Every language imagines birds differently, and in doing so reveals something about itself. English hears a “tweet”; French prefers cui-cui; Russian lets birds chirikat’/чирикать and svistet’/свистеть; Hebrew listens to the many voices of the tsiporim/ציפורים; while Yiddish, perhaps because it has wandered across so many countries and listened to so many neighbors, is content neither with imitation nor with classification. It borrows, reshapes, invents and smiles, hearing sounds before it asks where they came from. Long before linguists described language families, Yiddish had already welcomed them into conversation.

Birds themselves have always stood at the edge of that conversation. They crossed seas before maps existed, followed invisible routes before human beings imagined borders, and filled the air with repeated cries long before anyone distinguished consonants from vowels or grammar from melody. Human speech did not invent rhythm, repetition or articulation. It inherited them from a living creation that had already discovered how breath could become meaning.

One understands this almost instinctively while standing on the cliffs of the North  Atlantic Sea, or from Scilly Isles up to the Shetlands, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Jan Mayen and the Scandinavian coasts, Svalbard. There the Atlantic never quite falls silent. Wind, ocean and birds participate in one immense exchange whose grammar remains beyond human invention. The periarctic Puffins (Lundir-Fulmar) disappear into narrow fissures in the rock before returning with deliberate murmurs. Gulls stretch their cries across the waves until they resemble long vowels suspended above the sea. Gannets descend like exclamation marks. Ravens interrupt the air with rough consonants, while eagles circle so high above the precipices that their silence itself becomes another form of speech.

One begins by watching birds. Before long, one discovers that it is language itself that is being observed.

The following poem emerged from such listening. It is not intended as a catalogue of Faroese birds, nor as an exercise in comparative linguistics, although Hebrew, Slavic, Germanic and Yiddish echoes all find their place within it. Rather, it follows the slow birth of articulation itself. The birds do not merely sing. They prolong sounds, interrupt one another, repeat, hesitate, answer and linger. Before speech becomes language, articulation has already entered the world.

That is perhaps why Yiddish proves such a natural companion for this journey. Born from migrations rather than frontiers, it has spent centuries receiving sounds before classifying them. Germanic roots, Hebrew prayer, Slavic consonants, Romance echoes and countless local voices entered the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)