Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  Indeed, a major property of Greek culture, throughout its long continuous history since the third century BC, has been a wish to hark back to the classics, aping their linguistic form as well (as far as possible) as their style and content, but never the excitement of innovation and originality that must have attended their actual writing in the fifth and fourth centuries. Whatever has proved enduring in the Greek language tradition—and leaving aside the question of whether its classics really are the best things ever written—it has far more to do with rigid conservatism than openness to exciting new ideas. If nothing else, the history of the Greek language community shows that conservatism too can be attractive, if something attractive is being conserved.

  We can see that what Greek had to offer was highly attractive in the context of the ancient world. Even those whose careers were dedicated to limiting and diminishing Greek influence nevertheless took as much as they could from it: the Kushāna kings of Afghanistan, who went on using Greek on their coinage after unseating Greek kings; the Parthian and Armenian courtiers entertaining themselves with Greek tragedies, even as their armies were besting the Greeks’ Roman students; the Carthaginian generals who used Greek to communicate with their own forces of mercenaries. The Greeks were undoubtedly the Great Communicators of the Mediterranean world.

  But the agents who spread this undoubtedly attractive commodity round the oikouménē, the inhabited world, were seldom actually Greek. The spread of the Greek language is, rather, an object lesson in the effectiveness of hitching a ride. Macedon was beyond the pale of the Greek language community; yet its king planted Greek-speaking colonies all the way to the boundaries of India. Aramaic was the language of Greece’s greatest foe, the Persian empire; yet the two-hundred-year-old use of it as a chancery language across the empire meant that there was a clear model for Greeks to follow in seeding a Greek-based communications network round their newly won domains. Two hundred years later Rome, and with it Latin, was taking the whole Mediterranean rim by storm; yet Greek, the language of colonies in southern Italy, was accepted into a kind of equality with Latin, and went on to become the true cultural milieu of the Roman empire—in the sense that no cultivated inhabitant of the empire could be without it. Two hundred years later still, the new brooms sweeping the empire were mystery religions, especially Christianity; yet although none of them originated in Greece, their language of preference was Greek, and so Greek built an indissoluble link with the greatest movement of the late Roman empire, the Christian Church. By a final stroke of good fortune, this same movement, now specialised as Christian Orthodoxy, turned out to be the key to preserving Greek through four centuries of Turkish domination, after the dissolution of the Roman empire in the east. Greek thus owes its remarkable career to help from its friends, at every crucial turning point of the last 2300 years.

  Yet curiously, for all its close relationship with other cultural powers (military, administrative and spiritual), Greek has been highly resistant to influence from others with which it has been in contact. We have already seen that out in the farthest eastern reaches Greek was prepared to take on loan words for interesting new substances from India;* but the influence of its bedfellow language Aramaic was negligible. In the west, its five centuries of cohabitation with Latin as a principal language of the Roman empire led to a crop of borrowings to designate official and military matters, administration and finance (for example, names of months, coins, ranks, military ranks, taxes) but hardly any day-to-day words.* Many words where one might have expected borrowings, such as consul, senātus, Augustus, imperātor, are in fact usually translated: húpatos (literally ‘topmost’), gerousía (’gathering of old men’), Sebastós (’reverend’), autokrátōr (’self-controller’). Likewise, the Christian and other mystery religions’ adoption of Greek left it surprisingly untouched, if one discounts the names of people and places, and interjections such as amébar;n and hōsanná.†

  Things changed after the Greeks were disempowered by the Fourth Crusade. Latin elements came into the language and stuck: bánio, ‘bath’, bastar$rTcross;o, ‘bastard’, bíra, ‘beer’. After this, within a Turkish-run world, Greek did behave more like a colonised language, and absorbed a whole host of Turkish words, not just for new concepts such as tzamí, ‘mosque’, χatzís, ‘Mecca pilgrim’, o$rTcross;alíski, ‘concubine’ (from Turkish oda-lik, ‘roomer’, combined with a Greek diminutive), but for such mundane and apparently gratuitous things as boyatzís, ‘painter’, tembélis, ‘lazy’, yakás, ‘collar’, bólikos, ‘abundant’ and sokáki, ‘street’. A lot of such vocabulary has since dropped out, or been suppressed by language planning policies since independence. But the new tolerance of borrowed words since the collapse of the empire is evidence in itself that we were right to see Greek’s self-image as changing around that time: relieved of responsibilities to keep order in its historic dominions, and indeed to stand as the bulwark of Christian Orthodoxy, the language was no longer maintained in such conscious isolation from its neighbours.

  Having developed autonomously as a cultural area, linked primarily by a common language, a common set of gods and a general sense of kinship, Greek effectively had global reach pressed upon it: this was its reward for impressing so mightily the imperial powers of Macedon and Rome. Over the centuries, those powers ebbed away, leaving large-scale political units in their wake, and Greek speakers as the de facto guardians of a political dispensation not of their making. They reacted by holding to the core of their own traditions, which in the last analysis turned out not to be political, or even intellectual, but linguistic. Their distinctive, civic, approach to government fell away when confronted with units larger than city-states; their rationalist, or polytheistic, philosophies yielded to Christianity; but they never lost faith in the rhetoric of Lysias or Demosthenes, the poetry of Aeschylus or Euripides, or the prose of Plato and Xenophon. It was a curious faith, confronted with a multinational, multilinguistic empire. But it served.

  Greek’s solipsism in effect came to an end with the downfall of its associated empire. After two millennia of steadfast concentration, it was no longer constrained to preserve its unity by holding the line that the unchanging standard of excellence, linguistic if not spiritual, was the language of one Greek city in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. From our perspective in the twenty-first century, and especially in a language community, such as English, which has cut itself free from adoration of classics, whether in its own language or anyone else’s, it is hard to see real value in this central myth. But the Greek achievement stands as an interesting monument of one way to keep a language tradition, even one of vast extent, self-consciously united. The absence of serious division in the Greek language is quite striking to this day. While Latin is succeeded by a handful of separate national language traditions, all of which have moved on from their common roots in the Latin of Rome in, say, the second century BC, Greek—even as spoken on the Turkish shores of the Black Sea, and in villages in the remote south of Italy—knows what is its common centre. The adulation of Attic did actually work, in the grand programme of making sure that Greek remained the language of a single community.

  * It was the name for some of Achilles’ people in Homer’s Iliad (ii.684), and since he was the greatest Greek hero in that greatest of Greek poems, this may have been sufficient to name the whole race by association.

  † w, written as f in some Greek alphabets, dropped out of pronunciation (and hence spelling) in most dialects. Hence the w in this Homeric word is, strictly speaking, conjectural, lōTnes is the same word, with a common contraction of a+o into ô. Later the Indians came to call the Greeks yavana too—although their first major encounter was with a warlike force led by Macedonians. § Near Oropus, which is on the coast facing Eretria, according to Strabo, ix.2.10. ¶ Two other ethnonyms for Greek, seemingly much older, are Danaoi and Akhaioi. They are the words used by their ethnic poet Homer, writing some time in the early first millennium BC. The name Danaoi has associations with the c
ity of Argos, a major city at the time when Homer represents Greece. Danaos is a legendary king of that city. Akhaioi, when it is used specifically, refers either to the people of an area in the north of the Peloponnese, with no particular claim to representative status, or to the people of Phthiotis, which is also notable in Homer as another part of the kingdom of Achilles (Iliad, ii.684). Its Latin form, Achîvî, shows that it originally had a W at the end of the stem (hence really ’Akhaiwoi’). But in this form, with an inversion of the A and I, as Ahhiyawa, it does seem to figure as a term for a major kingdom in other documents, namely the royal correspondence (in cuneiform on baked clay tablets) of the Hittites who dominated Anatolia in the second millennium BC. So it seems that, early on, the Greeks were known abroad by yet another name.

  Both these terms may have been used by the Egyptians. There is an inscription c. 1370 BC (on a statue base in a funerary temple of Amenophis III) which mentions the TNY along with a variety of other names locatable in Crete. Egyptian hieroglyphics usually omit vowels, and i or y between vowels is often lost in Greek, so this could be an explicit reference to the Danaioi. In another inscription c. 1186 BC, the DNYN are mentioned as one of the Sea-Peoples attacking Egypt. But in an earlier inscription c. 1218 BC, the IKWS, which could just possibly be the Akhaiwoi or Ahhiyawa, are mentioned as allies in the resistance against the Sea-Peoples (Strange 1980; Muhly et al. 1982).

  * In this chapter, Greek names in the text are given in the conventional Latinised form: hence not Hēródotos, Akhaiós but Herodotus, Achaeus. In the romanised transcription, h has much the same force as in English, but is often used to aspirate a consonant: kh, ph, th could more accurately have been written kh ph th in fact as in English ‘Can Pete take it?’ Except in diphthongs, au, eu, the Greek u was pronounced in Attic much as it is today in French, phonetically [y]; ou was a long ū, as in English rune. The accents in Greek up to the early centuries AD give some image of the pattern of tone, not stress; thereafter they just mark the stressed syllable.

  * As it happens, this pre-eminence of Attic was the result of cultural and commercial, not military, dominance. Athens, as we have seen, was early a major trading centre. But until the fifth century Greek literature had been the joint product of many different dialects.

  * Compare the figures for modern spoken English: two forms for most nouns (word, words), four for most verbs (talk, talks, talked, talking).

  * The fact that Greek speech was so dialectally riven at the time had an interesting impact on these styles and genres: for the first few centuries after written literature began, each became associated with a particular dialect, typically that of its first practitioners, even though the literature was largely shared. So epic poetry had to be written in Homer’s mixture of Ionic and Aeolic, lyric poetry in Doric, history at first in Ionic, tragedy in Attic. This played some role in perpetuating knowledge of the dialects, even after the increasing unity of the Greek world was pushing them out of actual use in conversation. It is a particularly good example of how so much of a language’s flavour comes purely by association.

  * It also had one colony on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, Amisūs, modern Samsun.

  † Although not prohibited by Carthaginian or Phoenician influence, the Adriatic received rather little attention from Greek colonists, and was not identified with a particular metropolis. However, it was de facto a Dorian area. Three major cities here were Epidamnos, later Dyrrhachium (now Durrazzë in Albania), founded by Corinth and the neighbouring island of Corcyra c.625 BC; Atria, in the Po delta, founded in late sixth century BC by Aegina (a Dorian city later cleared and repopulated by Athens); and Ancona, a city of the indigenous Piceni later refounded by Greek refugees from Syracuse in 387 BC. (The promise of the Venetian lagoon was not exploited in antiquity.)

  § For all its stately sound, this name (Buzántion) is just the diminutive of Búzas, as if Hongkers had become the official name of Hong Kong.

  ¶ Cyrene, founded c.630, specialised in the growth and export of sílphion, a medicinal plant. But Greek was also to be heard farther east on the African shore, where a rather different kind of enterprise was established. Naucratis, ‘Sea-Queen’, was a pan-Hellenic emporium in the Nile delta, a centre for trade with the Egyptian market, in a trading concession allowed by the pharaoh. The initiative here had come from Ionian Greeks, from Miletus and Samos, conveniently sited just to the north. (See Chapter 4.)

  * This early Greek range is very different from the genres of medieval and modern European literature. There is no novel, no essay, no fantasy literature. Neither is there any literature devoted to religious devotion. As it happens, the first three of these were all Greek inventions too, but from a much later period, in the first centuries AD, when Greece was an enforced part of the Roman empire, and there was no serious expectation of a public career or public responsibilities. Affluent individuals were then free to explore more personal concerns, to write romances, and descriptions of personal adventures. Likewise, explorations of individual religious experience were alien to the Greek spirit in these earlier days, although they were later to become central after the spread of Christianity. The religious outpourings of the earlier period take the form of hymns to the Olympian gods, with an emphasis on recounting their myths.

  † Greek analysis of grammar was essentially complete when Dionysius the Thracian, working in Alexandria, the intellectual centre of Greece at the time, published his compilation of Stoic and Alexandrian work as Tékhnē Grammalik$ēA at the beginning of the first century BC.

  * An exception to this tendency for indigenous populations to survive Greek settlement was Sicily, where the Greek presence must have been particularly dense. They had at least thirteen separate colonies there, and the western end of the island was in the hands of another foreign incomer, Carthage, with three more. Nevertheless, the pre-existing Sicans, Elymians and Sicels had been very much a factor when land was originally sought for the new cities.

  † Such political fame as they acquired was associated with experiments in tyrannous megalomania, notably those of Dionysius of Syracuse (430-367 BC) and Agathocles of Acragas (361-284 BC), both of whom organised Greek wars against Carthage with zero net effect.

  § ekbebarbarōsthai: it had been two hundred years since Rome had conquered Greece, and begun its attempt to assimilate its culture; yet a Greek—and one educated at Rome at that—still classed Romans as barbarians.

  * This was a significant year for Athens, the first year of restored democracy after its conclusive defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.

  † Athens adopted the Ionic alphabet as used in Miletus, in preference to their own ‘Attic’ style, which had not distinguished long E (H—eta) and long O (Ω—omega) from their short versions.

  § Q (qoppa) was originally a back [k] used before back vowels [o] and [u]. Early inscriptions use FH to represent [f], since F was originally a sign for [w] or [v]. Most of the Ionic dialects (including those at Miletus and Athens) had lost this sound, hence its disappearance from the offical Greek alphabet. But there is a bizarre twist here. Chalcis and Eretria, which founded Pithecusae and Cumae, actually spoke Ionic dialects, and so might have been expected to drop F in writing too.

  ¶ In principle, it is possible that this distinctive product of the eastern Mediterranean was brought to the west by the other great colonial civilisation, the Phoenicians, but the countries that became (and have remained to this day) pre-eminent in wine-making happen to be in the Greek sphere of influence, Italy and Gaul/France, rather than North Africa and Spain.

  * This event is immortalised (along with other evidence, Greek and Indian) in two example sentences of the second-century Sanskrit grammarian Patañjali (3.2.111): arunad yavanan sāketam, ‘The Greek has besieged Saketa’ (a city close to Faizabad on the Gaghra); arunad yavanan mādhyamikam, “The Greek has besieged Madhyamika’ (a city close to Chittaurgarh, south of the Rajasthan desert). In each case, the sentence needs to be veridical in order to illustrate the point, that
this tense (LaN, the imperfect) is used ‘of a recent public occurrence not actually witnessed by the speaker but potentially so’. Since of these two only Saketa is actually on the way to Patna from the Panjab, it appears that the Greeks also campaigned farther south and west, in Rajasthan.

  * It is also the origin of the romantic boy’s name Romeo.

  * Libanius, a Greek resident of Antioch in Syria in the fourth century AD, wrote sixty-four speeches which range over municipal, educational and cultural matters, as well as an autobiography and an encomium of the city. He mentions the existence of Aramaic just once, although it was spoken in the country all around (Mango 1980: ch. 1).

  * It is interesting from a modern standpoint—and indeed from a classical Indian one, concerned to distinguish the complementary roles of Brahman/scholar, Kshatriya/warrior-king and Vaiśya/trader—that the question of who the leaders in business were never seems to have occurred to the Greeks or Romans. Fortunes were certainly being made, but this was seen as an occasion more for indulgence than glory.

  † Two fields where the Romans never used Greek were law and the military. This was true even in Greek’s heartland in the eastern Mediterranean, where Latin otherwise made little headway.

  * These were not the only pan-Hellenic games: two others were the Pythian games in Delphi, and the Isthmian games, organised by Corinth.