In the context of a sutra, these cases have special interpretation, referring respectively to the input, the output and the right-hand context of a phonological rule. The sutra is therefore to be understood as:
But what is the reference of the strange words themselves? They are to be understood as applications of another set of sutras (known as the Śiva-sutras), which plays the role of a system for defining natural classes of sounds in Sanskrit. This begins:
There is no distinction between upper or lower case in Sanskrit, nor any semicolons. But the use of this Roman typographical convenience is simply to show explicitly what a student of Paninian grammar learns by example, namely that the letters here written in upper case are functioning as control characters. Any term consisting of one of the lower-case letters a followed by one of the control characters b denotes the sequence of phones starling with a and ending just before b. So, for example, ‘aC’ denotes the set of vowels, ‘haT’ the set of semi-vowels excluding 1. It can be seen then that the sutra being analysed is nothing less than a concise statement of the rule:
Terse, indeed, but it should be remembered that this level of concision is possible only because a number of controlling principles can be taken for granted—e.g. the interpretation implicit in the brackets: the first four phones map respectively on to the second four phones, but this occurs before any of the nine phones in the environment. Part of the task of the tradition of commentary which followed on from Panini was to make explicit the precise nature of the paribhāā (auxiliary principles) on which the correct interpretation of the sutras rests.
* Compare the 215,000 or so entries in the latest Chambers English Dictionary, and over 500,000 in the latest Oxford English Dictionary.
* This is the precise Sanskrit equivalent of the Greek barbaros, defined as someone who did not speak Sanskrit.
* Bizarrely this only happened after Muslim incursions, which had brought in the completely alien Persian as the new elite language.
* Indeed, there is a famous story of the embarrassment caused when a king called Satavahana turned out to know less Sanskrit than a lady: in a water fight, one of his queens begged him to stop pelting her with water (modakai, from mā udakai, ‘not with-waters’), but he responded by showering her with sweets (modakai, ‘with sweets’). He was so mortified when she pointed out his mistake that he took to his bed, and then embarked on a crash course in grammar (Somadeva, Kathā-sarit-sāgaram, l.vi.108-22).
* One gets some idea of how much, and how little, Pali differs from Sanskrit by comparing the Sanskrit equivalent for this phrase: sarvasatā mūlabhāā.
* He called it Fan, probably a Chinese reduction of the word Brahmana.
* The most widely used alphabet in this area of India is still known as deva-nāgarī, ‘the gods’ urban [script]’.
* These two terms came to mean ‘slave’ and ‘demon, robber, bandit’ respectively. Compare the development of the English word slave from Slav, and the apparently opposite route taken by Serb from Latin servus. The feminine of dāsa, dāsī, came to mean ‘whore’ (devadāsī, ‘a god’s slave-girl’, was a temple prostitute), and one of the most routine Sanskrit insults is dāsya putra, equivalent to ‘whoreson’ or ‘son of a bitch’.
* The purpose was to rescue Rama’s kidnapped wife Sita—rather similar to Homer’s motivation for the Trojan War, where a Greek fleet set out to rescue Menelaus’s wife Helen.
* In a total reversal, Hinduism was later to renounce even the possibility of foreign voyages. It was held to bring unassuageable impurity upon higher castes, e.g. in the late-thirteenth-century law digest by Hemādri (iii.2: 667).
* Devanagari, Gujarati, Panjabi, Bengali, Oriya in the north; Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and Sinhalese in the south. There is another related alphabet, used farther north for Tibetan.
† Burmese, Lao, Thai, Khmer (Cambodian) on the mainland; in the islands, Javanese, Balinese, Tagalog (in the Philippines), Batak (in Sumatra) and Bugis (in Sulawesi)
. * The same word is now pronounced Phnom, as in Phnom Penh.
† Java, Sumatra and Malaya are derived from Yava-dvīpa, ‘barley island’; samudra, ‘sea’, and Malaya, actually from a Dravidian word, malai, ‘a hill’, in south India near Malabar. Cambodia (Kamboja) evokes Kambuja, a kingdom in the Khyber pass area; but had a competing etymology as Kambu-ja, i.e. born of Kambu Svāyambhūva, a hermit who united with the celestial nymph Mera to found the race of Khmers (Coedès 1968: 66). Champa shares its name with the kingdom of the lower Ganges, but is probably the local ethnonym Cham in Sanskrit form. The River Irrawaddy in Burma is named for the Irāvatī, ‘having drinking water’, the old name of the Ravi river in Panjab.
* To an extent, this still continues: so Megawati Sukarnoputri, at the time of writing president of Indonesia, has a name that translates as ‘Cloudy, Beneficent’s Daughter’.
* A variant called Siddha-mātka, ‘settled alphabet’, or simply Siddha, is the version of the script most generally used in the East Asian (i.e. Mahayana) Buddhist traditions.
† The motivation for this is purely historic. It ultimately goes back to an equally arbitrary ‘aleph beth gimel daleth…’ specified by the Phoenicians.
* The items in parentheses do not exist separately, in the spelling or the language, for phonetic reasons.
* Nevertheless, the script had been modified deftly to represent more effectively features of Tibetan which are alien to the Aryan languages for which Brahmi and all its successors had been designed. Notably, it can distinguish initial vowels that have glottal stops in front of them and those that do not. (In Sanskrit, as in English, a glottal jerk is inserted automatically when a vowel begins an utterance.) The script was later (in the thirteenth century) borrowed by the Chinese at the court of Kublai Khan, to create the ‘Phagspa script for Mongolian, this even being declared the official script of the empire in 1269. It was also used to write Chinese. (See Chapter 4, ‘Holding fast to a system of writing’, p. 156.)
* Malacca’s role as an entrepôt firmly established Malay, Bahasa Mělayu, as the lingua franca of the region, and this has lasted up to the present day. (See Chapter 11, ‘Dutch interlopers’, p. 400.) Malacca was itself a colony of šrī Vijaya (Palembang) on Sumatra, also a major trade centre, and that is where the earliest (seventh century) inscriptions in Malay have been found, one of them upriver from the city of Jambi, previously known as Malayu (Hall 1981: 47-8). Ironically enough, ’Bahasa’ is none other than the Sanskrit word bhāā, ‘language’.
* Although we know that some features, e.g. the tonal accent, and the pronunciation of over-long (pluti) vowels, have been lost along the way.
† Most famously NRWN KSR (’Nero Emperor’) added up to 666, the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation.
* Ironically, the most lasting contribution of Kanishka’s rule was ‘Shaka’ era, a dating system still in use in India. It runs from AD 78, and is even used in many of the Sanskrit inscriptions of South-East Asia.
* The three fabled libraries of Nalanda, Ratnodadhi (’sea of jewels’), Ratnasāgara (’ocean of jewels’) and Ratnarajaka (’jewel-adorned’), were all to be burnt down. Perhaps it is significant that, according to Tibetan Buddhist accounts of their end, the fires resulted from spells cast by visitors affronted by the rudeness they received from the scholars of Nalanda.
* The name Urdu is short for zabān eurdū e muallā, Persian for ‘language of the camp exalted’, where the first and last words are originally Arabic, the middle one Turkic, and the linking e’s pure Persian. Hindi is a shortening of Hindui or Hindvi, the word for ‘Indian talk’ originally used by Muslims, since the word Hind itself is a Persian version of the name of the Sindhu river, known to the Greeks (and Europeans) as the Indus.
* For the view from the English side, see Chapter 12, ‘Changing perspective—English in India’, p. 501.
6
Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek
Spartans to Athenians (urging an al
liance to resist the Persians, 480 BC):
Barbarians have nothing trustworthy or true.
Athenians to Spartans (in reply):
There is nowhere so much gold or a country so outstanding in beauty and merit that we should be willing to take it as a reward for going over to the Medes and so enslaving Greece. In fact there are many important things stopping us from doing that even if we wanted to…and then again there is Greekness, being of the same blood and language, and having shared shrines and rituals of the gods, and similar customs, which it would not be right for the Athenians to betray.
Herodotus* viii. 142-4
ke tóra ti tha yénume xorís varvárus? i ánthropi aftí ísan my a kápya lísis.
And now what will become of us without barbarians? These people were some sort of a solution.
Constantine Kavafis, Waiting for the Barbarians, 1949,111.35-6
After the stately self-possession of Chinese and Egyptian, the sensuous prolixity of Sanskrit, and the innovative absolutisms of the Near Eastern languages, Greek makes a much more familiar, not to say modern, impression. This is the language of the people who brought wine, olive oil and literacy to the Mediterranean world, who invented logic, tragic drama and elective government, famed as much for competitive games as for figurative arts of striking realism. All of Europe became directly or indirectly their students. The dictionaries of European languages are all full of words borrowed from Greek to express Greek concepts and artefacts, and their grammars too, when they came to be written down, were organised on Greek principles.
Yet the history of the Greek language itself is far more complex and beguiling than its net influence would suggest. It was played out as much in the Near East as in the Mediterranean, in areas that are today all but purged of any trace of Greek. Like English, it was spread through a variety of means—speculative commerce, naked imperialism, cultural allure; and the means were very different in the long-term durability of what they achieved.
Above all, Greek stands as an example of a classical language that ran its course, fostered with a self-regarding arrogance that for over a thousand years its neighbours were happy to endorse, giving it their military support as they accepted the benefits of its more advanced culture and technology. These powerful, but impressed, neighbours included the Roman empire and the Christian Church. Greek’s influence was eclipsed only when it ran out of new alliances, and was forced to face alone an unsympathetic enemy which drew its cultural support elsewhere. It is an instructive example of what can happen to a prestige language when its community ceases to innovate, and the rest of the world catches up.
Greek at its acme
The high point of Greek expansion came for a century or so approaching the close of the first millennium BC. Then the language could be heard on the lips of merchants, diplomats and soldiers from Emporiai (modern Ampurias), a trading post in the north-east corner of modern Spain, to Palibothras (Pātaliputra, modern Patna) in India, a distance of 40,000 stadia, or 8,000 kilometres, approaching a quarter of the circumference of the globe. Within this range, and over 80 per cent of its extent, there was a continuous band of lands under Greek-speaking administration, all to the east of the Greek homeland in the south Balkans, and extending as far as what is now Pakistan. This total expanse of Greater Greece, the Hellenised world, had been built up over about seven hundred years, without the benefit of any technology but the ship, the shoe, the wheel, the road, the horse, and writing.
This de facto world language had a currency that ranged over half a dozen distinct empires and kingdoms of the time. Known as he koiné diálektos—’the common talk’—or simply the koinē, Attic Greek, the particular dialect of the city of Athens, had become current all over the eastern Mediterranean. In Greece too it was gradually replacing all the twenty dialects that had flourished up until the fourth century BC. Probably this levelling began through the commercial prestige of Athens itself, with Piraeus, its port, giving an Attic linguistic tinge to the hub of intra-Greek trade. Pericles, who had presided over Athens’ glory days in the mid-fifth century BC, had already boasted to his fellow-Athenians of a prosperity that allowed them to benefit from the produce of the whole earth. As more outsiders felt the need to learn Greek, and Greeks themselves began to have an outlook wider than their own city, Attic Greek spread.
And despite the different means of achieving its spread, it was already eliciting some of the same attitudes that English evokes today. A political pamphlet of the fifth century had claimed that while Greeks in general used each their own dialect, Athenians spoke a mixture of all of them, and all barbarian languages too.1 In a comedy of the second century, written by the Macedonian Posidippus, a Thessalian (from the north of Greece) reproaches the Athenians for seeing all Greek as Attic. Athenians had some of the same problems in taking the rest of Greece seriously that Greeks in general had with the rest of the world. If they failed to speak proper Greek, they were, after all, no better than barbarians.*
Who is a Greek?
Tí dè tis? Tí d’ ou tis? Skiás ónar ánthrōpos.
What is someone? What is no one? A shadow’s dream is man.
Pindar, Pythian Odes, viii.95—6
Until their independence in AD 1821, the Greeks had only ever been united politically in the aftermath of joint conquest by some outsider. This happened for the first time in the fourth century BC, when the outsider was Philip, the king of Macedon on their northern border. Nevertheless, over the previous thousand years other civilisations encountering the Greeks appear always to have seen them as members of a single ethnic group.
In a way, this was strange, since outsiders always knew them simply by the tribal name of the group they happened to encounter. The Greeks’ shared name for themselves, Héllēnes, never caught on outside Greece.* The Persians knew them as Yauna, for their encounter was with the Ionian Greeks, who are called láwones in Homer, the earliest Greek in the tradition. † At the opposite end of the Greek world, the Romans got to know the Greeks as Graii. They were meeting Greek colonists from Euboea and Boeotia, who were setting up a new city of Cyme in Italy (later known by the Romans as Cumae). In fact, Graii seems to memorialise a small town in southern Boeotia called Graia. § The word Greek comes through the Latin Graecus, a straightforward adjective formed from this name (from Grai-icus), and came to take over from the original Graii.
What, then, was a Greek, by any of these appellations? Although the main criterion was language, there was a general feeling that Greeks had much more in common than that. In a famous passage of Herodotus, the Athenians are made to explain why they will never betray Greece.2 They advert to to Hellēnikón, ‘Greekness’, which is defined as having the same blood and the same language, common shrines of deities, common rituals and similar customs. Common blood, of course, was not something that could be proved or ascertained objectively, though there would have been a feeling for facial features and no doubt skin colour. Common language was evident through mutual intelligibility of all the Greek dialects. As for common service to common gods, the Olympian pantheon was validated in the narrative of the Homeric epics and other hymns, even if the actual practice of cults in different places could be quite unique. Respect for common oracles where prophetic insight could be sought, the most notable being Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, and attendance at the quadrennial Olympic games (whose records of victors extend back to 776 BC) were two other major institutions that bound the Greeks together.*
In fact, the Greeks always felt that there was a rational basis that set them apart from the bárbaroi, the rest of humanity, whose varying speech could just be thought of as an elaboration of ‘bar-bar’, hardly worth distinguishing from the noises made by animals, † Anything foreign was felt somehow to be ridiculous.
So the historian Herodotus describes the language of the Ethiopian Trogodytes (sic) as sounding like screeching bats,3 and in the midst of a serious tragedy4 Queen Clytaemnestra—admittedly a picture of condescending arrogance—conjectures that Cass
andra, the Trojan princess, may speak an unknown language like that of swallows. Even Strabo himself, cosmopolitan geographer of the Mediterranean world in the time of Julius Caesar, writes in the midst of his gazetteer of the peoples of Spain (3.3.7): ‘I am loath to go on about the names, conscious of the unpleasantness of them written down, unless someone could actually enjoy hearing of the Pleutauroi, the Bardyetai or the Allotriges, or other names even fouler and more meaningless.’
There are many classic texts where Greeks have set out their ideals. Outstanding among them is Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ Speech for the War Dead made in 431 BC.5 Pericles was the leader of Athens who built the Parthenon and led the city into its great war against Sparta. This speech is an attempt to summarise Athens’ contribution to civilisation, not claiming that the city was like others, but rather setting them an example (parádeigma). He talks of a free approach to politics which is open to all, however poor, of tolerance in private life, of the enjoyment of public entertainments. He glories in the city’s military accomplishments, but no less in the fact that they do not (unlike their main enemy, Sparta) make a fetish of military preparedness. All lies in striking the right balance; in a very Greek phrase, he says:
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Page 28
