ABSTRACT
This essay presents a comprehensive analysis of a single text concerning the origin and political and moral issues surrounding language. Composed by the same gifted narrator whose testimony appears in chapter 3, and dating from the same time period of collection, transcription, and translation, this text and the accompanying commentary have never been published before. This testimony is remarkable in that the narrator lays out not only a native theory of language and ethnicity but also a theory of history. As such, this chapter provides background on the logic of cyclical time reckoning and the politics of ethnicity that underlie many of the other discussions in this book.
