“Talking Jew’s harp” and its relation to vowel harmony as a paradigm of formative influence of music on language

Abstract

A very popular, yet barely researched, musical instrument is Jew’s harp (a.k.a. Jaw harp, JH). Its earliest archeological occurrences date back to the early Bronze Age, but its simplest constructions, made of tree twigs and bark, along with its cross-cultural connection to shamanic beliefs, suggest its prehistoric use. Archeological evidence points to Northeast China and the Amur basin as the source of JH’s early dissemination (BCE) over a vast area, from the Volga steppes to Japan. JH has been an important musical instrument in most local traditional musical cultures within this area. For some indigenous ethnicities such as the Yakuts, this is the only non-percussive musical instrument. Its uniqueness is manifested in the peculiar tradition of articulating speech-like sounds. The importance of this tradition is evident by its enormous geographic span from Western Europe to Melanesia. Its use to camouflage romantic communication between a young male and a young female is especially common. Little known is the similarity between the vocal system of articulations in the “talking JH” tradition and vowel harmony found in most languages of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic families of the Transeurasian (a.k.a. “Altaic”) family, as well as in many Uralic languages - all of which are spoken by peoples that regularly use the JH. This paper outlines a possible scenario in which the spread of the cult of ancestral plants across this vast region, from Altai to Sakhalin, and the cult of the “singing mask” of the Tuva-Amur area may have given special importance to musicking on the JH, initiating its spread along pastoralism to the neighboring regions. Once established, the JH tradition may have bifurcated into two types: the framed idioglot, usually made of organic materials, which was sustained in north and northeast, and the bow-shaped heteroglot metallic type that spread to west and southwest. The ethnicities that preferred the framed JH construction retained the JH as their sole (or one of the very few) musical instruments within their timbre-oriented music culture. The ethnicities that adopted forms of frequency-oriented music developed a rich assortment of musical instruments which transformed their JH traditions and reduced the importance of the JH in their music cultures. It is JH’s unique status as a primary traditional instrument that may have granted it formative influence over the existing languages of the Transeurasian family and the neighboring Uralic family.