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Authors: Nicholas Ostler

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Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

BOOK: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
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EMPIRES

 

OF THE

 

WORD

 

A Language History of the World

 

NICHOLAS OSTLER

 

 
 

To Jane
SINE QVA NON

 
CONTENTS
 

Cover

Title Page

PREFACE

PROLOGUE: A CLASH OF LANGUAGES

PART I: THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE HISTORY

1 Themistocles’ Carpet

The language view of human history

The state of nature

Literacy and the beginning of language history

2 What It Takes to Be a World Language; or, You Never Can Tell

PART II: LANGUAGES BY LAND

3 The Desert Blooms: Language Innovation in the Middle East

Three sisters who span the history of 4500 years

The story in brief: Language leapfrog

Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death

FIRST INTERLUDE: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ELAMITE?

Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy

Phoenician—commerce without culture:
Canaan, and points west

Aramaic—the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia

SECOND INTERLUDE: THE SHIELD OF FAITH

Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission’

THIRD INTERLUDE:
TURKIC AND PERSIAN, OUTRIDERS OF ISLAM

A Middle Eastern inheritance:
The glamour of the desert nomad

4 Triumphs of Fertility: Egyptian and Chinese

Careers in parallel

Language along the Nile

A stately progress

Immigrants from Libya and Kush

Competition from Aramaic and Greek

Changes in writing

Final paradoxes

Language from Huang-he to Yangtze

Origins

First Unity

Retreat to the south

Northern influences

Beyond the southern sea

Dealing with foreign devils

Whys and wherefores

Holding fast to a system of writing

Foreign relations

China’s disciples

Coping with invasions: Egyptian undercut

Coping with invasions: Chinese unsettled

5 Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit

The story in brief

The character of Sanskrit

Intrinsic qualities

Sanskrit in Indian life

Outsiders’ views

The spread of Sanskrit

Sanskrit in India

Sanskrit in South-East Asia

Sanskrit carried by Buddhism: Central and eastern Asia

Sanskrit supplanted

The charm of Sanskrit

The roots of Sanskrit’s charm

Limiting weaknesses

Sanskrit no longer alone

6 Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek

Greek at its acme

Who is a Greek?

What kind of a language?

Homes from home: Greek spread through settlement

Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war

A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture

Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning

Intimations of decline

Bactria, Persia, Mesopotamia

Syria, Palestine, Egypt

Greece

Anatolia

Consolations in age

Retrospect: The life cycle of a classic

7 Contesting Europe: Celt, Roman, German and Slav

Reversals of fortune

The contenders: Greek and Roman views

The Celts

The Germans

The Romans

The Slavs

Rún: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts

Traces of Celtic languages

How to recognise Celtic

Celtic literacy

How Gaulish spread

The Gauls’ advances in the historic record

Consilium: The rationale of Roman Imperium

Mōs Māiōrum—the Roman way

The desertion of Gaulish

Latin among the Basques and the Britons

Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances

The Germanic invasions—irresistible and ineffectual

Slavonic dawn in the Balkans

Against the odds: The advent of English

8 The First Death of Latin

PART III: LANGUAGES BY SEA

9 The Second Death of Latin

10 Usurpers of Greatness: Spanish in the New World

Portrait of a conquistador

An unprecedented empire

First chinks in the language barrier:
Interpreters, bilinguals, grammarians

Past struggles: How American languages had spread

The spread of Nahuatl

The spread of Quechua

The spreads of Chibcha, Guaraní, Mapudungun

The Church’s solution: The lenguas generales

The state’s solution: Hispanización

Coda: Across the Pacific

11 In the Train of Empire: Europe"’s Languages Abroad

Portuguese pioneers

An Asian empire

Portuguese in America

Dutch interlopers

La francophonie

French in Europe

The first empire

The second empire

The Third Rome, and all the Russias

The origins of Russian

Russian east then west

Russian north then south

The status of Russian

The Soviet experiment

Conclusions

Curiously ineffective—German ambitions

Imperial epilogue: Kōminka

12 Microcosm or Distorting Mirror? The Career of English

Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French

English overlaid

Spreading the Anglo-Norman package

The waning of Norman French

Stabilising the language

What sort of a language?

Westward Ho!

Pirates and planters

Someone else’s land

Manifest destiny

Winning ways

Changing perspective—English in India

A merchant venture

Protestantism, profit and progress

Success, despite the best intentions

The world taken by storm

An empire completed

Wonder upon wonder

English among its peers

PART IV: LANGUAGES TODAY AND TOMORROW

13 The Current Top Twenty

14 Looking Ahead

What is old

What is new

Way to go

Three threads: Freedom, prestige and learnability

Freedom

Prestige

What makes a language learnable

Vaster than empires

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

PRAISE FOR
Empires of the Word

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE
 

qūwatu l- ’insāni fi ‘aqlihi wa lisānihi.

The strength of a person is in his intelligence and his tongue.

(Arabic proverb)

 

If language is what makes us human, it is languages that make us superhuman.

Human thought is unthinkable without the faculty of language, but language pure and undifferentiated is a fantasy of philosophers. Real language is always found in some local variant: English, Navajo, Chinese, Swahili, Burushaski or one of several thousand others. And every one of these links its speakers into a tradition that has survived for thousands of years. Once learnt in a human community, it will provide access to a vast array of knowledge and belief: assets that empower us, when we think, when we listen, when we speak, read or write, to stand on the shoulders of so much ancestral thought and feeling. Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers.

This book is fundamental. It is about the history of those traditions, the languages. Far more than princes, states or economies, it is language-communities who are the real players in world history, persisting through the ages, clearly and consciously perceived by their speakers as symbols of identity, but nonetheless gradually changing, and perhaps splitting or even merging as the communities react to new realities. This interplay of languages is an aspect of history that has too long been neglected.

As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories.

BOOK: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
8.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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