530 years ago, in the small kingdom nestled in the valley between China and the deserts of Central Asia called Ferghana, a young prince watched his father climb the steps of a makeshift tower to feed his beloved racing pigeons. As the prince watched, the wooden beams cracked and the tower collapsed into the ravine below, killing the king and kicking off a chain of events that would begin the modern era of Central and South Asia. The 11 year old boy, named Zahir-ud-din, known to us by his later nickname, Babur, would live to become a great ruler and prolific poet. Remembering the event many years later in his autobiography, Babur remarked wryly,

“On the fourth day of Ramadan my father, Umar Sheikh Mirza was engaged in feeding his pigeons when the platform slipped precipitating him from the top of the rock so that he flew with his pigeons and their house and became a falcon,”

Babur’s life would be filled with tragedy, homesickness, and betrayal. As a young boy, he could never have predicted the unlikely series of events that would exile him from his home in Central Asia and lead him to victory at the battle of Panipat and his destiny as the first emperor of the Timurid dynasty in South Asia - now remembered as the Mughal Empire.

What Babur could have told you - perhaps even at that young age, was the importance of birds in sustaining life in his valley. Babur was born into a period of tumultuous environmental changes in Central Asia. The Syr Darya, a life-giving river that flowed from the Tianshen mountains to the Aral Sea changed course during Babur’s boyhood, drying and aridifying thousands of acres of what had been productive land. Writing in exile decades later, Babur would still remember grimly:

“in my time, the Syr Darya was lost far away in the sands”.

Many settlements where the river once flowed were abandoned, but some agricultural communities managed to survive thanks to an unlikely resource–guano. The product of concentrated bird droppings, guano is incredibly rich in nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium, making it a perfect resource for agriculture. As the river valleys dried up, this pigeon fertilizer was the key to sustaining life and agriculture for many communities. Still, aridification took a terrible toll on life in the valley, and as pressures mounted the 200 year old empire founded by the mighty conqueror Timur, Babur’s great-great-great grandfather, collapsed.

Guano’s potassium content makes it as much a weapon of war as a fertilizer. When combined with charcoal, guano can be used to create the gunpowder that was so vital for military success in Babur’s tumultuous life. Valued for more than just their droppings, Babur’s homing pigeons would have been his only means of rapid communication in the age before the telegram. If stationed correctly, homing pigeons could bring word days ahead of an approaching army.

Babur would have needed his pigeons’ guano and communication logistics to survive. He was far from the only claimant to Timur’s throne, and his father’s sudden death embroiled his valley in a bitter struggle for supremacy that pitted him against his own cousins, friends, and allies.

Guano or no, Babur would not win the succession crisis in his home valley. Betrayed by his family and invaded by the Uzbeks, he was dethroned and diminished to the life of an impoverished guerilla warrior in Afghanistan. Abandoned by his allies and family, Babur’s story could have easily vanished into the margins of history. But one night with only a hundred of his followers, he snuck into the fortress of Kabul, once a possession of Timur himself, and managed to force the garrison of Arguinids, a rival tribe, to surrender. His bravery in battle and cunning strategy earned him the nickname we know him by today– Babur - “the Tiger”.

Ruling from his newly seized kingdom from Kabul, Babur enjoyed traveling through the countryside of Afghanistan, where he was astonished by life in the desolate wilderness. Years later, he recounted a vivid scene he remembered on the shores of the salt lake Ab-i-Istada:

“we saw a wonderful thing,—something as red as the rose of the dawn kept shewing and vanishing between the sky and the water. It kept coming and going. When we got quite close we learned that what seemed to be the cause were flocks of geese. Neither 10,000, nor 20,000 in a flock, but geese innumerable which, when the mass of birds flapped their wings in flight, sometimes shewed red feathers, sometimes not. Not only was this bird there in countless numbers, but birds of every sort. Eggs lay in masses on the shore”

His love for birds seems to have been common for his era, as they had long been appreciated by the Persianate world. He described, with some admiration, a distant relative of his own Barlas clan who shared a similar passion for hawks, which had been trained by the people of Central Asia since time immemorial for hunting:

“Muhammad Baranduq was remarkably intelligent, a very leaderlike man indeed! He was extravagantly fond of a hawk; so much so, they say, that if a hawk of his had strayed or had died, he would ask, taking the names of his sons on his lips, what it would have mattered if such or such a son had died or had broken his neck, rather than this or that bird had died or had strayed.”

Though Babur talks about eating and hunting birds, he betrays some squeamishness - perhaps because of his love for animals - of actually cutting them up, though of course as the leader of a war band he perhaps could not have said so directly:

At this party they set a roast goose before me but as I was no carver or disjointer of birds, I left it alone. Do you not like it? ” inquired the Mirza. Said I, “I am a poor carver.”

Babur’s compassion for birds did not extend to his subjects or enemies and we know from his own unapologetic account that his rule was just as brutal as any other medieval leader of the era. In Afghanistan he terrorized the local Hazara population with the justification that they were Shias and thus apostates, despite the fact that in his teenage years, he had converted to Shia Islam to gain the favor of the Iranian Shah Ismail. When he arrived in India, as in Afghanistan, he justified the massacres of rebellious towns and fortresses as a holy war against the Hindus, though many of his fellow Hanafis would have been tortured and executed by his camp as well.

In any case, the nobles of Delhi, upon hearing about this renegade soldier, and themselves dissatisfied with their Sultan, invited Babur to usurp the throne. This began his long quest to take Delhi and subdue the plains of northern India, then called “Hindustan”, though he admits at the time that the real prize in his eyes, was to return to his homeland in Ferghana.

“No one cares for a man in peril. No one gladdens the exile’s heart. My heart has found no joy in this exiled state. No one takes the slightest joy from exile.”

Maybe the only thing that distracted Babur from this homesickness was his curiosity at the strange new animals he encountered along the way. Nothing could have prepared him for the sights he would encounter in India.

“The world was different here. Grass, plants and trees, animals and birds, customs and traditions, communities and castes, it was all so different! I was so astounded. There was reason to be surprised…”

Ever the biologist, he took note in his biography of the new types of wildlife he encountered in the humid forests and plains of Punjab onto Delhi. He conveys, in great detail his fascination and confusion when he first saw crocodiles, rhinos, elephants, and shocking new species of birds, like the peacock:

“It is a beautifully coloured and splendid animal … Because it is all but flightless it sticks to mountains and forests. It is strange that in the forests where peacocks are, there are also many jackals. With a tail a fathom long, how can it run from forest to forest and not fall prey to the jackals?”

Babur shares with us, also, anecdotes about parrots and wonders, curiously, about their intelligence:

“We used to think that parrots and myna birds said whatever they were taught, not that they could think on their own. Recently, however, Abu’l-Qasim Jalayir, a member of my close retinue, told me something strange. He had covered the cage of a parrot of this kind, and the bird said, “Uncover me. I can’t breathe!.” Another time the porters who were carrying it sat down to rest as passersby were coming and going. The parrot said, “The people have gone. Aren’t you going?” The responsibility for the truth of this report lies with the one who told it. Without hearing it with one’s own ears it is difficult to believe.”

While his observations on the natural world in India gave Babur joy, he was aware when he wrote his autobiography that time was slipping by, and his great plans for a triumphant return home to Ferghana had become more and more distant, causing him great distress.

“How is it possible to forget the delicious melons and grapes of that pleasant region? They very recently brought me a single melon from Kabul. While cutting it up, I felt myself affected with a strong feeling of loneliness and a sense of my exile from my native country, and I could not help shedding tears.”

He never did make it home, and in 1530 the conqueror died in exile in Agra. As a modern audience, it is somewhat difficult to understand his internal motivations and desires; he is at times a sensitive and homesick exile, and at others a savage bandit and opportunist. He loved the wealth and power of his throne in Delhi but he hated the sweltering heat of the place and its people. Justifications and moralizations of the Timurid in any case will not get us far in understanding the man, whose biography hints that he himself may have not been able to reconcile these contradictions.

Babur’s sense of wonder and intuition when it comes to birds, and all natural life, on the other hand, cannot be contested. He stands out as one of the first ornithologists, and his chapter on the descriptions of birds are so lovingly detailed that modern scientists can identify each bird even today.

Babur’s descendants would continue to rule from Agra and Delhi until the mid 19th century, and built gardens, bridges,and shrines which adorn nearly all the subcontinent. And, true to the family of Babur, his descendants were also avid lovers of birds. In fact, his great-grandson, Jehangir, in particular, was so fascinated by birds (perhaps, not enough in the running of his own kingdom) that the scientific study on pigeon breeding he funded would be directly used in Charles Darwin’s “Origin of the Species’’.

Today, in the city of Andijan, in modern day Kyrgyzstan, a town that Babur lost and neither he nor his descendants ever managed to regain, there is a small garden named after the conqueror that overlooks the city on the site where, the legend claims, he looked at his beloved valley one last time before leaving forever. On a warm summer day, you can see all manner of chirping birds resting on the branches of its melon trees before flying off again.

A good guide for inexperienced users must conform to basic pragmatic rules. Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics that evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions.¹One prevalent theory in pragmatics is Relevance Theory.

The Ojibwe language is an Algonquin language consisting of a dialect continuum¹ that spans northern Wisconsin and Michigan up through Ontario and Southern Saskatchewan in Canada ¹. It has around 8,000 native speakers in the United States, and over 45,000 speakers in Canada;given that the Ojibwe language has no centralized language authority (like Navajo or Nunavut Inuit), there is no agreed orthography across dialects, with most in the US and Southern Canada opting to use a Roman transliteration, and the northern dialects using the same Canadian Aboriginal syllabics that are used in Inuktitut and Cree ¹.

Ojibwe is a polysynthetic language (although less so than, say, Eskimo-Aluet languages) , and is highly verb-inflectional. Ojibwe is a head-marking language syntactically , and is usually VOS, although occasionally VSO, and while word order is usually preferred in these two forms (especially in Eastern Ojibwe) all word orders are attested ¹. Ojibwe words can be classified into four main categories: nouns, pronouns, verbs, and particles. While the nouns, pronouns and verbs can be highly inflected, particles cannot ¹.

Nouns in Ojibwe are split into four grammatical categories- gender, person, obviation, and inclusion ². Nouns are highly inflectional, and can possess references to other nouns via inflection. For example,nouns that do not reference a possessor may be deleted when other nouns can convey this information: ihkwee okosisan (gloss: the-woman her-son) can be reduced to okosisan (gloss:her-son). Nouns are classified as animate or inanimate (which corresponds to gender) based on the gender of their stem word, and every noun, including pronoun, corresponds to one of these genders. As with all grammatical gender, the rules regarding what qualifies as animate and inanimate are mostly arbitrary with pronouns, animals, and some plants being animate, as well as some grammatically animate inanimate objects, like Aashikan (foot-wrapping, sock) and otaahsan(pants), along with all other articles of clothing ¹. Ojibwean nouns have singular and plural forms, can be differentiated by person, as well as inclusion,- for example nouns like Kiinawint (gloss: We (including the speaker) and kiinawaa (gloss: You (excluding the speaker)).

A unique feature in Ojibwe, and a few other Algonquin languages is the use of Obviation in classifying nouns. Obviation differentiates between third persons in a given context. A third person become obviate when there is a grammatical link to a more prominent third person(called a proximate)that has already been mentioned in the sentence. To understand the difference between the two, we can look at the following sentence: ninkosihsan owaapaman(gloss: my-son[proximate] he-sees-him[obv]). Here, the third speaker (he) is the obviate, connected to the more prominent/significant/closer proximate (my-son) ².

Ojibwe also has simple particles, kaa(who will) and kee(that will) that are compounded with conjunct verbs and create relative clauses. ¹.

Verbs in Ojibwe are heavily inflectional as well, even more so than substantives. Verbs can also carry this information, causing pronoun-drops in most informal usage of the language. For example, the phrase Niin niinkihkeentaan (gloss: I I-know-it) can be reduced to niinkihkeentaan (gloss: I know it). A verb consists of a verb stem with inflectional affixes, and the order in which these affixes are added on indicate which mood the verb takes: the order of Kinipaa (Ke: second person + Nipaa: sleep) indicates that the verb is in the declarative mood (you are sleeping), while nipaan (Nipaa:sleep + n: second person) is an imperative(sleep!). Voice defines the subject-object relationship between two individuals in a verb, and is naturally expressed in only transitive verbs. There are three modes in Ojibwe, preterit, dubitative, and negative (with present being unmarked), and can be chained together:compare anohkii-pan (Dubious: He is probably working) with ahnokiikopan (Dubious-Preterit: He was probably working) and even kaawin anohkiihsiikopan (Dubious-Preterit-Negative: He probably wasn’t working)².

Inflection of Verbs

First, let us look at the ways we can inflect verbs in Ojibwe. Verbs in Ojibwe can be inflected based on person, tense, number, and transitivity. As transitivity(of the noun that the verb is effecting) and mood have to do with other words in the sentence, we will only cover the phenomenon that can be applied to inflect verbs. Also, we will be handling verbs which are CLASS I Verbs, as defined by Valentine³, as these verbs are the most common and have inflection that shows the most regularity. First, we look at person and tense, which are both handled by prefixes that occur before the verb stem, with person first adding ka in this order. After adding the stem, we go immediately on to animate-ness (of the verb as it affects the noun it is acting upon), which in indicated by adding nid to the verb stem. Next, we add the negative suffix, sii, which negates the verb (except if the verb is an imperative, in which case different rules to get the negative imperative apply). Then, we add number, or plurality, indicated as the suffix min which, combined with the person affix above, gives us all the pronouns in the language. Finally, we have final verb modifications, which include excessiveness, compassionateness, and the dissimulative. Excessiveness refers to a verb action which occurs excessively or too much, as in nimenekwa, “I drink”, nimenekwaške, I drink too much. Compassionateness refers to an action that elicits pity. For example, we have the word nebaa,”he sleeps”, and nebaaše, he exites pity, being asleep. Finally, we have the dissimulative, which implies that the action being done is faked or pretended. Using the same stem as before, we get nebaa, “he sleeps”, followed by “nebaakauso”, he is pretending to be asleep. These final additions to the verb cannot be chained together, and always apply as the last rule in the continuation class. Below we can see a summary of all of these rules below as applied to the verb “menekwa”:

Cuneiform, the ancient orthography used by Near-Eastern civilizations from 3500BC to the first century in the Common Era, is significant not only because it represents mankind’s shift from pre-history to history- people describing ideas in their language on their terms, but also because it gives us great insight into the languages of the ancient Near East: Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite. All of the information we have about the onset of human civilization in the Near East has been facilitated by the fact that we were able to phonetically analyze the scripts of these dead languages and draw conclusions based on the way we know language works. This post will discuss how Cuneiform transformed from its use as a seal and record-keeping tool by the Sumerians, into a full written language, and how this script was then taken and changed by surrounding civilizations in order to fit the phonetics and syntax of their own languages.