A second track took me from Nama and Malay deeper into the syntax of exotic languages, on forays that ramified further and further as I found (I was rediscovering the wheel now) that the term primitive meant nothing, that every one of the 700 tongues of Borneo was as coherent and complex and intractable to analysis as English. I read Noam Chomsky and Jerrold Katz and the new universal grammarians and reached the point of asking myself: If a latter-day ark were ever commissioned to take the best that mankind has to offer and make a fresh start on the farther planets, if it ever came to that, might we not leave Shakespeare's plays and Beethoven's quartets behind to make room for the last speaker of Dyirbal, even though that last speaker might be a fat old woman who scratched herself and smelled bad? It seemed an odd position for a student of English, the greatest imperial language of them all, to be falling into. It was a doubly odd position for someone with literary ambitions, albeit of the vaguest—ambitions to speak one day, somehow, in his own voice—to discover him self suspecting that languages spoke people or at the very least spoke through them. ("Remembering Texas", Doubling the Point)