EMPIRES
OF THE
WORD
A Language History of the World
NICHOLAS OSTLER
To Jane
SINE QVA NON
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
PREFACE
PROLOGUE: A CLASH OF LANGUAGES
PART I: THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE HISTORY
1 Themistocles’ Carpet
The language view of human history
The state of nature
Literacy and the beginning of language history
2 What It Takes to Be a World Language; or, You Never Can Tell
PART II: LANGUAGES BY LAND
3 The Desert Blooms: Language Innovation in the Middle East
Three sisters who span the history of 4500 years
The story in brief: Language leapfrog
Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death
FIRST INTERLUDE: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ELAMITE?
Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy
Phoenician—commerce without culture:
Canaan, and points west
Aramaic—the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia
SECOND INTERLUDE: THE SHIELD OF FAITH
Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission’
THIRD INTERLUDE:
TURKIC AND PERSIAN, OUTRIDERS OF ISLAM
A Middle Eastern inheritance:
The glamour of the desert nomad
4 Triumphs of Fertility: Egyptian and Chinese
Careers in parallel
Language along the Nile
A stately progress
Immigrants from Libya and Kush
Competition from Aramaic and Greek
Changes in writing
Final paradoxes
Language from Huang-he to Yangtze
Origins
First Unity
Retreat to the south
Northern influences
Beyond the southern sea
Dealing with foreign devils
Whys and wherefores
Holding fast to a system of writing
Foreign relations
China’s disciples
Coping with invasions: Egyptian undercut
Coping with invasions: Chinese unsettled
5 Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit
The story in brief
The character of Sanskrit
Intrinsic qualities
Sanskrit in Indian life
Outsiders’ views
The spread of Sanskrit
Sanskrit in India
Sanskrit in South-East Asia
Sanskrit carried by Buddhism: Central and eastern Asia
Sanskrit supplanted
The charm of Sanskrit
The roots of Sanskrit’s charm
Limiting weaknesses
Sanskrit no longer alone
6 Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek
Greek at its acme
Who is a Greek?
What kind of a language?
Homes from home: Greek spread through settlement
Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war
A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture
Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning
Intimations of decline
Bactria, Persia, Mesopotamia
Syria, Palestine, Egypt
Greece
Anatolia
Consolations in age
Retrospect: The life cycle of a classic
7 Contesting Europe: Celt, Roman, German and Slav
Reversals of fortune
The contenders: Greek and Roman views
The Celts
The Germans
The Romans
The Slavs
Rún: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts
Traces of Celtic languages
How to recognise Celtic
Celtic literacy
How Gaulish spread
The Gauls’ advances in the historic record
Consilium: The rationale of Roman Imperium
Mōs Māiōrum—the Roman way
The desertion of Gaulish
Latin among the Basques and the Britons
Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances
The Germanic invasions—irresistible and ineffectual
Slavonic dawn in the Balkans
Against the odds: The advent of English
8 The First Death of Latin
PART III: LANGUAGES BY SEA
9 The Second Death of Latin
10 Usurpers of Greatness: Spanish in the New World
Portrait of a conquistador
An unprecedented empire
First chinks in the language barrier:
Interpreters, bilinguals, grammarians
Past struggles: How American languages had spread
The spread of Nahuatl
The spread of Quechua
The spreads of Chibcha, Guaraní, Mapudungun
The Church’s solution: The lenguas generales
The state’s solution: Hispanización
Coda: Across the Pacific
11 In the Train of Empire: Europe"’s Languages Abroad
Portuguese pioneers
An Asian empire
Portuguese in America
Dutch interlopers
La francophonie
French in Europe
The first empire
The second empire
The Third Rome, and all the Russias
The origins of Russian
Russian east then west
Russian north then south
The status of Russian
The Soviet experiment
Conclusions
Curiously ineffective—German ambitions
Imperial epilogue: Kōminka
12 Microcosm or Distorting Mirror? The Career of English
Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French
English overlaid
Spreading the Anglo-Norman package
The waning of Norman French
Stabilising the language
What sort of a language?
Westward Ho!
Pirates and planters
Someone else’s land
Manifest destiny
Winning ways
Changing perspective—English in India
A merchant venture
Protestantism, profit and progress
Success, despite the best intentions
The world taken by storm
An empire completed
Wonder upon wonder
English among its peers
PART IV: LANGUAGES TODAY AND TOMORROW
13 The Current Top Twenty
14 Looking Ahead
What is old
What is new
Way to go
Three threads: Freedom, prestige and learnability
Freedom
Prestige
What makes a language learnable
Vaster than empires
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Author
PRAISE FOR Empires of the Word
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
qūwatu l- ’insāni fi ‘aqlihi wa lisānihi.
The strength of a person is in his intelligence and his tongue.
(Arabic proverb)
If language is what makes us human, it is languages that mak
e us superhuman.
Human thought is unthinkable without the faculty of language, but language pure and undifferentiated is a fantasy of philosophers. Real language is always found in some local variant: English, Navajo, Chinese, Swahili, Burushaski or one of several thousand others. And every one of these links its speakers into a tradition that has survived for thousands of years. Once learnt in a human community, it will provide access to a vast array of knowledge and belief: assets that empower us, when we think, when we listen, when we speak, read or write, to stand on the shoulders of so much ancestral thought and feeling. Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers.
This book is fundamental. It is about the history of those traditions, the languages. Far more than princes, states or economies, it is language-communities who are the real players in world history, persisting through the ages, clearly and consciously perceived by their speakers as symbols of identity, but nonetheless gradually changing, and perhaps splitting or even merging as the communities react to new realities. This interplay of languages is an aspect of history that has too long been neglected.
As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories.
It is not possible, even in a book as big as this one, to tell all those stories. Empires of the Word concentrates on the languages that, for one reason or another, grew out from their homes, and spread across the world. But even with such a stringent entry qualification, cutting the number of stories from many thousand to a couple of dozen, the remaining diversity is still overwhelming. In a way, there are so many tales to tell that the work is less a telling of a single story than a linguistic Thousand and One Nights.
We shall range over the amazing innovations, in education, culture and diplomacy, thought up by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and much later, the improbable details of how they were projected across the world.
Besides these epic achievements, language failures are no less interesting. The Western Roman Empire was thoroughly overrun by German-speakers in the fifth century. These conquests laid the basis for the countries of modem western Europe: so why did German get left behind? In Africa, Egyptian had been surviving foreign takeovers for over three millennia: why did it shrivel and disappear after the influx of Muhammad’s Arabic? And in the modern era, the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for the same period that Britain ruled India: so why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia? Until such questions are answered, the global spread of English can never be understood.
On a cultural level, there is fascination too in the world-views that went with the advancing and receding languages. Ironies abound: Latin could make no headway with the sophisticates of the eastern Mediterranean, who spoke Greek and Aramaic, but it was quickly embraced by the illiterate peoples of Gaul and Spain. In the Americas, Catholic missionaries slowed for centuries the spread of Spanish, but in Asia, Evangelical Protestants turned out to be crucial to the take-up of English. We may as well admit at the outset that the mysteries of linguistic attraction and linguistic influence run deep: to tell the story is not always to understand it.
Nevertheless, I believe that the universal study of language history, of which this is a first attempt, is at least as enlightening and valid a focus for science as the more usual concerns of historical linguistics. It is as significant to compare the linguistic effects of the Roman and the Germanic conquests of Gaul as it is to compare the structures of the Latin and Germanic verb-systems—indeed just possibly one might throw some light on the other. Languages by their nature define communities, and so offer clearer units than most in social studies on which to base comparative analyses. Not enough attention has been paid to the growth, development and collapse of language communities through time, and the light these may shed on the kinds of society that spoke these languages. It is a received truth, for example, that in the Roman Empire the west was administered in Latin, the east in Greek, and the Greek administration lasted for many centuries more than the Latin: how surprising, but how revealing then, that when the time came for the defences to collapse and the Empire’s provinces to be overrun, Latin survived—and has never been replaced—but Greek largely evaporated within a couple of generations.
The language history of the world can be eloquent of the real character of peoples, their past movements and changes. It also offers some broad hints for the future. Asked in 1898 to choose a single defining event in recent history, the German chancellor Bismarck replied, ‘North America speaks English’. He was right, as the twentieth century showed. Twice the major powers of North America stepped in to determine the outcome of struggles that started in Europe, each time on the side of the English-speaking forces. Even more, the twentieth century’s technological revolutions in communications, telephones, films, car ownership, television, computing and the Internet, were led overwhelmingly from English-speaking America, projecting its language across the world, to parts untouched even by the British Empire. It seems almost as if a world language revolution is following on, borne by the new media.
But though the spread of a language is seldom reversible, it is never secure. Even a language as broadly based as English is in the twenty-first century cannot be immune. It is still threatened by those old causes of language succession: changes in population growth, patterns of trade and cultural prestige. For all the recent technical mastery of English, nothing guarantees long-term pre-eminence in publishing, broadcasting or the World Wide Web. Technology, like the jungle, is neutral.
Language history does not, in itself, explain the past, or predict the future. There are thousands of language traditions, and their relative sizes are changing dynamically. Important innovations can arise in any one of them; in modern conditions especially, innovations may spread fast. Languages such as Egyptian and Akkadian, Sanskrit and Persian, Greek and Latin, in their day all seemed irresistible in their dominance and their prestige. But as they found to their cost, speaker populations can be unsentimental.
The language future, like the language past, is set to be full of surprises. But to find out what has happened in history overall, the true winners and losers among human groups, we cannot ignore the outcomes of the language struggle.
Little Solsbury Hill, 28 July 2004
PROLOGUE: A CLASH OF LANGUAGES
On 8 November 1519 Hernán Cortés and a band of three hundred Spaniards met for the first time the supreme ruler of Mexico. The venue was the causeway across the lake leading to its capital city, Tenochtitlán. All around them was water. On the eastern horizon a volcano could be seen in eruption. Cortés was on horseback, bearded, in shining armour, belying his recent career as a small-town law officer and amateur gold prospector. Motecuhzoma,* born to sit on the royal mat of Mexico and already victorious in many wars, was carried on a litter, resplendent in a vast circular headdress with plumes of lustrous green quetzal, ornaments on his nose, ears and lower lip, behind him an escort of warriors wearing jaguar hides and eagle feathers.
After an exchange of gifts, the Spaniards were led into the city, and accommodated in a palace that had been the residence of Motecuhzoma’s father. They were given a dinner of turkey, fruit and maize tamales. Then Motecuhzoma, whose official title was tlatoani, ‘speaker’, returned to greet his guests.
This was the first moment when the two leaders shared directly with each other
their understanding of this epoch-making encounter: the ruler of the largest empire in the Americas, still at the height of his power, coming face to face with the self-appointed emissary of the king of Spain, who, though under guard in a well-kept and well-ordered city, larger than any to be seen in Europe, was yet strangely unawed. Their words set the tone for all that was to follow, above all the tragic diplomacy and incomprehension of the Aztecs, and the calculating, dissembling, but unremitting, aggression of the Spaniards. It was the first step towards the replacement of Nahuatl as the imperial language of Mexico, and the progress of Spanish towards its establishment as the language first of government and religion and then of everything else in the New World.1
Motecuhzoma opened with a flowery speech in Nahuatl, translated by the interpreters whom Cortés had brought with him: Malin-tzin, a Mexican noblewoman, rendered the Nahuatl into Yucatec Maya, and Fray Géronimo de Aguilar, a Spanish priest, conveyed the sense of the Maya into Spanish. Cortés then replied in Spanish, and the process ran in reverse.
Totēukyoe, ōtikmihiyōwiltih ōtikmoziyawiltih*
Our Lord, how you must have suffered, how fatigued you must be.
This was a conventional greeting, although there would have been few whom the tlatoani of all Mexico would address as tēukyoe, ‘Lordship’.
ō tlāltiteç tommahzītīko, ō īteç tommopāčiwiltīko in mātzin in motepētzin, Mešihko, ō īpan tommowetziko in mopetlatzin, in mokpaltzin, in ō ačitzinka nimitzonnopiyalīlih, in ōnimitzonnotlapiyalīlih …
You have graciously come on earth, you have approached your water, your high place of Mexico, you have come down to your mat, your throne, which I have briefly kept for you, I who used to keep it for you.
This was already strange. Motecuhzoma was addressing Cortés as a steward to his sovereign. ‘For they have gone, your governors, the kings, Itzcoatl, the old Motecuhzoma, Axayacatl, Tizoc, Ahuitzotl, who hitherto have come to be guardians of your domain, to govern the water, the high place of Mexico, they behind whom, following whom your subjects have advanced,’†
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