Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (110 page)

1.
As such, it was recorded in many near-contemporary chronicles. For Motecuhzoma’s words in Nahuatl, I here quote from the contemporary encyclopedia of Aztec civilisation,
General History of the Affairs of New Spain
(xii.16), compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, and for Cortés’s in Spanish from the eyewitness account of his serving soldier, Bernal Díaz del Castilla,
True History of the Conquest of New Spain
(ch. lxxxix).

1.
Sykes (2001, chs 7, 10); Weale et al. (2002). See Chapter 7, ‘Against the odds: The advent of English’, p. 310.

2.
Anderson (1991) is a good guide to the short but fraught history of the concept of the nation, and its transplantation for use all over the world.

3.
Sahagün, vi. 13.

4.
Karttunen (1990: 291-4).

5.
Quotations from three Nahuatl speakers, cited in King (1994: 136-7).

6.
Aulus Gellius,
Noctes Atticae
, xvii.17:
Quintus Ennius tria corda habere sese dicebat, quod loqui Graece et Osce et Latine sciret.

1.
e.g. in Lipiński (1997:46).

2.
Firth (1964: 70-1). This is a reissue of works originally published in 1937 and 1930.

3.
Whitfield (1999: 36).

1.
Tablet II, II. 36-48; text from Lambert (1960: 40); trans. W. G. Lambert in Pritchard (1969: 596-600), slightly modified.

2.
II. 70-8; text from Lambert (1960: 148); trans. W. G. Lambert in Pritchard (1969:601).

3.
Lipiński (1997: 42-4).

4.
The Words of Ahiqar, col. xiv, 208-23; text from Lindenberger (1983: 209), with vowels supplied by Peter T. Daniels; trans. from Pritchard (1969: 430).

5.
The evidence is in the Elamite pronoun system, and some features of noun and verb morphology; Diakonoff (1985: 3); McAlpin (1981). But the attribution is still controversial.

6.
Lancel (1997: 437).

7.
Such colonies included Seleuceia on the Tigris, Seleuceia on the Eulaeus—none other than Susa, formerly the Elamite and Persian capital—and modern Aï Khanum in the Bactrian far east, i.e. modern Afghanistan (Wiesehöfer 2001: 111-12).

8.
Pritchard (1969: 56): Inanna’s Descent to the Nether World (trans. S. N. Kramer).

9.
Tsereteli (1959 [1912]).

10.
Expounded in Schmandt-Besserat (1997).

11.
Hallo (1974: 185-6); the Hymn to Inanna is translated in Pritchard (1969: 579-82).

12.
Pritchard (1969: 496): Love Song to a King (trans. S. N. Kramer), slightly adapted.

13.
Pritchard (1969: 652): Ua-aua, a Sumerian lullaby (trans. S. N. Kramer), slightly adapted; .

14.
Thomsen (1984: 293-4), quoting from
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
, 107(4), pp. 1-12; (trans. S. N. Kramer), slightly adapted.

15.
Pritchard (1969: 651): The Curse of Agade, vv. 279-81 (trans S. N. Kramer); .

16.
McAlpin (1981:60).

17.
Malbran-Labat (1996: 56).

18.
Wiesehöfer (2001: 10).

19.
Diakonoff (1985:24).

20.
Hallo (1974: 184).

21.
Kramer (1979: 39).

22.
This is the analysis of Malbran-Labat (1996).

23.
Roux (1992: 276).

24.
Sawyer (1999: 14).

25.
Oded (1979); Oded, quoted in Garelli (1982: 438); and Roux (1992: 308).

26.
Pritchard (1969: 284): from a display inscription in Sargon II’s show capital of Khorsabad (Dŭr Sharrukîn).

27.
Tadmor (1982: 451).

28.
Parpola (1999) claims it was quite deliberate: ‘The Aramaization of Assyria was a calculated policy aimed at creating national unity and identity of a kind that could never have been achieved, had the Empire remained a loose conglomeration of a plethora of different nations and languages.’

29.
Garelli (1982:442).

30.
Kaufman (1997: 114-15).

31.
Dietrich (1967: 87-90).

32.
ibid.: 90, citing Dietrich (1979: item 10).

33.
Kaufman (1974: 165-70). And Parpola (1999) notes a slip of the stylus in Ashurbanipal’s library copy of Gilgamesh (mid-seventh century), which could only have been made by an Aramaic speaker: the glyph for ‘lord’ (
mara
in Aramaic) in place of that for ‘son’ (
mara
in Akkadian).

34.
Pritchard (1969: 317): Historical documents, 5. Antiochus Soter (trans. F. H. Weissbach).

35.
ibid.: 136: Poems about Baal and Anath, f.C (trans. H. L. Ginsberg).

36.
Genesis xxvii.28 and 39. See also Gordon (1971: 122).

37.
Ezekiel xxvii.3-11, 25-6, 32.

38.
Lancel (1997: 357); Cribb et al. (1999: 225, 227).

39.
Augustine,
Letters
, xvii.2 (Letter to Maximus Madaurus).

40.
Pliny,
Naturalis Historia
, xviii.22.

41.
Hanno,
Periplus
(Codex Palatinus Graecus 398, fols 55r-56r).

42.
Augustine,
Sermones
, clxvii.4.

43.
Plautus,
Poenulus
, 930-1028.

44.
ibid., 1002-12: the translations of the Punic follow Sznycer (1967: 141-3).

45.
Livy, xxviii.46.16.

46.
Kaufman (1997: 115).

47.
Greenfield (1985: 708); Polotsky (1971).

48.
Thucydides, iv.50.

49.
Daniel i.4.

50.
Lemaire and Lozachmeur (1996: passim).

51.
Greenfield (1985: 701, n. 2).

52.
Pritchard (1969: 428): The Words of Ahiqar (trans. H. L. Ginsberg).

53.
ibid.: 491: Letters of the Jews in Elephantine (trans. H. L. Ginsberg).

54.
Schlumberger et al. (1958).

55.
Henning(1949).

56.
There is one curse-tablet of the fourth century BC, recently discovered at the Macedonian capital, Pella, which suggests that it was a variant Greek dialect, of the north-western type (Voutyras 1994).

57.
Brock (1989: 19).

58.
Saeki (1937).

59.
Their paradoxical use of English to protect the use of German is described in Johnson-Weiner (1999).

60.
Described from a Welsh learner’s viewpoint by Pam Petro (Petro 1997: 259-319).

61.
Hadith of disputed authenticity. Al-Tabrizi (1985: 6006).

62.
Attempted in Miquel (1968) and Planhol (1968).

63.
Qur’ān, xcvi.1-2. Tantalisingly, the last word here is also often translated as ‘blood clot’. The semantic root of
’alaqin
seems to be the idea of clinging.

64.
Braudel (1993: 72), quoting the Arab historian Baladhori.

65.
Lewis (1995: 184-6).

66.
Frye (1993:99).

67.
ibid.: 123.

68.
ibid.: 169.

69.
ibid.: 113.

70.
ibid.: 169.

71.
Guichard (2000: 143), quoting Jean-Pierre Molénat.

72.
Corriente (1992:34).

73.
Haddadou (1993: 87).

74.
Ibn Khaldūn, quoted in Ellingham et al. (2001: 552); this thirteenth-century author also wrote a history of the Berbers.

75.
Ibn Khaldūn,
Muqaddimat
, quoted in Armstrong (2000: 90).

76.
Shaw (1976: 5).

77.
Schoff (1912).

78.
Hourani (1995: 92-7).

79.
Dalby (1998: 591-5).

80.
Clauson (2002: 50, 183).

81.
‘Abd al-Ghanī (1929).

82.
Mango (1999: 496).

83.
Khaulavi (1979, vol. ii: 37).

84.
Braudel (1993:45).

85.
ibid.: 112.

86.
ibid.: 41-2.

1.
trans. Lichtheim (1973: 52).

2.
trans. Soothill (1910: 73-4).

3.
Pritchard (1969: 415).

4.
Erman (1894: 544).

5.
ibid.: 106.

6.
ibid.: 244.

7.
Noted by Loprieno (1995: 71).

8.
Moran (1992: xx-xxi).

9.
Bacchylides (1961: 14-16), frag. 20B; also Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1361.

10.
Greenfield (1985: 701, n. 2).

11. See Loprieno (1995).

12.
Johnson (1999: 177); Dodson (2001: 90, 92).

13.
According to the Cairene Arab Maqrizi (1365-1442), reported in Lipinski (1997: 29).

14.
By the Translators’ Bureau in late imperial times: Ramsey (1987: 32).

15.
Bazin (1948).

16.
Ramsey (1987: 102-3, 139-40, 236-7). Strictly speaking Cantonese has nine tones, having added one more split.

17.
Hashimoto (1986) argues a little too desperately that Chinese was effectively ‘Altaicised’ in the north, but his evidence is confined to transitory pidginised states of the language in Beijing, and a deviant contemporary dialect in Qinghai, where speakers are probably bilingual in Tibetan.

18.
Norman (1988: 20).

19.
Wang (1992: 11).

20.
Hall (1981: 212).

21.
Coedès (1968: 37). See Chapter 5, ‘Sanskrit in South-East Asia’, p. 204.

22.
Wang (1992: 16).

23.
Grousset (1970: 66).

24.
Mote (1999: 25, 980).

25.
The figures for Egypt are derived from Dollinger (2002), and for China from Barraclough (1978: 80, 127). McEvedy and Jones (1978) suggest a rather lower figure for Egypt in Roman times, 5 million. They simply dismiss the estimate in Diodorus (i.31) of 7 million for Egypt in 300 BC as ‘too high’. For China, they point out that the AD 2 census figures are actually for 11.8 million households. They estimate that China’s population then stayed close to 50 million until the beginning of the second millennium AD, when it began to rise with the greater cultivation of rice in the Yangtze valley, reaching 115 million in 1200, but then falling back in the Mongol era and not recovering until 1500. None of the above affects the general point about the exceptionally high population density of Egypt and China in the pre-modern world.

26.
Figures derived from Russell (1958).

27.
Pritchard (1969: 415).

28.
Arnett (1982: 45-7).