties, that words like "fluff" have the very attributes of fluffiness. This is the path to the world of abracadabra peekaboo, in which if you can grasp the secrets of the right words (the thinking goes), the whole world will be revealed.

Words in and of themselves are about as interesting as nails. Which is to say, I find that what one does with words more interesting than the words themselves. A nail is inert unless it's being hit by a hammer grasped by an arm attached to a brain with a plan. So, too, with words. They can be the sharp point of the action, but they're not the actors, and they don't explain the action. If you try to tell the history of architecture through a history of nails, you get lots of blacksmiths, anvils and photos of nailheads buried in wood, but nothing about designing, building, or the other activities of architecture. Likewise, shaking down words for the keys to the secrets of American life, social or political or whatever, is an esoteric practice akin to cabala. It obscures more than it reveals, and is more elitist than it seems.

Being more pragmatic in my outlook, I'm more interested in people and their relationship to words than in words alone. For a real slice of life I prefer phrase books, books that are intended to help the reader do something. Two of my favorites are "Farm and Ranch Spanish" and "Spanish for the Housewife," written in the 1970s and reprinted in the 1990s by two Texans. The books are intended to "give the reader a working knowledge of Spanish, therefore saving much time and getting better results on the job, be it on the farm, ranch or in the home."

They're flawed and narrow but perfect depictions of a worldview. They're also so lily white and proper, I'm not sure how people who use them get "better results." If you don't have words for bodily functions and all the other outputs that make up the cycle of life and death on farms and ranches, how do you get things done? And if you only have the formal Spanish pronoun usted, not the familiar pronoun tu, how do you bring your Spanish-speaking employees into your confidence and social intimacy?

I'm less charged up by dictionaries, which have always seemed like boxes of nails. And I've never warmed to William Safire, who has always put a lot of stock in words and their singular importance. The title of his long-running column for The New York Times proclaims that he's writing "On Language," but it should actually be "On Words." He's billed as a language maven. He should really be called a vocabulary shaman.

Politics is verby. It's full of actors and audiences, people doing, resisting, manipulating, leading, apologizing, dealing, sneaking around. In other words, putting words to work. We're fascinated by the Spitzer scandal because of its salacious verbiness. As static as it has become, the Democratic presidential nominating process is still fairly verby.

"Safire's Political Dictionary," now out in a new paperback edition, is overwhelmingly nouny. He's all about the nails. In fact, his focus is so noun heavy, he doesn't list a verb until Page 40: "ballyhoo." Don't be fooled by "ballot box stuffing" on Page 39; that "-ing" marks the gerund, not the progressive verb. The next verb doesn't appear until Page 44, with "barnstorm." And after that, it's enough nouns to leave you logy: "bedsheet ballot," "benign neglect," "big stick." Ah, here's a genuine political verb: "bloviate."

Want to tell me the language of American politics? Give me in-house style memos at K Street spin shops and Senate men's room graffiti. Give me Google searches as trends over time, then show me the words that political Web site developers use to get their sites higher on search engines. Above all, tell me something about how people make sense of words and images—give me brain scans of average Americans as they watch CNN and Fox News side by side. But don't ask me to believe in the mystical power of words. "This is a lexicon of conflict and drama, of fulsome praise and fierce ridicule, of emotional pleading and intellectual persuasion," Safire writes. But the conjunctions "and," "but," "or" and "so" are also a lexicon of conflict and drama—in fact, little drama could take place without them.

Safire's dictionary certainly has its charms. It charts how some words and phrases became political tools (see the entries "is is, meaning of" and "macaca"), and it's packed with historical and political arcana (see the entry on "root, hog, or die," a political proverb from the 1830s), compliments that are slurs, slurs that look like something else, and even ventures into foreign politics with an entry on Adolf Hitler's use of the phrase "the night of the long knives" and a reference to Winston Churchill's poodle. "Great men do well to have small dogs," the lexicographer writes in the entry "Checkers speech," about Richard Nixon's 1952 speech denying he had received secret funds for personal use. The longest entry appears to be for " CIA-ese," or "spookspeak," which includes the terms "family jewels" and "wafflebottom" ("Rendition" gets its own entry).

But once I realized Safire's book isn't comprehensive enough to be a reliable reference work, it struck me that it's not even a dictionary, and it's not about words. It's not a phrase book either. What Safire has written is a postmodern political novel, arranged in a nonlinear fashion. It's a sprawling epic of American politics from the Revolution to the current day (with special emphasis on Watergate), arranged as fragments full of characters and scenes, in which the narrator, who calls himself "the lexicographer," pops up at random moments of political insiderness, claiming to be tracing the political lives of words. This kind of kaleidoscopic novel about American politics is one that Jorge Luis Borges or Roberto Bolano might have written if Safire hadn't, a novel about a made-up political system.

Scholars and pundits have pumped out a steady stream of analysis of political speaking and speeches, as if digging out the intent that lay behind the words is equivalent to their political impact. This is a dodge. Less and less do these words come from leaders' own pens than from their speechwriters and political consultants' pens. It's hard to stop glorifying the intention, though, because digging in the heads of political leaders is more glamorous than figuring out the brains of average folks. People who study political communication know surprisingly little about how people listen and what makes them change their behavior, even though massive portions of our economy (think advertising, education and health care) are dedicated to those pursuits.

What's needed is a history of political listening, not another one about political speaking; a history of audiences, not more on speechmakers. Not a count of words that were spoken, written, or broadcast, but the list of words that were heard. This is what keeps Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" on the best-seller lists: It discards the mystery of how words and images work and focuses on how people work. That's where the action is, with the hammer, the arm and the brain, but not the measly nail.

"The verb," Edward Mr. Vajda, linguistic adventurer, says. "The key to all this is the verbs."

"All this" is Mr. Vajda's announcement of a linguistic link between Asia and the Americas, a discovery that has sent a wave of celebration — and controversy — through his field .

In 1987, Mr. Vajda was a new professor of Slavic Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, where he came across a book in Russian about a language called Ket, a nearly extinct language spoken by only 1,000 people in a remote area of central Siberia. It belonged to a language family called Yeneseic, of which Ket was the only survivor. One its siblings, Arin, is only known because a Cossack adventurer named Arzamas Loskutov wrote down words from the last Arin speaker in 1735.

Reading the book, Mr. Vajda noticed the Ket verbs, a complex string of particles attached to a root that make up almost an entire sentence. "It was intriguing," Mr. Vajda says, "because the verb is completely different from anything else in Asia." In fact, they reminded him of verbs in Navajo, a Na-Dene language that he had studied. That was enough to pique his interest to pursue evidence of a connection between Na-Dene and Yeniseian — a linguistic connection between Asia and the Americas.

Although traces of tools and genes have established that humans migrated from Siberia to North America between 10 and 12,000 years ago, no one had ever demonstrated that languages spoken in both places are related.

Mr. Vajda set out to do just that. Over the next 10 years, he learned as much as he could about Ket, publishing articles about its extraordinary verbs, and met experts on American languages, on whose shoulders he would eventually stand. Also rewarding was a trip to Siberia on a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 1998, where he met Yeniseian scholars and native Ket speakers. Mr. Vajda figures he may be one of the only non-Ket in the world who can carry on a conversation in the language.

Throughout it all, he says, "the more I found about the Yeniseic verbs, the more I saw parallels."

By seeking such parallels, Mr. Vajda knew he was flouting academic convention. Any link between Asian and American languages would be at least 10,000 years old, a span of time almost twice what mainstream historical linguists had thought plausible and prudent. Searching for these sorts of relationships at such vast distances of time and space would get one dubbed a "long ranger," the name for a small, marginal group of linguists who like construct language families mainly by comparing lists of words. Finding homes for Ket, Basque, Finnish, and other isolated languages has been a favourite pastime. Imprudent, the mainstream calls it.

Mr. Vajda proved sympathetic to this big thinking. In 1996, he invited a long ranger, Merritt Ruhlen, to speak at Western Washington. In 1998, Mr. Ruhlen published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that put Ket and Dene in the same language family based on 36 similar pairs of words.

Mr. Ruhlen received some media attention for his article, including a CNN report that was seen by Raymond Yakeleya, a television producer in Edmonton and member of the Dene First Nation. "That got us thinking," Mr. Yakeleya remembered, "were the Ket our ancestors? Were they our people?" Mr. Ruhlen put Mr. Yakeleya in touch with Mr. Vajda, who was by then known as a Ket expert.

"It's exciting," says Mr. Yakeleya, who is making a documentary about the Ket. "If you're Scottish, you know where the Scots came from, but as, as Dene, we always wondered about that, too." When asked about aboriginal myths of autochthonous origins that contradict the scientific story of a cross-straits migration, Mr. Yakeleya says he's heard such stories, but "it's difficult to see because each of the Dene tribes has a piece of the puzzle."

Mr. Vajda spent the decade or so building an argument that would convince more than the long rangers. Just comparing lists of words, Mr. Vajda says, isn't proof of anything. "You'll just come up with science fiction if you do that," he says.

For help, he turned to the verbs. After learning as much as he could about the verb in modern Ket from its native speakers, he showed it has the same structure and sounds as the verbs in ancestral forms of Na-Dene languages that other linguists, such as Jim Kari and Michael Krauss, had reconstructed.

"I'm not passing myself off as a great discoverer," he says. "If I had to start from scratch, I don't know if I could have gotten anywhere."

Connecting languages is such tricky work, because the potential confounds grow the further back (and further away) the connection. For one thing, unrelated languages can still look and sound alike because the human brain invented the same grammatical patterns in multiple places. Or, speakers of one language also borrow from other languages. And languages can, by following their own paths, accidentally begin to look like another language. Redrawing language families provides such valuable evidence about the migration and cultures of prehistoric peoples, it's crucial to do it right.

Mr. Vajda saw that comparing verbs wasn't enough. So he attacked another problem, how the languages acquired tone through the same processes of phonetic change. To top it off, he showed that an unusually high number of Yeniseic and Na-Dene words are similar. In modern Ket, the word for finger is təq; in ancestral Athabaskan (a Dene language), it's ts'əq. He credited Mr. Ruhlen for discovering the shared word for "birchbark."

Late in February, Mr. Vajda had his chance to announce his findings at the annual Alaska Anthropological Association meeting in Anchorage. Afterward, linguistics blogs and listservs sizzled with news of a bona fide linguistic discovery, the first demonstrated linguistic link between Asia and the Americas. For a field in which big discoveries don't happen very often, it was celebration time.

Mr. Vajda's work is remarkable not only because it reaffirms the archaeological and genetic evidence for migration across the Bering Straits. "The news isn't the Siberian connection, but the successful demonstration of a long-distance, temporally deep connection," says Johanna Nicholas, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on the world's families of languages. At the same Anchorage meeting, she presented a statistical analysis showing that Mr. Vajda's evidence is sufficient for establishing the ancient link.

"He has succeeded in convincing a number of linguists who are normally quite skeptical about long-range comparisons," says Bernard Comrie, the director of the department of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, "as well as specialists in Na-Dene who are normally skeptical about attempts to relate 'their' languages to others."

But not everyone is popping the champagne. In a telephone interview, University of Utah linguist — and self-described curmudgeon — Lyle Campbell remains skeptical of the proposed Dene-Yeniseian connection. "I think the evidence isn't as compelling as they think it is," he says. For one thing, the two language families are now 8,000 miles away from each other. "That fact alone says probably a connection doesn't seem very likely." For another thing, Mr. Vajda matched very short items, like the prefixes of verbs, some of which are only a consonant long. These are short enough to have occurred by chance.

"I think he's made a very good case," Mr. Campbell says, "but I don't think he's demonstrated it conclusively in my mind."

Mr. Campbell rattled off a long list of recent discoveries that have proven important for reconstructing the prehistoric human past. Among them are Algic, Uto-Aztecan, and Oto-Manguean — three major language families in the Americas discovered in the 20th century, the last one an open question until the 1970s. The Sino-Tibetan family, Mr. Campbell noted, has been accepted for less than 50 years, and Austroasiatic less than 20 years. "So we do make some progress," he says. "We do find there are distant genetic relationship that we are able to prove."

Even more critical of Mr. Vajda is Merrit Ruhlen who wants credit for suggesting the connection first and who feels wronged by linguists like Johanna Nichols. The news of Mr. Vajda's discovery sparked a heated email correspondence between Mr. Vajda and Mr. Ruhlen, with Mr. Ruhlen airing old grievances and defending his work and Mr. Vajda scrambling to acknowledge previous work made as early as 1923 by an Italian, Alfredo Trombetti.

"You have to start off by comparing basic vocabulary," Mr. Ruhlen says. "Every language family has been found that way."

But Mr. Vajda's demonstration has set a benchmark for what's acceptable to the non long-rangers, who insist they're not biased. "I think the main thing [Mr. Vajda's work] does is resoundingly falsify the claim often made by long-range comparativists that mainstream linguists have set some upper limit on time depth and refuse to even consider the possibility of relatedness at a deeper level or beyond established family groupings," Nichols says. "Though difficult and time-consuming, discoveries of new language families are not impossibly rare."

Mr. Vajda also persisted in looking for a Ket-Dene connection in the face of research suggesting that modern Ket and Na-Dene speakers do not share any DNA material. In 2002, University of Kansas Michael Crawford published an analysis that showed that Ket speakers are genetically more related to their Siberian neighbours, and Na-Dene speakers to their neighbours. This doesn't automatically preclude a connection, since languages and genes don't necessarily travel together.

"Languages can be acquired from other unrelated groups, while you cannot 'learn' or acquire a genome," says Mr. Crawford.

However, Mr. Vajda says there is no evidence that the Ket or Athabaskans switched languages. "These two groups are known for their linguistic conservatism, which extends to a general aversion to borrowing foreign words," he says. Mr. Vajda believes that a DNA comparison should exclude people of Haida descent, since he believes that Haida, an endangered language spoken in the Queen Charlotte Islands, is not related to Athabaskan, Eyak, or Tlingit. Mr. Crawford's analysis included the Haida. And, says Mr. Vajda, the Ket have been intermarrying with their neighbours for millennia.

Raymond Yakeleya and others have welcomed Mr. Vajda's discovery as well. In 2005, he helped organize an international Dene meeting in Calgary that gathered Canadian aboriginals as well as Navajo and Apaches from the U.S, which strengthened his conviction that the Dene are curious about their origins.

"It can't only be the white man digging in our past," Mr. Yakeleya says. "We have to start doing some of the digging, too."

The goal is to invite Ket people to a Dene elders meeting in Yellowknife in 2009. When Bruce Starlight, an elder in the Tsut'ina First Nation, met Navajo attendees at the 2005 gathering, he felt attached to them. "There's a kinship that is just like, you feel it, it's a feeling. It's a brotherhood feeling," he says.

Will he have that feeling when he meets any Ket?

"Very sure. I'm very sure," he says.

Remember Joe, my old friend from Alpine? He would be 80 years old this year, but he’s long gone. Survived cancer long enough to see the truth of God—he’d finally asked to see a priest after a lifetime of avowed atheism—and watch the twin towers fall. A month later I was driving to Midland for a burial in a place he never wanted. But Joe haunts me still. Especially when the economic news gets bad. I can hear his voice: Do you know what a derivative is, Michael? A liquidity put? Phantom envelopes mailed from Alpine arrived filled with clipped newspaper articles and forecasts of human greed highlighted with yellow marker. The words in my ears: Michael, you need a gun, and cash, small bills.

So you don’t remember Joe. Let me bring him back for you, then. In 1995 I moved from Austin to Alpine, a small town on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas, to spend a summer reading and doing some writing, far away from the city and a girlfriend who didn’t know how to love me. I moved into a stone cottage at a place called Cozy Courts, where Joe also lived. Just five years earlier, he had hitchhiked from Milwaukee, living under bridges and in shelters, to escape the snow and a wife he’d hated for 40 years. When I met him he’d just gotten back from a steamer trip through the Panama Canal. He told me stories about how he mocked the senior citizens at the senior center. This, I thought, is the way I want to grow old; this is how to stand up to life. He was 68; I was 26 and impressionable.

A self-taught man, he read Erasmus at 14, and his spiritual life fed on Charles Darwin. Give me reason, logic, and common sense, he always used to say. In the 1970s he bought yen and made a killing, but he’d grown up during the Great Depression in Brooklyn. To the end of his life, he kept most of his cash at hand, all in small bills, stuffed in boxes of soap and cereal. The man with cash is king, he used to tell me. The man with cash in his house becomes paranoid, I replied. He kept a .22-caliber pistol in a hollowed-out Bible on his dashboard and used to get up early on Sunday mornings, drive to a railroad bridge east of town, set up a limp piece of cardboard, and shoot it full of holes in five seconds. He was practicing for a gunfight, he told me. In the corner of his one-room cottage leaned a baseball bat, a broom, and a black matte double-pump shotgun. He kept a photocopy of the state laws about use of deadly force folded in his wallet. He wasn’t bug-eyed paranoid, but stiff and unapproachable, his back leg always cocked to flee or strike when anyone approached. He may or may not have been a cop in Milwaukee. But he had sold washing machines and taught high school science.

Joe had come to Texas so he could live the life of a boy again: tromp in the desert as he pleased, eat beans from a pot off the stove, read books until dusk sitting under the eaves of a cottage with his dog at his feet and the Southern Pacific rumbling into town on the tracks nearby and the swallows swooping down over the swimming pool and creasing its surface with their thirsty beaks. When I write about Joe I inevitably give more attention to the guns and the money, because I like breaking the dictum that a gun that shows up in the first chapter must be fired by the end of the story. Not so here. For me his character is plot enough.

I want you to know that he was a voracious reader. Entomology. Forensic sciences. Histories of the stock market and the Federal Reserve. Bible studies, mainly books that showed how the Bible recycles Mesopotamian myth. I also want you to know about his generosity and his disdain. If you were a widow or a kid or someone genuinely deserving but were having bad times, he would drive you anywhere and even give you money. If a book was particularly good he would buy an extra copy and donate it to the library. If you were a priest or Christian believer, a stockbroker or a drug addict, he would cross the street before saying “hi.” I don’t want to entomb him in a caricature, but look: This was a man who cackled with delight when he proposed dressing as a devil in red pajamas, horns, pitchfork, and forked tail, and dancing down the aisle of the Baptist church on a Sunday morning. He read so avidly about the crimes of stockbrokers and the madness of crowds, you’d think someone had cheated him out of millions. He was an excellent student of human pride and its kaleidoscopic delusions, a dogged critic of all that was pretentious and vain, a bulldog and a lover of the desert who left not a thing behind beyond what I do to memorialize him. Michael, people are people, you can’t change people.

One day that summer I was outside talking to Joe, leaning on his pickup (which he called, mimicking a Mexican accent, his peekup), when Dennis, a guy in his 30s who was one of our neighbors, lumbered by on crutches like a giant uncomfortable bug. Dennis was a Mormon who went into trances every afternoon around 4 and spoke in tongues. Ha-hee-hee-ko-kuu-me-mee-maa-aa, he chanted, the nonsense syllables drifting among the cottages like bewildering dust. Six months before, while crossing the street, he’d been hit by a bicycle. Both his hips had been broken. Later in the summer I heard a cop say, “That guy? If he didn’t have bad luck, he wouldn’t have any luck at all.”

Dennis turned to us: “Hey Joe, you know what?”

“No, what?” Joe said, after a long pause. Once he’d called Dennis a “space cadet” and a “minister of Gawwwd.”

“They told me I can’t get unemployment benefits anymore,” Dennis said. “What am I gonna do? I can’t get money unless I’m homeless and out on the street. What’m I s’posed to do? How’s a guy s’posed to pay rent, ‘specially if he can’t work?” He said this in a thick, slobbery voice, and for a moment he sounded like he might cry. He pleaded, “What am I gonna do, Joe?”

Joe looked toward the street, up into the tree, down at his boots. Finally he said, “I don’t know, Dennis.”

Without a word Dennis turned away, as if he were familiar with this desert of sympathy, and lumbered on his crutches back to his cottage. When I tried to defend Dennis, Joe turned on me. “We’ve all had a hard life,” he shouted. “I could tell ...” Then he fell silent. I saw and heard flashes of the truth of his life and do not underestimate his resentments or the authenticity of their source. Who knows what he could have told me if he had ever told it all?

Joe wanted his ashes spread in the dry creek beds near Alpine, but maybe it’s just as well that he’s buried in Midland, where he can keep his eye on human conflicts, the sort that defined his life.

Listening to the priest at the funeral, I wanted to grab him and say, “If Joe were alive he’d smack your gilded missal and dance a jig on the Astroturf of his own grave, fling dollar bills to the wind and moon the slabs of granite soon to be his neighbors.”

These days his voice still comes to me: Michael, if you want to write about immigration, you should try the cemetery. They just won’t stop coming.

It's the nouns and verbs that catch our ears first. The complex words, the sediments of Greek and Latin affixes, the long noun phrases, the passive verbs. The surnames of researchers rising and fallen. The journal titles, the acronyms. You can also hear, in that perpetual dance with certainty, the hedges that soften claims ("it was reported that") or strengthen them ("though inconclusive, the data suggests..."). The language of science, with its specialized vocabulary and clipped rhythm, has a distinctive architecture.

The functional elegance of this rarefied speak is uniquely captured in one of its most inconspicuous words: "so." This isn't "so" the intensifier ("so expensive"); it's not the "so" that joins two clauses. This is the "so" that introduces a sentence, as in "So as we can see, modified Newtonian dynamics cannot account for the rotation of any of the three observed galaxies."

This "so" is key to a basic unit of scientific talk: the explanation. What follows "so" is another idea, insight, or fact—not because it's merely next in a series but because it's conceptually consequent: "So when chaperone proteins bind to their receptors, the process allows other bound proteins to expose their signal sequences." The versatility of this precursory "so" allows for a remarkable wealth of potential follow-through. The structure of the word itself makes it extremely useful, namely the sibilant "s" and the long, hollow "o," both of which are infinitely extendable and can carry a wild variety of emotional intonation. There's the curt "so," the wondering, wandering "soooooo," the exploratory "so?" In its crudest form it buys one time. At its most elegant, it facilitates the work of intellectual hopscotch—or Twister, if that's your game. "So" is here a verbal teleporter; it facilitates a leap from A to B that spares the listener the complexity in between without simultaneously dishonoring it. It abbreviates all the data, logic, information, or research experience that one might need to understand what follows. "So" is a transition between the "there" of specialized knowledge and the "here" of explanation.
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In this explanatory role, the word frequents the vocabulary of certain groups more than others. While writing his book The New New Thing, Michael Lewis found "so" endemic to Silicon Valley. Microsoft employees claimed it as indigenous to Redmond, Washington, with the rest of their rich lexicon of geek-speak and corporate jive. Employees at Hewlett Packard survived boring meetings by counting the number of "so"s. A joke even circulated: What's the sound of Santa Claus at an HP Christmas party? "So so so!"

An oncology researcher at Johns Hopkins recently confessed to me that he says "so" with such frequency that his patients tease him about it; his colleagues are trying to help him break the habit. He figures he caught it from his boss: "We call it the 'so' virus." Indeed, as a staple entrée into an expository framework, "so" carries with it the attractive connotation of signaling the arrival of privileged information or hard-won knowledge. A mantle of authority easily assumed, if not legitimately earned.

But beyond this, can such a tiny word reveal anything about the metaphorical underpinnings and conceptual structure of scientific endeavors? In the 1990s, Columbia University psychologist Stanley Schachter counted how often professors said "uh" and "um" in lectures and found that humanists said them more than social scientists, and natural scientists said them less frequently of all. Because such words mark places where a speaker is choosing what to say next, Schachter argued, natural scientists' low hesitation rate underscored the hard facts they were communicating. "So" can be said to have the inverse relation for exactly the same reason. It relays a sense of accuracy and rigor. One doesn't have to worry about what to say as much as when to say it. "So" is the organizing device for a logic-driven thought process.

Former Microsoft engineer Alex Barnett wrote on his blog that "so" was a "delaminater" word. To him an idea was a concrete object, much like an onion. "So" was the word a speaker used to convey that another layer was peeling back. This metaphor implies that ideas have a kernel that one could reach with enough "so"s, a notion surely enticing to the problem-solvers and the goal-oriented. I prefer to think of "so" as a vehicle across a landscape of knowledge. It lies not so much in between points on a terminal trajectory, but more on perpetual journey across points of understanding. In this sense it shares some qualities with the infinite "why"s of a two-year-old. Another "so" can always follow the end of a thought. The trajectory is endless; the rabbit hole has no bottom. There will always be more questions for science to answer.

As a word that dwells in the lexicon of those who desire to understand and to learn, "so" is a marker of healthy intellectual tolerance. It is a hallmark of a robust cognitive approach to the world. But this is not to say that the "so" employed by professional explainers is all deduction and dialectic. It also implies an element of faith. This is the faith of any attempt to teach, argue, brainstorm, or present: the conviction that the person who is listening will understand what's being said and comprehend its significance. More than anything else, this fidelity may spring from a need to communicate; a fervent desire to exchange ideas and, in turn, build new ones. This is an inclination characteristic of many people. "So" is just more frequent on the tongues of those who do it best.