Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (33 page)

^*
In the Philippines, there are half a million Chinese, and in Thailand 1.8 million, almost all speaking Southern Min. Of Malaysia’s 4.5 million Chinese speakers, half speak Southern or Eastern Min, a quarter speak Hakka, a sixth speak Yue, the rest (still half a million of them) speaking Mandarin. Chinese has largely died on the lips of Indonesia’s 6 million ethnic Chinese, and only a third of them still speak some form of it in the home: but of those who do, over a third speak Min, a little less than a third Hakka, just under a tenth Yue. The remaining quarter speak Mandarin (Grimes 2000).

^*
This term, first applied to the Portuguese, derives from Arab-Persian
firengi
, ultimately from
Frank.

^*
Both empires very occasionally permitted a woman to take up the office of king, notably Hatshepsut ( 1473-1458 BC) and Cleopatra (51-30 BC) of Egypt, and the empresses Wu (AD 690-705) and Ci Xi (AD 1895-1908) of China. Eerily, it was in the reign of a woman that both monarchies, after so many millennia, came to their end.

^*
Their views of India are considered at pp. 192ff. below.

^†
Sanskrit atlta, pratyutpanna, anagata, ‘past by’, ‘given in the presence’, ‘not come’.

^*
So generally impressed were they with the way that their Chinese contemporaries did things that in the seventh century AD Korea and Japan even introduced the system of public examinations for entry into the government. (Vietnam, meanwhile, was spending the whole first millennium AD under direct Chinese rule.) But they did it as copycats, emphatically not because they appreciated the point of the system: the Japanese permitted only nobles to sit the examination; and in Korea, sons of higher-graded families were exempted.

^*
Aside from Cleopatra’s well-known bravura performance, Peremans ( 1964) finds little evidence of bilingualism in Ptolemaic Egypt, and much of Greeks and Egyptians (
egkhōrioi
, ‘locals’) sticking to their own languages. Some famous Egyptians, such as the high priest and Greek historian of Egypt,
Maněthō
, did reach high rank in what remained to the end a Greek-speaking hierarchy. But so many public documents were bilingual (the most famous being the Rosetta Stone, but also judicial notices relating to private cases) that the population could not have been. He also quotes a touching letter: ‘I was glad, both for you and for myself, to learn that you were learning Egyptian writing, because now you can come to the city and teach the children of Phalu … es the enema doctor, and have a means of support for your old age’ (p. 57). Despite the mention of writing, the tutor was presumably to be employed to teach the middle-class Egyptian children Greek, not vice versa.

^*
The Chinese have been unlike most other dominant language communities reviewed in this book in one way: they have not lumped all those speaking other languages under one unflattering name. The single term ‘barbarian’ is inescapable in English translation, but Chinese has many words, in principle all with different designations. Already in the third-century BC dictionary
Erya
(’Examples of Refined Usage’), the term
sìhši
is defined:
jiŭyí bādí qīróng liŭmán
, ‘the 9 Yi, the 8 Di, the 7 Rong and the 6 Man’ (
Erya
, s.v.
Sidí
, cited in Wilkinson 2000: 710). Yet another term was
Fān
, from the Chinese point of view divided into the
,
shēngfān
, and
,
shúfān, ‘raw’ or ‘cooked’, depending on whether they had begun to settle to civilised Chinese ways. Not that this multiplicity betokened any particular discernment or respect for the lesser breeds. Although the different words were part of the language, they were often lumped together, e.g.
Róngdí
, Yídí
, or used undiscriminatingly. In fact, the monosyllabic blanket terms are supplemented with more specific terms for particular tribes. These were often written out, as a kind of Chinese private joke, with insulting characters, e.g.
nú
, ‘slave’, in
Xiōngnú
, and
wō
, ‘dwarf’, in
Wōgŭo
, ‘dwarf-realm’, i.e. Japan. With urbane malice, this chanced to be pronounced in Japanese identically with
wa
, ‘harmony’, the term the Japanese preferred when referring to themselves.

^*
The famous Chinese novels of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, notably
Hongloumeng
, “The Dream of the Red Chamber’, by Cao Xueqin,
Sanguozhi Yanyo
, ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’, by Luo Guanzhong, and
Xiyouji
, ‘Journey to the West’, by Wu Cheng-en, were all written in this dialect of Chinese.

^†
There were also a number of attempts to replace Chinese characters with a romanised script, but with the acknowledged difficulty of finding a system that could be neutral in terms of the different dialects, none succeeded in becoming anything more than an aid to learners and foreigners. The Pinyin romanisation used in this book represents standard Mandarin, and is now close to being an international standard. It was developed in collaboration with Russian scholars, and published officially in 1957.