Mongolian Connections: Lingua Franca

Before Mongolia, I’d never traveled alone in a country of which I did not know the language. Though I was intimidated by this prospect at first, I’ve discovered something: I do know the language. Sort of. Not Mongolian, but English; one can get by in Ulaanbaatar with just English, and even in the countryside, “Hi” and “Thanks” seem to be pretty standard knowledge. Though I feel weird expecting people to know English, I also feel weird trying in Mongolian sometimes, when they probably do know enough English to help me. I’d never had to realize before how universal English is. Sure, plenty of countries don’t have many English-speakers, but generally nations are implementing English in their curricula (which is convenient for would-be traveling Americans who can teach it just about everywhere except Spain). One (very very strange) article I read in a Mongolian newspaper mentions the importance of educating people “in internationally recognized English language.” (There was more to that sentence, but I’m not sure exactly what it said; it in itself is evidence that there should be more English education in Mongolia.) And English isn’t in use just for the benefit of native English speakers; my Bulgarian friend who lives in Switzerland communicated with me and university employees completely in English, and almost all tourists here use English. At a café, I’ll hear a German speaking with a Mongolian, both in English. On one countryside-tour, the Frenchman in our group used an English translator, and he then translated into French for his wife. English has become the language of international communication. With European-Mongolian interactions, this is interesting because the language is a neutral third ground, what Esperanto was meant to be (and sort of failed, but we should keep working on it!) Of course, it’s only a neutral third ground for the non-American/British/etc. But I’m not complaining about that.

This de facto universal language just sort of sprung up organically, as, I suppose, languages have to. (Unfortunately for poor L L Zamenhof.) English is one connection here, but the idea of an international language of communication is another; of course, the idea of a neutral language that different nations used to communicate reminded me of one of my favorite things: Latin. In the Middle Ages, educated people spoke Latin; monks and scholars from different nations communicated in Latin, and texts were written in Latin so that everyone could read them. If you knew Latin, you knew that, even in a very regionally centered world, you could find someone with whom to communicate. In many senses, English is the new medieval Latin.

I wonder what this indicates about the world. The elite of the medieval world used an international language to communicate, before vernaculars came into fashion, and now, after a hiatus when the elite sort of just spoke all the languages they’d need, English has become a necessity for travellers and/or speakers of obscure languages. What does our age have in common with the Dark Age that necessitates such a language? Furthermore, I think it’s significant that not only the elite are speaking in this new universal language; for the first time in a long time (ever?) the common man in one nation can communicate with the common man in another. Of course, for the first time in a long time (ever?) the common man is travelling. But I’m not sure that’s all there is to it.

As much as the similarity between Latin’s function and English’s function interests me, the differences between the languages interest me, too. I’ve always thought English to be near-impossible to learn. Why don’t “through,” “though,” “cough,” and “tough” rhyme? It makes no sense. But when I speak to people who’ve learned English as a second language, they tend to have the same response to my denigrations of my language. They all say that English is easy to learn. Part of this, I think, is the fact that one is exposed to English all the time, even in a foreign country. But the other reason, as my friend K pointed out to me, is because English is so flexible. Though its irregularities must be frustrating, its lack of structure means that there aren’t grammatical tomes to be pored over. Perhaps it is very difficult to learn to speak English correctly (who/whom, “to boldly go,” final prepositions), but it’s pretty easy to pick up how to construct sentences.

English’s flexibility is also one of the things that makes it Awesome. It absorbs phrases and words effortlessly; “je ne sais quoi” and “fajita” are both equally at home in the English language. (Though you don’t even want to know how I just tried to spell that first one.) Somehow, they’re as at home as “whatever” and “hot dog.” Other languages aren’t like this, I think. K says that Chinese is so rigid that foreign words sort of just can’t be imported, while “home run” makes it into Spanish as the bastardized “jónron,” because that fits Spanish’s rules. In Latin, words have to fit a grammatical structure, and so foreign terms often had to be forcibly wedged into that structure. (And looking at how Ancient Greek imported foreign names can lead to hilarity.) English, however, takes words just as they come. I’m sure this isn’t true with some words, but for the most part it is more flexible than other languages.

This might be the reason for another difference between English and Latin: how they change. English is rapidly transforming, picking up new structures, new words, and new grammar in addition to new idioms. Latin, on the other hand? Though style, syntax, and vocabulary changed, I can read Plautus and I can read Abelard, and they were separated by over twelve centuries. Most English speakers can’t even manage Shakespeare fluently, and he was writing sort of recently. This is for reasons other than the rigidity and flexibility of Latin and English, respectively; I think part of it also has to do with who is speaking these languages. Latin was preserved by the intellectual elite, and it was taught to people as a second language. Little monks would be constantly corrected, and one wouldn’t put up with mistakes in scholarship. Latin wasn’t given a chance to evolve much in the structured settings in which it occurred. Compare this to how grammatical errors and stylistic faux pas are allowed not only in everyday conversation, but also even in published works and the New York Times (though not the New Yorker, of course). English and Latin both serve(d) as common languages, methods of communication across cultures, but the ways they play that role, the origins, the evolution, their use, and the repercussions, are quite different.

The modern English/medieval Latin connection is the subject of this Mongolian Connection, but I think I also, after a couple months of writing about why Mongolia is Awesome, want to remind everyone that English is Awsome, too.

(And I’ve used four words or phrases imported from other languages in this post, just by accident.)

Meditations: Marriage for Love or for Money?

Throughout the Secret History of the Mongols, and further throughout my readings on the Mongol Empire, I encountered a theme that’s common in pretty much all history and a lot of literature: marriage as a political tool. Genghis Khaan would take a wife in order to secure his relationship with (i.e. superiority over) that tribe. When you can have as many wives as you want, this strategy works pretty well. Morris Rossabi put it clearly when he stated that “the Mongols often used marital alliances as a means of binding non-Mongols to them.” The Ilkhan Abakha, for example, established a good relationship with the Byzantines because his wife was a Byzantine princess. Even Edward I of England considered marrying a Mongol in order to secure an alliance with them.

Of course this is not a Mongol innovation; East or West, children of prominent families have often been entered into marriages for political or monetary reasons. In fact, marriage was seen very much as a financial alliance for probably most of history. This is old news to pretty much everyone reading this, so I don’t feel the need to go into too much detail about it.

Reading about it this time, for some reason, I didn’t feel like many people do about the whole thing. The general cultural consensus is that we are much more advanced than those people, that our freer society allows us to marry for love, and that this is a much improved system. In our movies and books, girls (and boys) often escape arranged marriages (Pocahontas, Ever After, The Princess Bride, etc.) and end up in happy relationships with the ones they truly love. Awww.

But using marriage as a method of alliance was actually a very good idea. It does not apply so much anymore, because our political/financial systems just don’t work the way they used to, but I think it’s a mistake to view political marriages as just a cruel arrangement for the parties involved. Sure, a princess might get shipped off to a foreign land and wed to a man she couldn’t stand, but that marriage could potentially save thousands of lives. Wars have been prevented by beneficial marriages, and nations have been founded and developed because of a single partnership. In that sort of a context, a single girl’s romantic unhappiness just looks pretty insignificant. And of course, we need to remember that a marriage then did not mean what marriage now means. Mongol khans may not have spent much time with their wives at all, and even for European royalty, one simply was not expected to try to have some lovely romance with one’s spouse. A life in general then was different from a life now, and it usually was not intended to involve rose petals and affectionate glances. (That’s not to say that people in the past did not long for romantic love, just that it took a very different form and was thought to occur in a very different social context, usually outside of marriage.)

Our modern ideal view of marriage is that it should create a happy family; the old view of elite marriage was that it should create peaceful nations. And that seems to me to be a legitimate cause. So my point is, maybe we shouldn’t boo so much when a king insists his daughter marry the slow-witted neighboring prince. And maybe we shouldn’t cheer so much when she elopes with her true love and leaves the countries in the tension that could have been avoided with a  bit of personal sacrifice on her part.

This brings me back to the namesake of this blog, Our Lady of the Mongols. She seems like a heroine in a modern context, someone who stood up for herself and refused to be a victim of the system. Of course, hers is an extreme example, and being shuffled from one khan to the next isn’t conducive to any sort of happiness, and probably not going to produce much of an alliance, either. I do think it’s admirable that she chose her personal religious devotion over agreeing to be sent off to yet another khan on her father’s say-so. But that doesn’t make her father the villain; he was being a politician, and he probably thought he was choosing his constituents’ security over his daughter’s comfort.

Of course, times have changed, and Malia isn’t going to be betrothed to Prince Harry in this lifetime to preserve that “special relationship.” (Though if they fell in love on their own, the Sun would have a field day!) In our world, we are expected to marry for love, and if two young people are being used as bartering chips in corporate deals, we tend to get a little indignant. So why is this? As I mentioned before, the system itself is no longer one that benefits from marital alliance, so that changes things. But even when examining situations in historical contexts, we often think that people should not be unwillingly wed for the greater good. It seems to me to have to do with our culture’s broader philosophy of individualism. The individual now comes above the greater good, often above family or politics. Is this why we now view political/financial marriages as so barbaric? Because we place a higher value on individual happiness? Do we thus place a lower value on community security/success? Is it really a zero-sum game? Does our modern world value individual happiness because, in the newer system, it is thought to contribute to community security/success?

Of course, I don’t have any answers to these questions. (I never do!) But a scenario that lies on the cusp of the marriage as a tool/marriage for love transition showcases all of these themes, and then some. Some of you may have heard of Consuelo Vanderbilt. Consuelo was the only daughter of Alva Smith Vanderbilt and William Kissam Vanderbilt. (I list Alva first very deliberately.) Consuelo’s story is not a happy one; she made her debut in New York society as an elegant heiress, and she was secretly engaged to a man she loved. However, her mother wanted a marital alliance for her only daughter that would be advantageous to the Vanderbilt name, and she threatened/cajoled/manipulated her daughter into breaking off her engagement and instead marrying the Duke of Marlborough, a man Consuelo had met and disliked. The Duke didn’t like her any better than she liked him; Consuelo was marrying him to bring honor to the family name, and the Duke was marrying her for her multi-million dollar dowry. After a few years of unhappiness and the births of two sons, the couple divorced. Consuelo was no longer young, and though she married again, she never lived the Hollywood fantasy that she, as a girl with a secret fiancé and more money than she could possibly spend, could have hoped for. The Duke of Marlborough also married again, and that one ended more poorly than the first.

There was no happy ending for either Consuelo or the Duke; their arranged marriage was not one that ended in love like in the novels. It was just two people whose happiness was sacrificed in order to provide security for their families. But the thing is, it worked. The relatively new Vanderbilt family proved their worth and established themselves, and the Duke filled his family coffers. When I visited Blenheim Palace, the Marlborough family’s estate, one of the tour guides made a joke about me being American and said, “We like American money here. Without American money, we wouldn’t be here like this.” He explained that Blenheim is only privately owned because of the Vanderbilt money. The leftover interest of Consuelo’s dowry is still used to maintain the estate (now supplemented by entry fees), and the Duke of Marlborough lives in a private wing there. Unlike many estates, which could not afford their own upkeep and taxes, Blenheim Palace did not decay due to lack of funds, but flourished because of a single miserable marriage. On the one hand, Consuelo’s life is sad. And if a movie were made about her, we’d probably root for her to marry her secret fiancé. On the other hand, I like visiting Blenheim, and thousands of people now enjoy the estate that was built with a teenage girl’s tears. So what do we think here? Were those tears worth it?  If it were our own daughter, or our own estate, which would we choose, and which should we choose? Our posterity, or posterity in general?

Mongolia is Relevant: What Might Have Been

Okay, okay, I have a confession. Technically, my “Mongolia is Relevant” posts are a bit self-defeating, because if it were really relevant, you wouldn’t need me to tell you that. A blog on the USA doesn’t need to detail why it’s powerful, and a blog on China won’t bother to list the ways Chinese products impact your life. We’re aware that the US and China (and countless other countries) are relevant, because they are just so relevant. Mongolia impacts history and culture in a lot of ways, but it hasn’t impacted our world in a substantial enough way that the average Joe knows it.

But I’m here to tell you how close Mongolia was to being unquestionably, unignorably relevant. One of the books I read in my research is the story of Rabban Sauma, a Nestorian monk sent as an envoy from the Ilkhan to Europe at the end of the 13th Century. Rabban Sauma visited the Pope, the King of France, and the King of England, asking them to unite with the Mongols in an assault against the Mamluks. If European forces initiated another Crusade against the Muslim Mamluks in Egypt at the same time that the Mongols attacked from the East, the Mamluks would have been overwhelmed and defeated. Thus Mamluk assaults both on Christian Outremer communities and on the Mongol Ilkhanate would have been drastically reduced, and the Ilkhan promised to present Jerusalem to the Christians.

But this was not to be; while the Ilkhanate was desperately defending itself against the Mamluks, Europe was plagued by internal conflict, both between and within individual countries. Furthermore, parts of Europe (*coughcough GENOA coughcough*) were enjoying lucrative trade with the Muslims, and weren’t  eager to give up that income. So the alliance never happened, the present Ilkhan died, and his successors mostly converted to Islam. The historian Sir Steven Runciman expressed the potential significance of the alliance thusly:

“Had the Mongol alliance been achieved and honestly implemented by the West, the existence of Outremer would almost certainly have been prolonged. The Mamluks would have been crippled if not destroyed; and the Ilkhanate of Persia would have survived as a power friendly to the Christians and the West.”

So that whole Middle East tension thing? It might have been reduced (though probably never eliminated) years ago. Or, it could have been exacerbated, and maybe there might not have been a Dome of the Rock to fight over. But it would certainly have been different. And if the Mongols had exerted more control over the Middle East, they might still be in the Middle East, instead of confined mostly to Northern China, Outer Mongolia, and enclaves in New Jersey. I don’t know much about history, but this alliance would have been a big deal.

It may not have ended there… It would have been nice if the “Ilkhanate of Persia would have survived as a power friendly to Christians and the West,” but that wasn’t inevitable. Early European reluctance to an alliance with the Mongol Empire was based on the fear that the Mongol Empire, having conquered the lands to the east of Europe, would have seeped further into Europe itself. Though by the end of the 13th Century, the Mongols no longer retained their former power, this could have been a possibility. Once the Mamluks were defeated, the Mongol Horde’s total war may have been unleashed on the lands of their former allies, and, as the cliché goes, we might all be speaking Mongolian. (Though the US certainly wouldn’t have been founded under the circumstances it was, so you and I probably just wouldn’t be here, period.) Now, the Europe-Mongol alliance wasn’t exactly close to happening; a lot of factors prevented it, and there would have been more obstacles to a Mongol occupation of Europe… But it was possible.

So sure, Mongolia’s pretty remote now, but you should know that it could have ended up right in your backyard.

Meditations: Stalin Lives!

Walking around Ulaanbaatar, one cannot escape the feel of Stalinism that absolutely pervades the place. If I were given only three words to describe the city, “Stalinist” would indubitably make the list, and I’m not sure that, if I were given only one word, “Stalinist” wouldn’t be it.

It shows in the city’s name: “Ulaanbaatar” is translated as “Red Hero,” and it received its name in 1924 after being conquered by communists. (Who exactly the “Hero” is, I have yet to discover, though I suspect it is Sukhbaatar, who also gives his name to the main Square of the city.) And the buildings… I never realized until I got here how much of an effect architecture has on a place (which shows how little I’ve been paying attention). Most of the standing structures in Ulaanbaatar were built by the USSR, and they look like exactly what you’d expect: Square apartment buildings. Period. But it’s a neglected sort of Stalinism, like an abandoned communist city, despite the crowds of people walking around, knowing to avoid the open manholes and unbothered by the bits of wreckage that stand on (or are) the side of the road. Grass pokes through the concrete and makes a reluctant appearance in backyards and parks, but even the plants here look Soviet.

But here’s the thing: Ulaanbaatar is not communist. It is not Soviet, and officially, it never was. The Mongolian people are pretty ready for the future, evidenced by some of the new modern buildings and the rapid privatization of the country’s industry. When the coordinator of International Programmes dropped me off, I asked about a statue in front of the NUM and wondered who it was. She said she doesn’t like him much, that he was president of Mongolia when the NUM was founded, but she does not like him much (she repeated), because he was friends with Stalin. So people’s attitudes seem to be very un-communist.

My first meditation, then, is very appropriate to Mongolia in general (as I’ll get to later): How significant is the past? What prompts a people to reject their past, and once they collectively want to, how easy is it? Is it even possible, or does the past still stand as long as the buildings do? How are our own societies still tied to the past? Did America emerge the way it did due to the very fact that it was without a past, that it was a people starting fresh and erecting their own buildings? Getting back to Mongolia, is the Stalinism something that will wear off as new institutions of the country emerge (i.e. democracy, capitalism, technology), or has it made enough of a mark that they’re stuck with it for a while? What effect will new institutions have not only on the literal remnants of the past (buildings, statues, etc), but also on people's views of the past? And I haven’t even started with gers yet.