Dear and title opinions listeners, my name is Vituri Amalam and I am the producer for entitled opinions.
I am making this brief announcement today to inform you that entitled opinions will be back with a new season of shows this coming spring.
In the meantime, we have decided to air a new episode, which will hopefully feel like a momentary awakening from this period of hibernation.
In this episode, Robert Harrison interviews the renowned photographer and visual artist, Lena Herzog.
I hope that you will enjoy listening to this conversation and I look forward to coming back with a new season in the spring. Take care.
Thank you.
[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
[Music]
It has been estimated that 99.9% of the species that have ever existed on Earth are now extinct. Most of them long before are restless human race ever roamed the Earth.
So yes, they all go into the dark and we humans all go with them.
And so too do our human languages.
When the last speaker of a living language is buried, that language follows her into the silent funeral, into the Sélance et
des Hernèle of those interstellar spaces that terrified our comrade, Blaze Pascad.
What is it that disappears when a language goes extinct? A dwelling place, a domicile, a house of being, as Heidegger called it,
Being cannot survive in the wild of bises and gravitational waves of the space-time continuum.
If it is to be at all, it needs to be housed.
Hernèle famously declared that language is the house of being, and he cautioned against taking his statement metaphorically.
I quote, "The talk about the house of being is no transfer of the image house to being, but one day we will, by thinking the essence of being
in a way appropriate to its matter, more readily be able to think what house and to dwell are."
From our present vantage point, it seems unlikely that we will be thinking the essence of being in a more appropriate manner anytime soon.
As Heidegger himself avowed shortly before he died in 1976, I quote, "the growing and
an unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being which determines the age."
Meanwhile, we keep losing at an astonishing rate many of the world's spoken languages.
While the so-called sixth extinction is taking place in nature, a comparable extinction is taking place in culture,
among the diverse houses of being that human beings have built and lived in for centuries and even millennia.
I'm joined in the studio today by the renowned photographer and visual artist Lena Hernèle Zog.
She is well known to the entitled "Pinience Brigade" from the show I did with her on photography a few years back.
That show remains one of our most popular broadcasts.
Lena Hernèle Zog is the author of six books of photography, including Lost Souls, which was the focus of the entitled "Pinience Show" we did back in 2013.
She is back in the Bay Area for a screening of her new Immersive Sound and Video installation about the silent, mass extinction of languages that is taking place across the world today.
She calls it "last whispers or a torial for vanished voices, collapsing universes, and a falling tree."
It premiered at the British Museum during the Bloomsbury Festival in 2016 and will be opening in San Francisco soon.
I had the privilege of attending a screening of it recently and I was specially pleased to have Lena Hernèle Zog with us again in the studios of KZSU to talk about her or a torial
the phenomenal and the phenomenal and linguistic extinction.
They're not welcome back to your favorite podcast in title opinions.
Thank you, Robert.
Your new artwork has a beautifully intriguing title "Last Whispers or a torial for vanished voices, collapsing universes, and a falling tree."
Why don't we work through those various terms maybe starting with "Last Whispers"? What do you intend by "Last Whispers"? And what do they refer to?
"Last Whispers" is really a description of the vanished voices that extinct and endangered languages.
And the extraordinary very surprising thing that occurred to me when I understood the sheer scale, the massive cosmic release scale of the linguistic diversity extinction was how many languages that majority of human languages are going extinct.
And when I started to look into it and listen to the recordings from the endangered language archives, a lot of them actually were whispers.
They were quiet, confessional voices.
In part it's because the interaction between a linguist and a last speaker is very much like between a radio host and a guest.
It's a bit of a priest and someone who does the confession.
But also because these people last speakers really have no longer anyone to talk to.
And it really was very clear to me that these were the last whispers that we had recorded if we were lucky because a lot of them go unreported.
And the language is a world, a culture, a sort of universe, and as Haidagah said it and you quoted in your very beautiful introduction, a house of being.
How do we know what we know? It all really boils down to the way we name things, to the definitions that we put to the world, to ourselves.
And the variousness of this human faculty is an astonishing fact.
So it felt very much like the metaphor of the world or the galaxy of which language seemed appropriate.
And as a matter of fact I decided to include some of the recent recordings of the frequencies of gravitational waves translated into something audible that were recorded by LIGO, the listening ear, and something that Kalta and MIT has worked on for many years.
And finally it was launched recently and Kip saw in the last year's Nobel Prize winner was one of our gracious contributors of the gravitational waves which we weaved in into the auditorium into the audio part.
What are gravitational waves?
There are frequency waves that are initiated by events, mostly catastrophic events, and supernova, death of a star, death of a world that has happened all the time.
As a matter of fact it turns out that galaxies are full of supernova.
Just as our own world is full of these collapsing universes and cultures vanishing at a astounding rate.
So it is estimated that at the moment there are between six and seven thousand languages.
And just very fact that there's such a huge margin of approximation gives you an idea that we don't really have an idea of how many languages are there.
We have some, but it's not exactly.
These are spoken languages.
Spoken languages, that's right.
And some of them vanish without us recording them.
So when a culture or a language dies, has it ever existed and it goes back to the old philosophical trope when a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?
And although this is a philosophical old exercise or an epistemological one, I personally think it's also an empathetic one.
In other words, do you grant the world that there are other things that happen in the matter?
That's really a crucial one.
Obviously my answer is a resounding yes to both.
And the subtitle "vanished voices collapsing universes and a falling tree" really refers to that exercise that I want us to embark on.
And other than knowing the problem, the scale of the problem and the sort of impoverishment that is occurring to us without us knowing it, I actually wanted us to really feel that, feel it under our skin.
Have it make its way into the cerebellum by hearing these voices and how do you make silence apparent you sound what has gone silent?
And it's like describing hunger.
How do you describe hunger? You describe it by describing bread.
And so the auditorio unlike my previous work which is all about image photography and the visual, this one sound came first.
So I began by, well my interest in language goes way back is a matter of fact, I studied a the philological faculty of, at the time, learning grad now,
some Petersburg University in Russia, so philologia the love of language which I actually love that name of the discipline.
That has been with me since a very long time.
And again, I do describe the love of a language you can describe it also by describing its disappearance as well.
So, and that's actually one of the fascinating things that you find when you think about language a lot of the times you find yourselves out of words.
How do you think about language outside of it is really not possible? You can't extract yourself from yourself like you cannot extract yourself from the very tool of which you are trying to think.
Although each one of us inhabits a linguistic universe of our language, our language house.
And when I saw your video audio video installation, I did not feel that I was inhabiting any of these languages because they were most of them so foreign.
But my hope for the inhabiting you.
They were certainly coming into me audio in the audio medium and it was creating a sense of uncanny estrangement that I, because clearly any human language, if you don't even understand a single word or syllable of the words, what is obvious is that it does intend to mean and it is there as a form of meaning.
And your exclusion from it gives a special pathos to the realization that you're hearing a language which maybe is already dead.
I think most of the languages, many of the languages that you give audio for in the installation are either extinct already or very close to extension. Is that correct?
Yes.
And we used 40 languages from 27 countries.
Most of them are extinct, but some of them are endangered or critically endangered.
As a matter of fact, on the day of the premiere of the British Museum, one of our languages went from critically extinct.
There was only one last speaker of some too that was still speaking, language he died that day.
So one of our endangered languages became extinct.
Of course, we have to realize that every two weeks a language dies.
You mentioned that the recordings are really like quiet whispers in the literal sense, right?
Mainly over them are.
And you compared the confessional in the priests and if our listeners could see our booth here, it looks very much like a priests confessional because we're in separate.
As a matter of fact, if I may interrupt you, we have been contacted and there's quite a bit of interest from very famous churches and cathedrals that have musical programs for their people who come to visit them, very well-known ones, by the way.
Like the Stefan's Dominguevien, for example, was in John the Divine New York. They've been interested in this work and showing it.
And it was all very familiar to them, the tone of it.
Why is that? They're priests.
Right.
Well, in fact, this is a question I wanted to ask you because the whispers are not what primarily came across to me in the experience of listening to the whole 48 minutes of it.
Because you chose a lot of chance and that was an interesting decision on your part to focus on the musical incantation of some of these languages, which is what I think these priests were recognizing because it sounded great affinity kinship with Gugorian chance and other things.
Yeah. Well, but they could almost be sung without words, no?
Right. Well, some of them are, for example, the part that's called the conversation. Those are almost all whispers.
And they have this sort of a confessional tone. But I wanted to really didn't feel right to do. I didn't want to make it a recuem.
There is a melancholic quality about it, no matter what. And I thought if it's a requiem, at least it has to be a very dislike requiem.
Remember how defiant it is. It's almost like a swear to God. There's a defiance in the face of oblivion in that requiem.
And I thought if it's a requiem at all, it's that kind of requiem.
But I wanted it more than anything to be a lyrical poem.
Right.
And so another thing that I wanted to create, and I worked with most brilliant, I was lucky as hell, most brilliant team, Mark Manjini and Mark of Capalbo.
It sound design is in composers. We worked to create a tug between the private and very intimate personal and a cosmic one.
The problem is of course enormous. There are thousands, most of them will be gone.
Most of us of seven billion people on this planet are speaking only 30 languages.
We call them dominant languages. The rest are really going.
So we wanted to create that sort of a cosmic chorus.
And yet also let people know and feel that each one is a very personal life, a life.
So from an individual to this world chorus was one of our tasks as well.
The fallen tree also in the title. So a language goes extinct.
It ceases to sound, but the strong suggestion is that the waves go out into space, into the vacant interstellar spaces.
And that somehow that death of the language achieves a cosmic context in which it floats ghostly out there.
And you never know if in some other world or in some future time there might not be some way in which there can be a reanimation.
Do you remember Emily Dickinson's poem, "A Word Is Dead" when it is said, "I say it just begins to live that day"?
I mean you start thinking about some of the most crucial fundamental things to who we are when you think about language or going silence.
What is the nature of silence? John Burgess said, "Silence is like a hand extended."
And it is in a way and you want to grab that hand to shake that hand.
But I think some of those hands extended, they vanish.
And so at least if we know that, we become less provincial ourselves.
Because what happens other than the disappearance of them, something disappears in us.
This raises a question of the relationship between language and death which is highly fraught philosophical discussion.
Heidegger being one of the philosophers who suggests that if human beings did not were not thrown into their death as a ultimate possibility of their being, they could not speak.
And therefore language as a house of being is a direct function of our mortality.
A mortality which we make our own before we actually get to the moment of extinction.
Heidegger makes a distinction between when a life comes to an end, when it is terminated, that is a kind of death in the biological sense and the literal sense.
But that death as an animating force of language is something that we have already incorporated into our way of being in the world and into our speaking.
So it makes it all the more pathos written when a language which is inhabited by death almost by definition actually goes extinct.
Because it is a very human mode of being in the world specific to that language that is disappearing.
So I am not so bothered that language is die because I think they are born of death as much as they are prey to death.
It is the whole phenomenon of extinction which is a little bit different.
Yes, that is right. And of course some people ask our language is being born and they are interestingly languages born.
Every Pentecostal church will be a house of new language every service, apparently in prisons.
Prisoners constantly come up with new languages in order to avoid the surveillance of the guards.
And they die the moment almost that they are born.
And the thing about language as a tool of communication for a culture, for a community of people,
there is a thing that I am not sure that I am comfortable with the fact that we should be comfortable with it, with the mass extinction.
And I am very frequently asked the question, well, is it possible to revitalize it?
And they are actually quite a few projects of revitalization.
The one project that worked was Gaelic.
And it is a fascinating case. It also puts into relief the political nature of language and language extinction.
So after the Irish troubles one of the most important settlements was that Gaelic had to be taught in schools and had to become a second language.
In other words, Ireland became a bilingual country.
And what is fascinating is that a whole generation, let's say, of the people that are now in their 50s and 60s, very few speak Gaelic.
Their parents speak Gaelic. Their children speak Gaelic, but not them.
And they are the ones that are sort of an ominous sign of what would have happened to Gaelic.
And what is also fascinating is that now we have a science zinn.
It is very highly beneficial to be bilingual.
So people who have become bilingual not only have they regained their connection to the root and historical and cultural root of their culture, which arguably is important.
But they also have more robust intellect.
We are neurologically better wired if we speak at least a couple of languages.
So actually, benefits are all around.
The way that it occurred, the way that it happened was a political decision.
There was a political will attached to revitalization of that language.
As a matter of fact, UNESCO just declared 2019 the year of indigenous language.
Well, Gaelic is one of the lucky languages that survived the Roman conquests.
Not only that, but it was also 800 years illegal to speak Gaelic while it was part of the British Empire.
But it's estimated that one of the great, great extinctions of human language diversity occurred during,
as a result of the Roman imperial conquests of all these various territories.
Thousands of languages did not survive the way Gaelic just barely managed to survive.
That's right. Globalization, wars, climate change.
Right.
And all is brilliant for moving of capital.
It's flattened out cultural diversity.
And I'm not talking about some sort of a pseudo-moral posture that I'm talking about genuine impoverishment, cultural, and power.
Well, there are these vast cultural eras of dispersion and then unification of the world.
Yeah.
And it seems to be an ebb and flow.
And we are definitely in a moment of convergence rather than divergence.
Yeah.
And therefore a reduction of diversity.
That's right.
Increasing of how much in theization I'm thinking also of dialects.
This is not something that you addressed necessarily in last whispers, but anyone in a country like Italy, for example.
We know that the disappearance of local dialects is another, it's not only comparable.
And it's exactly the same sort of phenomenon because although a dialect is not a distinct language, the language would categorize it.
Well, Max Van Wert said that a language is a dialect with an army and an navy.
There we go.
So there's actually another disputed territories.
What defines dialect from language.
There's not really complete agreement on that.
But yes, of course.
Because having grown up in Rome and spending a lot of time there's still, I no longer hear Romanaccio.
Romanaccio is a kind of Roman, it's an accent, not so much a dialect, but it's a way of speaking Italian that's completely distinct to latsio, especially in Rome.
And it's gone.
It's an ebb ironic.
Yeah, and it's the empire has erased the dialects, including its own after a while.
That's right.
And it has to do with, as you say, transmission.
Yeah.
When the transmission is blocked, when television standardizes a particular language like French or Italian, German, everyone ends up buying into the dominant hegemonic version of the
language.
And so I think our listeners are probably very curious to get a sense of what your installation, what sort of sounds you brought into it.
Yeah.
And have a little taste of that, although they can't see it because it actually has a very powerful visual component to the audio tracks, but we can at least give them a taste of things.
Yeah.
And before we play it, I want to mention that the way that we have designed the sound, and it was a sound designed in a composition, the oratorius chord, was we created a nine-channel octophonic master.
And we didn't do it just to be technical and to savvy, but we wanted to evoke presence in order to articulate the absence.
And so what, when you actually are in the space of the installation itself, your mind neurologically registers these voices as present.
It doesn't register them as flattened the way you would hear, for example, now from the radio transmission or over, you know, computer or CD, but you still can hear what I see the beauty and the mysterious sort of nature of these languages, chance, in
the people, in the world. So, you're too composers, were they also responsible for the mix because with nine channels it's a tremendous job of mixing.
That's right.
And actually, in the beginning when we were doing that, in the studio, originally we didn't really quite know how it would sound, we knew it intellectually, but then finally, when we heard it, we were kind of stunned ourselves that that worked, the way it worked.
It really is underestimated how sound registers in our brain.
So anyway, yes, Marco Capalbo, who is also a filmmaker and a composer made recently a documentary on Stravinsky, he did aura, this sort of part of the auditorium, which is elucidating disjunction of the
dislocation and disappearance. And Mark Mangini, by the way, an Oscar-winning sound designer, who just recently did Blade Runner, 2049, and before that Mad Max, he wrote, he was more like a Raman enough.
And he took all the areas in songs that I have preselected in this kind of loving embrace.
And let's hear one, in Korean, it's track number two.
Okay. And I'm too illustrated.
Obviously alerting our artists anders, what they're going to be hearing is a reduced compressed file in MP3 form that gets podcast over.
iTunes or on our website. And that's a very different thing in that theory.
But you will still get the sense. And what you will hear is in-grain language, it's on Russian territory, but it's more related to finish than in your language. And it's extinct.
And you grew up not too far from where this language was being spoken, right?
Yeah.
Did you ever hear it spoken yourself? No. No, no, no.
And we got a courtesy of E-Lar, Sose University of London, and a Korean Institute of Language and Literature in Russia.
[singing in Korean]
[Music]
It's also the choice of choosing a chant rather than the spoken use of a language, a dead language, or a
language, but it doesn't need a language, it doesn't need a semantics to communicate what it's
what it's conveying.
[Music]
And he makes a case that's quite compelling that the first impulses of language were not, there were
no consonants and there were no words and that whatever was communicated was communicated
surely through the vowel sounds of melody and that he assumed that at least in the southern
hemisphere the content of these preverbal melodies would have been "emm-wa" love me or it's a love
song.
And he says that if you hear something that is a love song, if you don't understand the language
at all you still understand what the emotion.
Yeah, that's not true by the way that we know that this is true.
As a matter of fact, you know it's very frequent that some of the greatest thinkers
thought about language and were in completely wrong treasure and still it's fascinating to read
about it one of the most illuminating things in the subject is completely of base in terms of fact
is an essay by Ezra Pound on Findilosa on the Chinese character.
It's a very short essay.
It turns out he was completely wrong about it, but what he wanted to install was the action.
In the Chinese character and he essentially wrote one of the most poetic things of an aspiration
for a language Ezra Pound.
It turns out he was completely wrong about Chinese character and about Findilosa but never mind.
It reveals when we think about language about this house of being who a review who we are.
But I guess if I hear that chant and I don't understand the semantics of what she's saying,
it's a bit like rock music where you don't often understand what the words are.
Oh, you don't need to understand.
You don't need to understand it at the same time.
And there's a band, a British band called Portishead, a contemporary band we play that song on the exit.
It sounds very much like Portishead where the lead female singer, you don't really understand
the words, but there's this pathos that is very, very convergent with what we're hearing there.
Well, sometimes when you know it does add a bit to it or quite a bit to it.
Like for example, the next track I would like us to play, a home is from India.
And the last speaker, Tillishwa Mohan, collected by Stephen Mori of the Pacific and
Regional Archive for Digital Resources called Paradisiac.
That song, a home, that in a home language is called recalling the spirits.
And it refers to the legend or myth that spirits are better than us.
These, they are tenderhearted and they do not like the sight of human cruelty so they flee
after a war. In a home, you sing that song to recall the spirits.
In the video installation, you see the songs words, the lyrics scroll over the screen.
And it does, I think, make it deeper and more interesting to know that this song is recalling the
spirits, begging them to come back. And in fact, music has that special power to call the spirits.
It's a medium of communion with the spirit world from the very beginning.
We know that there's a beautiful movie called "Tulematandi Mohan."
And I have to mention this because it's about a 17th century French composer.
And it begins with his disciple long after the death of the Saint Colomb was the composer.
And they're playing in the court of the king. And he stops everyone. He says,
"Shaknottwafiniramuha." Every note has to finish with it in a dying,
ramuha dying. So the note has to die because through that interplay between sound and silence that
music articulates, the spirit world can actually be contacted. And in fact, his master, Saint Colomb,
after the death of his wife, composed all these beautiful lamentful songs which were his form of
maintaining converse and contact with his dead wife across that threshold. So this song that we're
going to hear is a kind of version of that special magical power that music has to
recall the spirits. We call the spirits and cross the special. So here we go.
[singing]
[singing in foreign language]
(singing in foreign language)
- Yeah, struck me that along with the loss of a language
like that, there's also the loss of that
the incantational power to contact the spirit world.
- Yeah.
- Are languages are not used to that purpose
very much these days.
- Right.
- And is this the scene, I remember it as with the man
in the desert, right?
- It's a mirage.
- It's a mirage, and it's that figure shimmering.
- For the whole two and a half minutes that this chant
takes place on.
- That's right, and then over the figure you see the lyrics
of the song which actually I found the script extraordinarily
beautiful.
- Do we know what it says?
- That's called, it says the lyrics of the song.
We do know exactly what it says.
It's asking the spirits, please come back to the sland,
the land that is deserted now, that we're done with being bad.
- Yeah.
- Come back.
- Well, let's hold on to that one for a long time
because there's gonna come a time where we're gonna have
to call the spirits back because it's unlikely that
under our present circumstances they're gonna be coming
back anytime soon.
- Unfortunately, yeah.
I know.
- So I can't resist asking about the role that the forest
plays in this whole or atorio.
Because there's, I think at the beginning of the film
there's something that looks like a cosmic space
that actually then enlarges with lights
and it turns out to be the inner circles
of the trunk of a tree.
- Yes.
- And then there's a long segment later in the film
where a roving camera just drifts through a forest.
- Yeah, it's a drone, it's filmed with a drone.
But the first one is actually, let's play the overture
because I wanted to mention about Echau in us
from hearing others.
When I was a child, I had this experience
when I well decided to look for God
when I was six years old.
And I went to church because that's called address
and I looked for him there.
And then I heard the sound of the bell
and it was the sound of a Russian bell.
And since Russia is enormous,
you had to use lower decibel sounds
in order for oil to carry long distances.
So it's the way you experience sound in a disco
with reverberates through your entire body.
And I ran back to my father and I said,
Papa, I found God.
And he's an atheist and a scientist.
And he looked at me and he said,
well, where did you find him?
And I said, in my ribs, I found him in my ribs.
And he said, oh, that's perfect.
But the way that he looked at me in the way
that it sounded, I said, well, something is up, something
isn't right.
So I went back again to hear the bell
and then I realized it's the bell.
And when I realized it, not only did they lose God,
I actually had this thrill, that this is possible,
that you can communicate to another human being
in such a way that it reverberates
through your whole being.
So our rotorial begins with the bell.
And of course also bells have these meanings
of a funeral or a danger where you told the bell.
And you hear the bells throughout the rotorial.
And that's what opens it.
And it's in a way that would also be
for the fanatical, is it?
So let's hear over it.
Are we going to find God?
We'll see.
By the way, I--
The point is to look.
Let me go ahead and say this.
If God is present, He's present everywhere, I think.
You don't go and find Him in some hidden place.
But what--
You sound like a preacher.
Mm, I'm not sure about that.
[LAUGHTER]
Let's give a listen to the overture.
By my cup, elbow.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So in between the two bells, what you heard were four languages.
The Selkam honor language from Argentina,
in green, without their accompaniment, from Russia,
I knew language from Japan and Bataari language from Oman.
And those were Cautes here of Sose University of London,
Carillion Institute of Language Literature and History of
the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Folkway
Recordings.
So, but to go back to your question about the forest,
let me remind something you wrote, Robert.
But why should forests haunt the mind
like some mystical dream or nightmare that every now and then
spreads its long, pre-historical shadows over the ordinary
clarity of things modern?
They are mysterious to us in so many ways,
as the languages we don't understand are.
And I have never really been comfortable with the metaphor
of a language tree.
I think it's more of a forest of languages.
And so that seemed like an appropriate metaphor
to fly through the forest and languages and be surrounded by them.
The way that we sometimes expect,
and somehow our pre-tenatural, almost prehistoric level,
we feel it in our DNA when we walk through a forest that we hear voices.
Absolutely.
One thing about the forest, even phenomenologically,
and I believe Claude Levy's host says this somewhere in his book,
he's topique when he went down to Brazil into the tropical forest.
He said that when you enter a forest like that,
a thick dense forest, your sense of sight
becomes altogether secondary.
And you don't see all that much because of the dappled light
and the darkness, but the sounds are accentuated.
Yeah, you become a deer or a wolf.
Yes, and there's a depth, all of a sudden there's a depth into the sounds
that you cannot imagine outside of the forest,
because it's a forest that creates the reverberation and resonance.
And that effect that you were talking about about the low decibels
and the base sound of a bell and Russia.
Yeah.
So you learn to listen more than to see.
And that's when I was watching your oratorio,
like everyone who was present at that screening at first,
I was, we're so, there's such scope of elia in our western culture
that everyone's transfixed to what's happening on the screen visually.
Yeah.
And then it struck me that actually it's the primary place
where the communication is taking place is in the audio.
That's right.
And we as a matter of effect created the work this way.
So first, I selected the, from thousands and thousands of recordings,
I selected a more narrow source library from which we then worked.
And then once we came up with the sounds and first sketches,
that's when we started to film.
And the flight through the forest, especially in conversation and in order,
was really while we were choreographing with earphones,
we were choreographing the drone flight with the earphones on and hearing the oratorio
as it was evolving.
Let's hear the conversation because there you hear really the spoken word.
And in the beginning, what you hear actually interwelcher,
an extinct language from Argentina, is the only origins myths that we decided to use.
We didn't have actually that many because these are difficult to articulate the origins myths.
And a lot of the times within extinct or endangered languages,
you're lucky enough to get through a dictionary.
Let alone something so profound and philosophical.
But here we have it.
And that is, it goes that all ancient human beings were first birds.
They were ducks, flamingos and swans.
And then from the quelcher,
they were, we created it in such a way, we strung the recordings from different places in the world.
The quelcher from Argentina,
Nivvoch from Russia, Nafsan, South Eufthait from Vanuatu,
Nahuatl from Mexico, I know from Japan,
and Joachan from Namibia, Surrel from Nepal, and King from South Africa,
Anungata, Ayolohorhatul Mictek from Mexico,
Sadu from China, Chama Kokko from Paraguay and Caket from Papua New Guinea.
Let's listen to conversation.
Oh, that's a course of the bits.
Will it be until now? It's just, it must be.
What will happen? I will call, I will be over my place, King of the South.
[Music]