Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  And for France, too, overseas expansion was under government control, ever since King François I had sent Jacques Cartier out to seek a North-West Passage in 1534. In the seventeenth century, Colbert had fretted over the non-expansion of the French language; but a century later, the French colonists on the ground had taken so little interest in de la Salle’s explorations along the Mississippi, let alone effective occupation of them, that Napoleon volunteered to sell them, sight unseen, to the USA. All the colonies that the French acquired in the nineteenth century, from Algeria to Indochina, were taken by French arms for the glory of France: la gloire remained an active motive. At the same time France was clearly still a major force in the scientific civilisation that it promoted, so that use of French could be presented as a channel to modernity. Settlers did move into Algeria, but elsewhere the force that made the French colonies a reality—and so spread the use of French—was the central government. Apart from in Algeria and lndo-China, this centralised approach meant that withdrawal of French control, when it came in the 1960s, was surprisingly speedy and painless. What often remained was an affection for the French language, a symbol of la civilisation française, rational in aspiration, national in sentiment.

  Given that Russian was spread over three centuries rather nakedly as a mark of the power of the Tsar’s empire—of limited appeal to those not accepted as Russian—and that the twentieth-century attempt to convert it, after the fact, into a vernacular for ‘Scientific Socialism’ collapsed with the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian language has something of an image problem. The heavy-handedness with which its materialism was asserted contrasted with the lighter touch of French rationalism, and the even-handedness of British pragmatism, and the open-handedness of American consumerism. Russian’s associations with group effort and economic austerity are almost the converse of English’s conjuring up of initiative and ingenuity by individuals, leading to wealth through enterprise.

  English, as a quintessentially ‘worldly’ tongue, can also be set against the atmospheres of world languages from a more distant past. Chinese and Egyptian, and indeed Greek and Latin in the ancient world, were all vehicles of civilisations that emphasised the value of the here and now, and at their best were able to provide a high standard of living to their citizens, as well as a degree of peace and security. Arabic and Sanskrit, by contrast, like Latin and Greek in the Christian era, were and are promoted by much more otherworldly cultures, focusing their speakers’ aspirations on spiritual aims, and seeing their degree of visible success or gratification in daily life as only a small part of what is really important.*

  This difference of language culture is in our age very evident. In the early twenty-first century, the aspiration to learn English or Arabic has become distinctive for many young people all over the world. In the countries of western Asia and North Africa, Arabic Language Teaching has become a service industry seeking foreign customers, just like ELT in so many other parts of the world. English and Arabic are in some ways remarkably similar: both have a written history of about one and a half thousand years, have been spread around the world by speakers who often knew no other language, and have bodies of literature that freight them with associations many centuries old. But rare is the young person who strives to learn Arabic for Avicenna’s philosophy, the stories of the Thousand and One Nights or the novels of Naguib Mahfouz; even rarer is one who struggles with English hoping to read the King James Bible, or the Book of Common Prayer. In our age, Arabic is for foreign learners the language of the Koran, English the language of modern business and global popular culture.

  * Old English ‘Be happy’; ‘stay healthy’; ‘let it come’ (i.e. the loving-cup passed around); ‘drink lustily’ ‘drink backwards’; ‘drink to me’ ‘drink half; ‘drink to the dregs’. These are all English toasts and drinking boasts to be heard as the English caroused the night away before the crucial battle of Hastings. Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing c.1140, says “… to this day the tradition has endured in Britain that at a banquet the one who drinks to another says “waesseil”, and he who receives the cup after him replies “drincheil’” (Historia Regum Britannie § 100, ms 568, f. 46v.).

  * Latin titles of prayers, ‘Spirit of the Lord’, ‘Salvation of the people’, ‘Hail Holy Mother’, following naturalised French forms of ‘Take pity’, (Greek) ‘Lord, have mercy’, ‘Our Father’.

  † Robert Wace, a Norman from Jersey, was commissioned in the 1160s by King Henry II to write a celebration of Norman history, named for its patriarch Rollo (i.e. Rou). This was to parallel his earlier Roman de Brut, on Britain before the Normans (likewise supposedly founded by Brutus). This section tells of the different demeanours of the English and Normans on the night before Hastings, 1066; but it also neatly illustrates the different roles of English, Norman French and Latin in Norman England.

  * In this section, ‘Norman’ will include the governing classes of England and its dependencies from 1066 to 1399. Their vernacular was initially Norman French, also known as Anglo-Norman; but after 1154, the varieties of French spoken at court would have been more broadly based, since Henry II and his barons were based in Anjou, in south-western France. Thereafter the dynasty is known as Angevin.

  * These were an asset to their literary culture as much as to their politics. Although Arthur comes out of Celtic legend, it was Anglo-Norman literature which created the ideal of the gallant knight in shining armour, the chevaler, a word that originally meant ‘horseman’. In Old English knight (usually spelt cniht) had just meant ‘lad’, hence someone young enough to fight, without overtones of cavalry, let alone chivalry.

  * After the first of these, Edward, in 1301, is supposed to have offered to give the Welsh a prince ‘born in Wales, and without a word of English’—then presented his own son, just recently bom at campaign headquarters in Caernarfon. The story, however, goes back only to the sixteenth century, and would be more credible if Edward himself had been a speaker of English rather than French. And his son had been born in 1284.

  † Calum Ceann Mór, ‘Big Head’, who reigned from 1059 to 1093. This was the famed Malcolm who had deposed and killed Macbeth.

  * It is all very reminiscent of the emotional, nostalgic and somewhat desperate tone of the defence for learning Latin itself, offered in the grammar schools of England in the middle of the twentieth century.

  * Characteristically conservative, the law held out longest: Law French did not finally disappear from the English courts until eliminated by an act of Parliament in 1733. By the same standard of retrospection, the law’s fondness for eighteenth-century wigs and gowns has still a century to run.

  † ‘… in many the country language is impaired; some use a strange babbling, twittering, snarling, growling and gnashing.’

  * From another point of view, the dialects of English were a boon to a naturalistic author like Chaucer, who was the first to use them to give realism to dialogue. In The Canterbury Tales, the Reeve, himself scripted as a Norfolk man, tells a story of Cambridge students John and Aleyn, who are clearly lads from the North. And the Summoner and the Friar both keep breaking into broad Northern English (Robinson 1957: 686, 688, 704-5).

  * The basic linguistic features of this area were: using ō not ā in words like woe, stone, go—north of the Humber they kept the Old English ā; using y (i.e. ü, French u) and later i, in words like hill, sin, fire, mice—in Kent and East Anglia they said ē—and this explains most instances of the apparently gratuitous y in Caxton’s spelling; using the modal verb shall, as against Northumbrian sal; using pronouns, she, they, them, theyr, as against West and South Country heo, hy, hem, here. In verbs, the present participle and gerund generalised Southern and Midland -ynge, as against Northern -ande; the plural ends in -en or nothing: we speken, they use, as against the South Country we speketh, hy useth. In fact, the present tense of verbs became subject to a lot of confusion, since this -eth ending was also used as a third singular ending in the South, and is widely used as such in S
hakespeare and the King James Bible: the wind bloweth, he goeth. Ultimately, this too was replaced, but by the -es ending, which had been used for every person but first singular in the North: I here, but thou/ he/ we/ ye/ they heres. (These details are gathered from Mossé 1962, who gives many more.)

  * And indeed in Welsh: Elizabeth I also authorised the publication of Y Beibl Cyssegr-lan, which was printed in London in 1588, and joined the Welsh translation of the Prayer Book (Y Llyfr Gweddi Gyffredin) in Welsh churches.

  † A corpus of texts that is usually mentioned in the same breath as the King James Bible, and accorded almost equal status in the textual definition of English, is the poetry of William Shakespeare. The two are almost exact contemporaries, this ‘Authorised Version’ of the Bible being compiled from 1604 to 1611, and Shakespeare writing from 1590 to 1611. But unlike the Bible, Shakespeare (first fully published in 1623) did not immediately become an iconic text of the English language, his reputation growing through the seventeenth century until it was fully canonised by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth.

  The Shakespeare phenomenon recalls the place of Homer in the history of Greek. Each was a poet of encyclopedic range and unchallenged quality but obscure identity, at or near the very foundation of the language’s main tradition of literary classics. Each seems to have acquired this status at least a century after he actually lived and composed. Each went on to have an overwhelming role in the heritage of his language, endlessly praised by critics and schoolteachers, and also to inform traditional ideas of the language community’s history. Perhaps this is best explained by emphasising that each of them is indebted more than most to a rich ancient tradition, Homer to that of the travelling bard or aoidós, Shakespeare to that of the strolling player. This was less remarkable to their contemporaries, who saw them in context, but somehow, as time went on, their works were felt to sum up the tradition, and so replaced it in memory.

  * Too many remarks proffered as comments on the nature of English, especially by writers, are thinly disguised praise of the traditions and aspirations of its speakers. Consider Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s words introducing the Oxford Book of English Verse: ‘Our fathers have, in the process of centuries, provided this realm, its colonies and wide dependencies, with a speech as malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural, capable of being as precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, and captaining all these excellences to its service.’ Or Walt Whitman: ‘Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race and range of time, and is the culling and composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, and is really the greatest of studies’ (’Slang in America’, North American Review, 41, 1885). Such confidence may of course be useful in using the language eloquently. Any language carries a vast network of associations with the past, which grow in power as that past is remembered.

  * I should reassure linguists reading this that I am consciously ignoring the structure latent in the vast amount of vocabulary borrowed from, or constructed out of, Latin, French and Greek.

  * To my knowledge, only the Japanese ’kanbun’ tradition of marking up classical Chinese text to be read out just as if it were in Japanese has had the chutzpah to dispense with that basic convention.

  * It, and the island of Croatoan, to which it famously but mysteriously decamped, were actually on the coast of modern North Carolina. The few survivors, merging with local Algonquian speakers, were to drop their English in the seventeenth century. But English did survive in the follow-up colony at Jamestown, whose capital was later moved to Williamsburg.

  * It is interesting to note that one major motive for Rome and Russia, the drive to secure borders by conquering neighbours, was largely absent.

  * The term is an anachronism, but the concept is not. Hakluyt organises the document, Discourse of Western Planting, with all the striking content on the second page, chapter headings that tell it all:

  A particuler discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde comodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne discoveries lately attempted, Written In the yere 1584 by Richarde Hackluyt of Oxforde at the requeste and direction of the righte worshipfull Mr. Walter Raghly [Ralegh] nowe Knight, before the comynge home of his Twoo Barkes: and is devided into xxi chapiters, the Titles whereof followe in the nexte leafe.

  * Chesapeake Bay, the site of the Virginia colony, had in fact been the northern boundary of Spanish Jesuit activities in ‘la Flórida’. From 1565 this had included small settlements in the modern Georgia, Carolinas and Virginia, but the whole area was abandoned in 1572 after eight missionaries were killed at Chesapeake.

  † Pocahontas was in many ways an exceptional woman. Seven years earlier, when still a girl, she had intervened with her father to save the life of another English pioneer, Captain John Smith, who went on to become the Jamestown colony’s first governor. When John Rolfe won her hand, she had still been confined against her will on an English ship on the Potomac river. She later became an early convert to Protestant Christianity.

  * The French had, as it happened, already studied the Algonquin language, when exploring the Ottawa river valley in 1541.

  * Swedish presence on the Atlantic seaboard was of fairly short duration (1638-55); their settlement in Delaware had been summarily evicted by the Dutch.

  * In 1867, Alaska too was acquired, by purchase from Russia.

  * This has been transmuted into the legend that at one point German was almost to be declared the official language of the USA.

  German remained the second-largest language of immigrants (at 25 per cent) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There was a surge of German-speaking immigrants in the early nineteenth century, and a tendency early on for them to congregate in Pennsylvania. It peaked in the 1870s, when 600,000, among a state population of 4 million, are said to have had German (’Pennsylvania Dutch’) as their everyday language, with another 150,000 outside the state. The popular use of German in public was very severely damaged by the First World War. It survives today only in small sectarian communities such as the Mennonites and Amish (Adams 1990: ch. 7).

  † This is made up of 14 per cent from the UK, 13 per cent from Ireland, 12 per cent from Canada, 4 per cent from the Philippines and 1 per cent from Jamaica. After German with 25 per cent, the next languages are Russian (10 per cent), Hungarian (4 per cent) and Chinese (3 per cent) (US Dept of Justice, 1998 Statistical Yearbook, quoted in Wright 2000: 291).

  * New York’s ‘Bowery’ perpetuates the name of the farm of Pieter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor.

  * Over 1.2 million Britons for 55,000 French.

  * Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Wyoming.

  * By interesting coincidence, the cities that grew up around them, which went on to become the first centres of government for British India, have all been renamed in the 1990s: as Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata.

  † Gujarati vāniyān, ‘merchants’, Hindi dubhā⋅iya, ‘bilingual’ (Yule and Burnell 1986 [1903], s.vv.).

  § The Mughals had brought Persian to India in the sixteenth century as their language of culture, although their ordinary sipāhi (’sepoy’) spoke Turkic. There is something strangely analogous to the Norman conquest of England here, with Persian in the role of French, and Delhi’s vernacular, developing into ’Urdū’ under Persian influence, in the role of English. In this sense Urdu, literally ‘language of the camp’, was the distinctive linguistic creation of the Mughals in India. And it was this, not English, which was to become the major language of the British Indian Army. (See Chapter 5, ‘Sanskrit no longer alone’, p. 222.)

  ¶ Arabic ‘educator, composer’ (Yule and Burnell 1986 [1903], s.v.).

  * Comparing this with the role of missions in the spread of Spanish points up another irony. For as noted in Chapter 10 (“The Church’s solution: The lenguas generales’, p. 3
64), the Spanish missions had served to retard the spread of Spanish, while the state was inclined to encourage it. In Brazil, something similar had occurred (see Chapter 11, ‘Portuguese pioneers’, p. 392). But in British India, the effects of Church and state—or state monopoly—were the reverse of this.

  * This was the very period when British academic studies of India’s history were making giant strides: between 1835 and 1837 James Prinsep, Assay Master at the mint, and secretary of the Asiatic

  Society of Bengal, succeeded in deciphering the Brahmi writing of the emperor Aśoka’s third-century BC inscriptions, and so unlocked the central story of the Maurya dynasty. (See Chapter 5, “The character of Sanskrit’, p. 188.) James’s brother Henry Thoby, then Chief Secretary to the government, had spoken out eloquently against Macaulay’s minute, possibly even leaking it and so providing the basis for a petition from eight thousand Muslims and another from Hindus. James, in an editorial in the Asiatic Society’s Journal, condemned ‘a measure which has in the face of all India withdrawn the countenance of the Government from the learned natives of the country, and pronounced a verdict of condemnation and abandonment on its literature’ (Allen 2002: 166-7).

  * Motto: ‘A lass and a lakh a day’ (Dalrymple 2002: 33).

  * English law, especially as applied in Australia, has a revealing quasi-synonym for this: terra nullius, literally ‘land belonging to nobody’.