Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  That power, first focused in Assyria, later in Babylon, finally in Persia, continued to grow in influence over the next thousand years. As Egypt lost its control of Palestine (its last hurrah was the campaign of the Libyan pharaoh Shoshenq through Palestine around 925), and then the eighth century BC saw Assyria advance its control in the same region, Egypt began to attract refugees and exiles. The language they spoke was Aramaic, which by this time had spread all over the Semitic-speaking Middle East, and had even replaced Akkadian throughout the Assyrian empire.

  In the seventh century BC, Aramaic entered Egypt in earnest, borne by the Assyrian invasion force of 671-667 which sacked Thebes and installed a puppet pharaoh. But Assyrian domination turned out to be transient, and Psamtek, the son of the quisling pharaoh Neko, was able to reclaim Egypt’s independence by 639. He soon began to reassert Egypt’s role in Palestine, occupying the Philistine capital Ashdod in 630, and defeating and killing Josiah, king of Judah, in 610. His successors continued the policy for another sixty-five years, taking advantage of the eclipse of Assyria by Babylon, and turning Palestine and Syria as a whole into a buffer zone for all the hostilities between Egypt and Babylon. The sack of Jerusalem in 587, and the exile of the Jews to Babylon, was one of the prices that others paid for this policy.

  Probably the net effect of this on language was to bring into Egypt not Aramaic, but Greek. An opportunistic alliance with Ionian and Carian pirates had enabled Psamtek to shake off Assyria. This set the tone for the dynasty’s practice of acting in consort with Greeks, both militarily and commercially. An Egyptian fleet of Greek-built triremes patrolled the Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts, and there was a Greek mercenary contingent with the Egyptian forces sent up the Nile on a last mission against Nubia in the 590s. The Greek trading colony of Naucratis was established close to Sais in the west of the Delta, as a treaty port very comparable to Shanghai in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries AD. There was a roaring trade, notably in Egyptian wheat and linen, paid for with Greek wine and silver. Greeks, when high on wine, says Bacchylides, a poet of the fifth century, would fantasise about ships from Egypt laden with wheat.9

  This was the beginning of a rich, cosmopolitan atmosphere in the Delta that was to be fulfilled in the expansion of Alexandria as a Greek city three hundred years later. The sound of Greek would have become familiar in Egypt, even if few as yet would have been learning it.* But before Greek reached its acme, Egypt would undergo an involuntary infusion of Aramaic.

  Aramaic, besides being the language of the Babylonians, was also adopted as the official language of the Persian empire, and it was this state which achieved the hitherto impossible task of subjecting Egypt durably to foreign rule. Egypt, drunk on Greek wine, was brought down to earth when the Persians marched in in 522 BC, deposed and killed the pharaoh Psamtek III, and set up a standard Persian administration with Egypt reduced to a province under a satrap.

  Persian rule lasted for two centuries, tempered by a resurgence of Egyptian independence in the fourth century that was later crushed. The Aramaic language established itself not just as a language of government and law, but also as a widespread medium of private communication. In fact, an accident of climate rather distorts the record. Because of its dry climate, Egypt provides the vast bulk of documents in Aramaic that have survived from this period, whether on papyrus, parchment, painted on stone or incised on metal.

  Aramaic, then, was the first language in three millennia to make a significant inroad into Egypt. When Alexander took the country in 332 BC, initiating three centuries of Greek rule, he found an administration run in Aramaic; in some respects, for instance in the law courts, this language persisted under the Ptolemies,10 but in general Aramaic was replaced in official use by Greek. Although the Ptolemies took their role as Greek successors to the pharaohs seriously, and Greek Egypt became an autonomous and prosperous country again, the Egyptian language was henceforth relegated to the extremes of sacred and profane: in the temples, and on the lips of the common people. Alexandria, which replaced Athens as the academic centre of the ancient world, was a Greek-speaking city. Famously, Queen Cleopatra, the last Ptolemy to rule (51-30 BC), was also the first to learn Egyptian—and that apparently only because she had a passion for languages.

  There was pleasure in the very sound of her voice. Like a many-stringed instrument, she turned her tongue easily to whatever dialect she would, and few indeed were the foreigners with whom she conversed through an interpreter, since she answered most of them in her own words, whether Ethiopian, Trogodyte, Hebrew, Arab, Syriac, Median or Parthian. The kings before her had not even had the patience to acquire Egyptian, and some had even been lacking in their Macedonian.*

  Changes in writing

  The Egyptian language went through more radical revolutions in its written form than it did orally. The elegant and exact pictorial symbols familiar from Egyptian monuments were called (by the Greeks) hieroglyphs, ‘sacred carvings’, translating the Egyptian term ’, maduww nāts ar, ‘words of god’ (the phrase also used for Ptah’s creative words in the text that heads this chapter). We have no indication as to how they arose, and they undergo essentially no modification in the 3400 or so years for which we see them in use, although in the last few centuries, when Egyptian religion was increasingly an antiquarian practice within a Hellenised and Christianised country, the scope the system gave for symbolism and imagery has increasing play. Vast numbers of new pictograms are invented, showing that the system is no longer bound by the constraint of being a practical script. The last inscription dates to AD 394, after which it was suppressed by the Christian authorities.*

  They had, from the time of the first non-monumental documents (c.2600 BC) been paralleled by an equivalent but more cursive script, called hieratic—’priestly’. These two scripts made up what was essentially a single system, which could be rendered either in monumental glyphs or a cursive scrawl, with about 175 signs interpreted as consonants or sequences of consonants, and a few hundred signs used in conjunction with them to specify meanings.

  From the seventh century BC, a new style of writing, known as demotic—’popular’—began to be used: it began as a radically simplified form of hieratic writing, but soon diverged from the traditional system when the link with the original hieroglyphs was forgotten.

  After the Greek conquest at the end of the fourth century BC, Greek glosses begin to appear in demotic texts, to clarify a difficult reading here and there. Literacy in Greek was becoming widespread. Despite this, the indigenous system of writing still had a very long way to run. The last dated demotic text is from AD 452,784 years after the Greek conquest, 482 years after the Ptolemies had been supplanted by Rome, and 310 years after the apostle St Mark is said to have first preached in the then Egyptian capital of Alexandria. Like the last hieroglyphs written fifty-eight years before, it was found on the last outpost of Egypt, the island of Philae.12

  Final paradoxes

  As we have seen, Christianity was to put an end to hieroglyphic writing and with it the central stream of ancient Egyptian culture. But despite this it had a last perverse effect, ensuring the long-term survival of the Egyptian language itself. By the third century AD Egyptian had long lost any role in government or elite life, which were now conducted exclusively in Greek. Yet at this very point, the newly rising force of Christians saw the language as the best means to advance the conversion of the Egyptian people. As such, they made it the vehicle of a new sort of literature, in which the Greek alphabet would be used to represent Egyptian. Since the Egyptian language is more complex in its sound system than Greek, six new letters (borrowed from the demotic script) were added: and so the Coptic alphabet was created. The new tradition began with translations of the Bible, then expanded into original compositions, narrating the lives of the Fathers of the Egyptian Desert, St Pachomius and his followers. Coptic became a major channel for the development of the Christian doctrine, with homilies, letters and polemics all widely read in the Egypt
ian Church.

  Egyptian was written in this way for another thousand years. Ironically, it was this late-acquired association with the Christian Church which saved it; by contrast, the lightning spread of Islam and Arabic in the seventh century soon blotted out the language of the previous masters, Greek.

  Egyptian, now known as Coptic, had survived the first onslaught; but the threat from Arabic was always more insidious than that from Greek. Islam, after all, was an egalitarian religion; once Arabic was accepted, there were no other bars to social preferment under the new regime. Over the centuries, the fortunes of the Coptic language ebbed with its associated religion. The last great work written in Coptic is the Triadon, a long poem composed shortly after 1300. Even a hundred years later, Christians in Upper Egypt were said to speak little else,13 but it seems that by the end of the sixteenth century Coptic conversation was gone, or almost gone. Its recitation, in the liturgy of the Coptic Church, has lasted to our day.

  Language from Huang-he to Yangtze

  The Master said:

  Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous.

  Confucius, Lúnyŭ (Analects), ii.15

  The basic pattern of the history of the Chinese language is very similar to that of Egyptian, the maintenance of unity and linguistic stability despite repeated alien influxes.

  Origins

  The language’s closest relatives are found in Tibet and Burma, but they are not close: Chinese is generally seen as a separate branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, with no special link to any of the other major languages in it: these include Tibetan, Karen, Burmese, and even such languages of southern China as Yi, Lisu and Jingpo. In their basic structure, all these languages are very similar, as tone languages, with most of the words or word roots monosyllabic, and no inflexion of nouns, adjectives or verbs. But this is not enough to define the family: rather it defines the area, since other unrelated languages in the neighbourhood, such as Thai, Zhuang, Hmong and Mien, are also like this.

  The Chinese language first turns up in the valley of the Yellow River or Huang-he. The earliest record is now a matter of controversy. In 2000, Chinese scholars recognised written characters in the markings on some 4800-year-old wine cups, found at Juxian in Shandong (’Mountain East’) province, where the river meets the sea. Whether that analysis is correct or not, the next-oldest characters are still a good 3400 years old: they were found written on bronze vessels, and on tortoiseshells and ox shoulder blades (heated until they cracked—a means of telling fortunes), near Anyang in Hebei (’River North’) province. Although the symbols are by origin pictographic, the system as a whole clearly represents the Chinese language. Visual puns are used to convey words with more abstract meanings (e.g. , originally a symbol for lái, ‘wheat’, represents lái, ‘come’), or more specific ones (e.g. láng, ‘wolf, is shown as , a combination of qušn, ‘dog’, and liáng, ‘good’).*

  The subsequent history of standard Chinese as spoken is conventionally divided into many periods, Old Chinese (up to 500 BC, represented by the Shījīng, ‘Book of Poetry’), Middle Chinese (500 BC-seventh century AD, represented by the Qièyùn rhyming dictionary), Old Mandarin (seventh to fourteenth centuries), Middle Mandarin (fourteenth to eighteenth centuries) and Modern Mandarin ever since. The prominence of poetry in the early part of this record is not a matter of aesthetics. Given the indirectness of the connection between Chinese script and its pronunciation, the evidence for the development of the spoken language comes mostly from detailed analysis of verse, particularly looking at which words rhyme.

  The written language itself does not give much away about language development over the last 2500 years, since the classical language, known as wényán (), was defined in the Chūnqiū, ‘Spring and Autumn’, period (770-476 BC), when the great classics such as Confucius’s Analects were written, and was kept unchanged virtually ever after. It was only in the twentieth century that wényán ceased to be the usual means of written expression, and a new written style, based on the words and structures of Mandarin, became universal. But wényán was formed in a region (the north-east) and at a time that is only a millennium or so after the beginning of Chinese progression across the country. As such, it gives a useful baseline for the changes that have affected different modern dialects over the two and a half millennia since it was the vernacular. For example, in one of the paradoxes typical of language history, it shows that the least-changed dialect of Chinese is the one spoken farthest away from the north-east: Cantonese, known to the Chinese by the name of the long-independent ‘barbarian’ kingdom of Yuè.

  The gap between written evidence and spoken reality means that a fair amount of the detail of how influences have played out in the history of the language must remain conjectural. We can only infer, and we cannot fully document, the forces that we shall be describing, some of them operating piecemeal on Chinese to produce the variety of dialects heard, especially in the south, but others keeping the vast majority of speakers in close touch with each other even as the spoken standard gradually moved, all down the ages.

  The degree of political unity in China, although its cyclical rise and fall is the usual tick-tock of Chinese history, is not particularly useful in recounting the spread and transformations of the Chinese language. Following the archaeological evidence, Chinese culture spread out from the middle Yellow River valley in all directions, but most significantly towards the south. In the Shang period (middle to late second millennium) we already find artefacts south of the Yangtze, and these spread out upstream into central China in the Zhou (early first millennium BC). But we know that a language different from Chinese was still spoken in the kingdom of Chu (approximately modern Sichuan, north of the Yangtze) in the third century BC*

  Geographically, Chinese was moving from the cold, dry northern plains where wheat and millet were cultivated into the warmer, wetter uplands where the staple was rice. As well as a difference in climate, there was a difference in terrain, which made the going much tougher in the south: nán chuán běi mš, ‘south boat, north horse’, as the proverb has it. In practice waterways, defined by nature rather than human resource, are the only way to travel easily in the south. This was not a barrier to Chinese cultural and linguistic spread, but it did mean that uniformity, cultural or linguistic, was never so easily imposed there.

  The motive behind the movement southward was no doubt the quest for more fertile soil, and its success must have been backed by the advantages in technology that the northerners were accumulating, symbolised by possession of a written language and large-scale organisation. The first reflection of this on politics comes in 221 BC, with the command of Shi Huang Di, the First Emperor, who unified most of central China, to half a million colonists to go and fill his newly conquered territories ‘among the various Yue peoples’. By this time there was a political motive to add to the economic one: the despot of a united China desired to separate the traditional families from their ancestral power bases; and the political push was renewed from time to time over the next millennium.†

  First Unity

  Shi Huang Di (’First Emperor’), who had converted his rule of the Qin state§ into the first overlordship of all the known states of the Chinese world, was for many reasons a significant figure. He reigned over China for only eleven years (221-210 BC), after thirty-seven on the throne of Qin, but what years they were: besides completing the Great Wall (invaders from the north were already a problem), abolishing the power of feudal lords, carrying through an intellectual purge in a notorious rampage of book-burning, and installing the Terracotta Army in his tomb in the then capital, Chang-an, he is also famous for the standardisation of Chinese characters, as part of a general programme to introduce common laws, weights and measures. This meant imposing the local standard of his (far western) state of Qin, which happened to be one of the most conservative in use at that time. It existed in two versions, the heavily pictorial zhuànshū, ‘seal script’, still occasionally
seen on ornate inscriptions and official seals, and the more cursive lìshū, ‘clerical script’. This latter was taken up under the Han empire that followed, and codified in a dictionary of the time, the Shuōwèn Jiězì of Xŭ Shèn. This system has been the basis of Chinese writing, kšishū (, ‘standard script’), ever since.

  Conscious of a common language in wényán and a common script in kšishū, Chinese people took a millennium to begin to notice people diverging: early Tang literature (seventh century AD) talks of the south differing from the north in its fāng-yán, ‘regional speech’, the normal word for a dialect: this came to be a pretty strong term, also to be applied (much later14) to refer to foreign languages such as Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, Manchu and Vietnamese.

  The languages spoken by China’s equestrian neighbours to its north and west were quite unrelated to the family that includes Chinese, the Sino-Tibetan languages already mentioned. Furthermore—and in this they differed from the tongues of China’s southern neighbours—they were not like Chinese typologically either. Like their modern descendants, the so-called Altaic languages* of central Asia, including the Turkic, the Mongol and the Tungus families, they are all highly polysyllabic; their words, at least the nouns and verbs, are built up systematically and agglutinatively out of strings of short elements. They are not tone languages, but they make extensive use of the principle of vowel harmony, so that the vowels in the suffixes echo the vowels of the word’s root. Their word order places the verb at the end of the sentence. In all these respects, they are radically different from Chinese, a monosyllabic tone language with little or no word formation, and a basic order in which the verb comes second in the sentence.