Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (30 page)

There was a lasting effect on Chinese from the many thousands of new terms which the translations produced, usually building on existing simple Chinese words but combining them in new ways. Three characteristic examples are
guò-qu
, ‘past’,
xiàn-zài
, ‘present’, and
wèi-lái
, ‘future’, each built of two elements:
passing/go, appear/be-there, not-yet/come.
Each precisely reflects the metaphor of a corresponding Pali word:
atīta, paccuppanna, anāgata.
^†
Such words became central to active Chinese vocabulary.

There is an irony here, or rather a significant correspondence between grammar and government. Other countries and languages may simply have borrowed some mangled version of the Sanskrit or Pali words, and supplemented the language that way. This is what was happening all over South-East Asia, even though its languages were just as different from the Indian languages as was Chinese. (See Chapter 5, p. 183.) But the fact that new words were reconstructions in Chinese of the concepts derived from Sanskrit or Pali words is of a piece with China’s general strategy in conducting its foreign relations: to attempt always to keep them under domestic control.

This attempt to maintain control was also a feature of China’s management of its front and back doors, the ‘Silk Roads’ round the Taklamakan desert to Dunhuang and the ports along the eastern seaboard. Although China was prepared to defend the security of the Silk Roads against the neighbouring barbarians from Roman times onward, the importance of the route was gradually eclipsed by the growth of the maritime trade. The maritime route was actually closed to private trade during the three centuries of the Ming period from around 1368, but when allowed this trade was concentrated mostly at Guangzhou (Canton), with some competition allowed from the more northerly port of Quanzhou in Fujian. From 1757 to 1842 and 1949 to 1979, Guangzhou enjoyed a monopoly, continuing the Chinese government preference for monitoring and easy taxation. This was forcibly broken open by European and American interests in the intervening century.

A strange exception to the general policy of the Chinese—which was to admit foreign trade on terms, but not to initiate it or to seek diplomatic contact with foreign powers—comes in the apparently unique case of Admiral Zheng-He, who undertook seven great voyages round the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433, reaching the Red Sea and Mogadishu.

In the Indian subcontinent Zheng-He’s attention was mostly concentrated on Śri Lanka, where on his second voyage in 1411 he is known to have left a trilingual inscription on a stone tablet (prepared in advance in China) in Chinese, Tamil and Persian.

It conveys greetings from the Chinese Ming emperor, and in its three languages expresses respect to the Buddha, the god Tenavarai-Nenavar and Allah respectively, listing massive offerings in gold, silver, silk, etc. These expeditions were evidently not mere courtesy visits, and have a certain dramatic similarity to the notorious behaviour of Europeans abroad: faced with resistance, the Chinese abducted the Śri Lankan king and took him forcibly to the emperor in Nanjing, but then returned him, along with the most holy relic in the island, the Sacred Tooth of Buddha. This resulted in a Chinese claim of sovereignty over Śri Lanka, which was actually respected through payment of tribute by the Śri Lankans until 1459.

Despite their apparent success, such imperialist initiatives ceased abruptly after Zheng-He’s final voyage, and were never renewed. No one really knows why. China’s foreign policy returned to its characteristic inward-looking and defensive stance.

Nevertheless, as seen above (’Beyond the southern sea’, p. 146), Chinese expatriates have given China, and the Chinese, a bridgehead into South-East Asia which its government never looked for—and indeed discouraged over many centuries. Now, in all the major countries of South-East Asia, Chinese-language communities are the principal source of investment capital.

In the Philippines, the overseas Chinese make up 1% of the country’s population, but control over half of the stock market. In Indonesia the proportions are 4% and 75% respectively, in Malaysia 32% and 60%. In Thailand the overseas Chinese account for at least half of the wealth … According to one estimate, the 51 million overseas Chinese control an economy worth $700 billion—roughly the same size as the 1.2 billion mainlanders.
³⁴

Growing Chinese-dominated businesses will have the opportunity of communicating with one another in Chinese, whether Mandarin or Southern Min; and so for the first time the Chinese language has potential for expansion outside the mainland. China itself is no longer keeping its distance from its fellow-Chinese who have chosen to make their living abroad, and it is possible that this new, more diplomatic face of China will become openly influential, perhaps even hegemonic.

Although China was always reserved in accepting any influence from foreigners, its smaller neighbours who achieved some level of settled civilisation and independent statehood were nothing like so circumspect in their acceptance of influence from China. The states and peoples of Korea, Japan and Vietnam adopted this position. Each of them spoke a language unrelated to Chinese. Each of them had to resist sporadic Chinese attempts at conquest (though Japan suffered this only in the first flush of Mongol imperialism). But each first learnt to read and write not in their own languages but in classical Chinese. And each developed writing systems for their own languages by transforming or supplementing the use of Chinese characters.

Unlike Chinese with Sanskrit and Pali, they each adopted vocabulary from Chinese as it was, regardless of the fact that it did not fit well within the sound systems of their own languages. For them, after all, China represented the fountainhead of advanced civilisation.
^*
As a result their languages became full of Chinese loan vocabulary, modified for their own pronunciation, and have remained so ever since. They soon had as clear an appreciation of the meanings of the syllables they borrowed, and the characters associated with them, as the Chinese had themselves—indeed, perhaps clearer, since they also used the same characters to represent words in their own languages, related only by meaning.

This faithful adoption and incorporation of Chinese language has provided a useful time capsule of a kind for modern comparative research on the history of Chinese. These three ‘Sinoxenic’ dialects, Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese, Sino-Vietnamese, are made up of syllables and words borrowed from Chinese. They are so complete that it is possible to use them to read out whole texts in
wényán.
As such, they have preserved an echo of Chinese as it was pronounced when the words were borrowed. In fact, in the case of Japanese—complex as ever—there are three distinct echoes:
go-on, kan-on
and
tō-on
, depending on whether the word was borrowed in the sixth century, the eighth century or early in the second millennium. So the Mandarin word
nèi
, ‘within’, written
, is now
noi
, pronounced in the sixth tone in Vietnamese,
nae
in Korean and
dai
or
nai
in Japanese. These antiquated styles proved vital when in 1954 the Swedish scholar Bernhard Karlgren came up with a reconstruction of the sounds of seventh-century Chinese.
³⁵

This avid cultural discipleship of its neighbours could be considered a major secondary spread of the Chinese language. It is often compared to the role of Latin within English and other modern European languages, or Arabic within Persian and Turkish, but it is really more comparable with the fundamental role of Sumerian within Akkadian. Chinese was a language quite unrelated to its disciple languages, and totally unlike them structurally. Nevertheless, its writing system became the root of their literacy, its words became inescapable for any sort of educated discourse, and its literature was adopted as the foundation for their own education system.

With their neighbours so in awe of them, it must have been hard for the Chinese to see their superiority as anything but a universal, objective fact.

This is from a pessimistic analysis of Egyptian society, which became a literary classic. (The one surviving manuscript was copied out some thousand years after the text was written.) It shows that even early in its recorded history conservatives were bewailing barbarian influxes into Egypt, which as they saw it disrupted the social order: ‘Serfs have become owners … She who looked at her face in the water is now the owner of a mirror …’ The word for
barbarian
is
pīdjeti
, ‘bowman’, bringing his desert home (
hrswt
) with him, and pointedly contrasted with real people, proper Egyptians.

This text pre-dates any foreign incursions into Egypt that we know about, but evidently the immigrant, particularly unwelcome if he was a social success, was already a stock figure. Yet this ancient Egyptian insularity is telling us more about perennial attitudes than any actual crisis for patriots: the persistence of the Egyptian language shows that the country was able to absorb all the foreign immigration of the following two millennia without losing its central character and traditions.

It is an interesting feature of Egyptian history that, until the advent of the Muslims, they suffered no overwhelming nomadic invasions comparable to the coming of the Amorites and Aramaeans to Mesopotamia. Yet we know that Libyan immigration was significant over many centuries, and among Egyptian dynasties at least the Hyksos kings and the Kushites were foreigners who installed themselves by force. Why, then, so little effect on Egypt’s language and culture? Part of the reason must have been the high density of the Egyptians on the ground (
pace
Ipuwer): there were so many of them, benefiting from the bounty of the Nile, that interlopers were doomed to merge.

And so despite the incursions, and the splits and discontinuities in the dynastic tradition, Egypt remained true to its religion, and the concept of a pharaoh ruling through
maR ‘at.

But invasions ultimately did undo the Egyptian language in its homeland: after all, Egypt is today a predominantly Muslim country with a Christian minority, everyone speaking Arabic. How did Egyptian finally come to lose its grip on its speakers?

First of all, there must have been a progressive weakening and dilution of the Egyptian-speaking part of the population. It gradually became a highly multilingual society. Egypt, after all, underwent many invasions in its last five hundred years of independent existence, at the hands of Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans. In the Hellenistic period (332-30 BC) there was also a major influx of Jews, whose major lingua franca was Greek. None of these brought a language that was to achieve full vernacular status in Egypt. But as we have seen, the Aramaic associated with the Assyrians and the Persians did spread within Egyptian society beyond the official sphere, and each of these succeeding powers brought in and fostered new communities that would have spoken something other than Egyptian.

Nevertheless, when Arabs in the first flush of Islam took possession of the country in the mid-seventh century AD, Egyptian was still the principal language spoken in its streets and fields.

The Arabs were not the first force of nomads to penetrate Egypt: the Libyans, and perhaps the Hyksos, had achieved this long before in the second millennium, and there may have been many other smaller incursions over the three poorly documented Intermediate Periods of Egyptian history. The Arabs were not the first power to use a foreign language for purposes of government: all of the Persians, Greeks and Romans had done this. The Arabs were not the first substantial power with a centre abroad to take possession of Egypt, and rule it as a colony: this had been done before for two centuries by the Persians, and for seven centuries by the Romans. The Arabs were not even the first to introduce a new religion: this had been successfully attempted by the Christians in the Roman period.

Why, then, was Arabic the first language successfully to replace Egyptian in its home country? The answer must lie in the combination of all these circumstances. Egyptian’s strengths were subverted one by one.

First the Assyrian and Babylonian wars in Palestine created a large Aramaic-speaking émigré community in the Delta area. This would have been the end of Egyptian’s language monopoly in the country, not very significant in itself. But then the country was penetrated by numerous business-minded Greeks, brought in by the Saite dynasty to buttress an alliance against Near Eastern powers, and granted their own, Greek-speaking, entrepôt in Naucratis in the Delta. Egypt was now very much a multilingual society, with foreigners’ languages more and more associated with higher prestige. The Persian conquest, and a succession of foreign rulers from Persia and then (after Alexander) Greece, meant that now higher-level administration began to be conducted in a language foreign to Egypt: in Aramaic for two hundred years, and then in Greek for a millennium.
^*