China’s political independence may yet save its language from the downward slide of Egyptian. And even under foreign rule, Chinese has shown itself much more resilient, and indeed absorbent, than Egyptian ever was in its last two millennia. It has the advantage, which Egyptian never had, not just of high density but also of vast absolute population size. In its written mode, there is nothing yet in the history of Chinese to compare with Egyptian’s loss of its indigenous writing system and adoption of the Greek script, though romanisation may yet come.
In sum, the cultural retreats that we identified as leading to Egyptian’s demise all have their analogues in the recent history of Chinese, except for political conquest. The writing may already be on the wall for the language now spoken by one fifth of mankind.
* This Pinyin romanisation represents a modern Mandarin pronunciation of this text from the fifth century BC. As such it represents the words and the sentence structure, but not the sounds that Confucius would have used.
† In this book, Chinese is transcribed using the pīnyīn zìmŭ ‘phonetic alphabet’ system, usually known as Pinyin, officially promoted by the Chinese government since 1958. In it, the accents (v,v,v,v) denote tone patterns, not different vowel sounds. Among consonants, c is English ts, j is English j, q English ch, and x English sh. You will also see zh, ch and sh: these are pronounced similarly to j, q and x, but with retroflex tongue, as if there were an r immediately following. Most Chinese outside the north-east area are in fact incapable of making the distinction. Pinyin has the virtue of being compact, accurate and consistent (without the irritating apostrophes of the older Western systems, Wade-Giles and Yale) but it can only claim to represent modern pronunciation. This can be misleading when it is applied to very old words and names.
* The word Mandarin is not Chinese at all, but a deformation of the Sanskrit word māntrin, ‘counsellor’, with some influence from the Portuguese verb mandar, ‘command’. Pŭtōnghuá means ‘common language’, a term with an inclusive feel, which has largely replaced older terms such as guāNnhuá, ‘official language’ (the closest to a Chinese equivalent for Mandarin), or guòyŭ, ‘national language’, which referred to much the same thing. Hànyŭ, ‘Han language’, is another term used.
* The origin of this name seems to be an early Greek attempt to represent late Egyptian n-irw-aR, ‘the-rivers-great’, referring to the Nile’s many streams in the Delta area. This is related to jatruw, ‘(the) river’, always its name in classical Egyptian (Luft 1992).
† The original name was Kiang alone, an Austro-Asiatic word, related to words for ‘river’ in Vietnamese song (once pronounced ’krong’) and Mon kruŋ, showing the kind of language spoken here before Chinese came in from the north (Norman 1988: 18).
§ Compare san, ‘brother’, with sānat, ‘sister’. Most abstract nouns share this femininity, e.g. maR ’at, ‘righteousness’ (always conceived as a goddess). See pp. 35ff. for a longer description of Semitic features.
† This common word for the king of Egypt was established by its use in the Hebrew Bible. It represents the Egyptian pr- ’r (House-Great), and so is like using ‘the Palace’ to refer to the British monarch.
* The name Memphis actually refers to King Pepi’s pyramid there, built some seven hundred years later: ‘stable in beauty’. Egypt is inexact as a name for the country. Reflecting the Greek word Aiguptos, it is in fact a title of Memphis: a slurring of əyt kRUW pta, ‘temple of the Ka-energy of Ptah’. kruw was the sustenance to the life force kaR, given by food and drink, and sacrificial offerings.
* Based in Sarw (Sais) in the Delta area, they are rumoured to have been of Libyan ancestry.
* Yet, when the hero of the fictional Tale of Sinuhe reached Retjenu, in northern Palestine (the tale is set at the end of the twentieth century BC, with Retjenu ranged with Egypt’s enemies), he was told: ‘You will be happy here. You will hear the language of Egypt.’ As Sinuhe recounts, there were already Egyptians with the ruler of Retjenu, who had spoken up for him (verse 30). The ruler’s name was Ammulanasi, recognisably Amorite.
* Herodotus, ii. 154, recounts that Psamtek put some Egyptian boys into the service of the Ionians and Carians, to be taught Greek, and thereby founded the Egyptian caste of interpreters. There is no reference to any Greeks studying Egyptian.
* Plutarch, Antony, xxvii.4-5. All these languages must have been heard on the streets of Alexandria in Cleopatra’s day. Ethiopian would be the language of Kush, and Syriac is a form of Aramaic. Trogodyte would have been spoken along the Red Sea coast, and is perhaps the ancestor of modern Beja. The Medjay, supposed to be the same, had been an eastern desert people employed in Egypt as police in the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries (Gardiner 1957: 183, n. 2). There is no mention here of Libyan—or of Latin, although Plutarch adds that Cleopatra is said to have spoken many other languages besides the ones he does mention. Most likely her amours with Caesar, and later Antony, were conducted in Greek.
* The last inscription was made on the sacred island of Philae, just above the Nile’s first cataract and symbolically the farthest outpost of the land of Egypt. The final desecration of the shrine, the last as well as the farthest in Egypt, was ratified by the Roman emperor Justinian (Johnson 1999: 229).
* Materials for writing changed over the millennia. For the early period our knowledge of what was current is of course reliant on its durability, hence the early prominence of bronze and bone. Later on (from the first millennium) the brush was used to write on strips of bamboo. More flexible materials, distinctive Chinese inventions, came later: rolls of silk from the second century BC, and paper from AD 105. Printing too was a Chinese contribution to world language technology: fixed blocks were cut to print whole pages from the end of the ninth century AD, and movable type was introduced from the eleventh. Naturally this last was harder work with a writing system that has always used several thousand symbols.
† Mencius (c.250 BC according to Brooks 2002), 3.B.6: ‘Suppose some great officer of Chu wanted his son to learn to speak Qi …’ Evidently, the ambitious were already setting themselves to learn Chinese. Qi was approximately modern Shandong, at the mouth of the Huang-he, and so at the centre of the spread of Chinese. Strangely, a text written only a decade or so later seems to pick Chu to contrast with an eastern barbarian language: ‘Let a Chu man grow up among Rong, or a Rong man grow up in Chu, and the Chu man will speak Rong, while the Rong man will speak Chu’ (Lushi Chunqiu, 4.E).
* These moves can be compared with the depopulations ordered by the kings of Assyria and Babylon after major military victories. (See Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 64.) But since the Mesopotamian kings saw the greatest threat in foreigners, they ended up seeding their empire with a foreign language, Aramaic; the Chinese emperor, seeing threat in Chinese feudal lords, disseminated them (and therewith the Chinese language) to the farthest corners of his realm.
§ This is often proposed as the etymology for the name China, a name that seems to have reached the West through Persian and Italian. But the Chinese use rather the names of the Han or Tang dynasties as the name of their nation, and the form of the name suggests that it is derived from the Sanskrit name, Cīna. This applied mainly to the area of Tibet, though also on occasions included Assam and Burma (Sircar 1971: 104-5). China as a whole was known to the Indians as Mahācīna, ‘Great China’: this, for example, is where the Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang told the Indians he was from, when he visited in 629. Si-Yu-Ki, v. 1 (in Beal 1884, part 1: 216).
* The Altai mountains of central Asia, the source of this name, are themselves named for their gold: cf. Turkish altin.
* This looks very much like a Chinese rendition of Hunnu, which would allow these people to be identified with those known to the Indians as Hūna, and to the Europeans as Hunni. But the phonetic resemblance unfortunately remains the only strong evidence. (See Sinor 1990: 177-9.)
* Called in modern Chinese Tùobá, using characters that at the time w
ould have been pronounced Tak-B’uat. The name has become the modern Chuvash: it still designates a Turkic-speaking people of whom there are 1.5 million scattered across Russia and Siberia (Clauson 2002 [1962]: 38; Dalby 1998: 134-5).
* The Statute of Kilkenny was passed in 1366, requiring the English colonists (section III) ‘to use the English language, and be called by an English name, leaving off entirely the manner of naming used by the Irish …’
† Briefly put, northern Chinese lost all its final consonants; and strings of previously free monosyllables became congealed into longer words. No one knows why, but some explanations for the changes have been proposed. Perhaps the semantic vagueness of Chinese morphemes, after losing so many distinctive consonants, meant that reinforcing one word with another was necessary in order to communicate effectively. Perhaps the sheer phonetic weakness of the new shorter syllables meant that doubling up had to occur to give the language an acceptable speech rhythm (Feng 1998). Perhaps the advent of Buddhism, with chanting in Sanskrit and Pali which introduced longer words, and the complicated expressions that arose when they were translated into Chinese, inured people to polysyllabism. The various trends and possible influences are clearly discussed in Wilkinson (2000:31-40).
* But this same trend can be seen in all Chinese dialects (and indeed farther south in the Yi and Vietnamese languages).
* ‘Southern Yue’. Mandarin Nán-Yuè and modern Vietnamese Vi&t Nam are just the same words, pronounced differently and reordered, so the name is still going strong two millennia on, its designation moved 750 kilometres to the south-west.
* In the Philippines, there are half a million Chinese, and in Thailand 1.8 million, almost all speaking Southern Min. Of Malaysia’s 4.5 million Chinese speakers, half speak Southern or Eastern Min, a quarter speak Hakka, a sixth speak Yue, the rest (still half a million of them) speaking Mandarin. Chinese has largely died on the lips of Indonesia’s 6 million ethnic Chinese, and only a third of them still speak some form of it in the home: but of those who do, over a third speak Min, a little less than a third Hakka, just under a tenth Yue. The remaining quarter speak Mandarin (Grimes 2000).
* This term, first applied to the Portuguese, derives from Arab-Persian firengi, ultimately from Frank.
* Both empires very occasionally permitted a woman to take up the office of king, notably Hatshepsut ( 1473-1458 BC) and Cleopatra (51-30 BC) of Egypt, and the empresses Wu (AD 690-705) and Ci Xi (AD 1895-1908) of China. Eerily, it was in the reign of a woman that both monarchies, after so many millennia, came to their end.
* Their views of India are considered at pp. 192ff. below.
† Sanskrit atlta, pratyutpanna, anagata, ‘past by’, ‘given in the presence’, ‘not come’.
* So generally impressed were they with the way that their Chinese contemporaries did things that in the seventh century AD Korea and Japan even introduced the system of public examinations for entry into the government. (Vietnam, meanwhile, was spending the whole first millennium AD under direct Chinese rule.) But they did it as copycats, emphatically not because they appreciated the point of the system: the Japanese permitted only nobles to sit the examination; and in Korea, sons of higher-graded families were exempted.
* Aside from Cleopatra’s well-known bravura performance, Peremans ( 1964) finds little evidence of bilingualism in Ptolemaic Egypt, and much of Greeks and Egyptians (egkhōrioi, ‘locals’) sticking to their own languages. Some famous Egyptians, such as the high priest and Greek historian of Egypt, Maněthō, did reach high rank in what remained to the end a Greek-speaking hierarchy. But so many public documents were bilingual (the most famous being the Rosetta Stone, but also judicial notices relating to private cases) that the population could not have been. He also quotes a touching letter: ‘I was glad, both for you and for myself, to learn that you were learning Egyptian writing, because now you can come to the city and teach the children of Phalu … es the enema doctor, and have a means of support for your old age’ (p. 57). Despite the mention of writing, the tutor was presumably to be employed to teach the middle-class Egyptian children Greek, not vice versa.
* The Chinese have been unlike most other dominant language communities reviewed in this book in one way: they have not lumped all those speaking other languages under one unflattering name. The single term ‘barbarian’ is inescapable in English translation, but Chinese has many words, in principle all with different designations. Already in the third-century BC dictionary Erya (’Examples of Refined Usage’), the term sìhši is defined: jiŭyí bādí qīróng liŭmán, ‘the 9 Yi, the 8 Di, the 7 Rong and the 6 Man’ (Erya, s.v. Sidí, cited in Wilkinson 2000: 710). Yet another term was Fān, from the Chinese point of view divided into the , shēngfān, and , shúfān, ‘raw’ or ‘cooked’, depending on whether they had begun to settle to civilised Chinese ways. Not that this multiplicity betokened any particular discernment or respect for the lesser breeds. Although the different words were part of the language, they were often lumped together, e.g. Róngdí, Yídí, or used undiscriminatingly. In fact, the monosyllabic blanket terms are supplemented with more specific terms for particular tribes. These were often written out, as a kind of Chinese private joke, with insulting characters, e.g. nú, ‘slave’, in Xiōngnú, and wō, ‘dwarf’, in Wōgŭo, ‘dwarf-realm’, i.e. Japan. With urbane malice, this chanced to be pronounced in Japanese identically with wa, ‘harmony’, the term the Japanese preferred when referring to themselves.
* The famous Chinese novels of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, notably Hongloumeng, “The Dream of the Red Chamber’, by Cao Xueqin, Sanguozhi Yanyo, ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’, by Luo Guanzhong, and Xiyouji, ‘Journey to the West’, by Wu Cheng-en, were all written in this dialect of Chinese.
† There were also a number of attempts to replace Chinese characters with a romanised script, but with the acknowledged difficulty of finding a system that could be neutral in terms of the different dialects, none succeeded in becoming anything more than an aid to learners and foreigners. The Pinyin romanisation used in this book represents standard Mandarin, and is now close to being an international standard. It was developed in collaboration with Russian scholars, and published officially in 1957.
5
Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit
bhāā praśastā sumano lateva
keām na cetāsy āvarjayati
Language, auspicious, charming, like a creeper, whose minds does it not win over?*
(sūkta—traditional maxim)
The story in brief
There is a persistent image of Sanskrit as a creeping plant, luxuriant and full blossomed. Over two thousand years it spread itself round the centres of Asian population: from north to south of the Indian subcontinent, and thence to South-East Asia and the East Indies, to the Tibetan plateau and to the Far East.
The word Sanskrit (saskta) means ‘composed’ or ‘synthesised’. It is a term for the language as formulated in the grammar books, contrasting it with its colloquial dialects, known as the Prakrits (prāta), the ‘naturals’. It also distinguishes it from an older form, sometimes called Vedic, known from its use in the Veda, ‘the knowledge’: these are hymns to the gods which appear to go back to the earliest days of the language as spoken in India, in the last centuries of the second millennium BC, but which are still recited unchanged in Hindu rituals today. Most of the modern languages of northern and central India are descendants of Sanskrit, developed versions of the Prakrits, much as the Romance languages developed from forms of vulgar Latin. But outside the Indian subcontinent, Sanskrit was never taken up as a popular language; it remained purely a medium of learned communication and sacred expression, strongest where the dominant religion had come from India.
Although it is religious tradition which has proved the most reliable preserver of Sanskrit in many an avatāra (’descent’, as of a divine being from heaven), and despite the heavy association, in the West today, of the language with transcendental spiri
tualism, Sanskrit was never just a liturgical language.
Even the Vedic corpus contains a joyous yet wry evocation of māūkā,1 ‘frogs’, doubly like the priestly caste of Brahmans: they take a vow of silence for a year (until the rainy season); and when they do pipe up ‘one of them repeats the speech of the other, as the learner does of his teacher’. It also brings us the wry self-pity of a compulsive gambler,2 enslaved to babhrava, ‘the browns’, the nuts then used as dice: rājā cid ebhyo nama it koti, ‘even a king bows before them...’ he excuses himself, going on: tasmai komi, ‘na dhanā ruadhmi’ daśāham prācīs, ‘tad tam vadāmi’. ‘I show him my empty palms: “I am not holding out on you—it’s the truth, I tell you."’
Later on, Sanskrit becomes very wide ranging in its content, including among its most widely known works romantic comedy, theoretical linguistics, economics, sexology (notably the Kāma Sūtra), lyrical verse, history and moral fables, along with a continuing production of epic poetry and religious and philosophical tracts. It is a very self-conscious literary tradition, full of learned allusions, and above all the most elaborate development of the pun known anywhere on earth.
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Page 21
