When Tchitcherine goes to the Kazakh village to record the aqyn's song, he hears an ajtys: a singing duel. Tchitcherine of course thinks of it in terms of language and the alphabet that he works for. (by the way, what is the letter under which he works?) On page 362 he "understands, abrubtly, that soon someone will come out and begin to write some of these down in the New Turkish Alphabet he helped frame...and this is how they will be lost." He comes to the realization that the voices of the boy and the girl in the singing duel, a Kazakh tradition, will fade out as other cultures try to compartmentalize and even preserve the old ways through a new alphabet. This is interesting because it relates back to a linguistic theory that Benjamin Whorf came up with in the 1950's: the linguistic relativity hypothesis which states that the way a person thinks about the world around him or her is determined by the language he or she grows up speaking. Whorf said that eskimos think about snow differently because they have more words for it and so can classify it differently than we do as native English speakers. In this village in Krgyzstan, Tchitcherine thinks that when people come in to record the old ways in a new language those ways will be lost or altered. When the language is changed, the way people think (and therefore also their traditions and culture) is changed as well.