Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (63 page)

^*
The authors are in fact extremely few, and are still recognisable as the core of a traditional, classical education in western Europe. The dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes; the historian Thucydides; the philosopher Plato; and a handful of orators culminating in Demosthenes, who inveighed against the threat of Philip of Macedon. Greek traditional attitudes dating back to the Roman empire effectively still defined the British school syllabus that I studied in the 1960s.

^*
Another feature of the writings besides their style was innovative. Christians were important in popularising the new format for books, the ‘codex’, with separate two-sided pages attached to a spine, as against the traditional scroll. This set the format for at least the next two thousand years. The conjecture is that this made books much easier to access when bookmarking, and quoting, important passages (Harris 1989: 296).

† Both Greek
homilía
and Latin
sermō
originally meant an informal conversation, a chat.

^*
His host, Artavazdes, the king of Armenia, was also a Greek scholar, apparently, to the extent of having written his own plays in the language (Plutarch,
Crassus
, fin.).

† Over the three years AD 114-17, the whole area was taken and lost again by the emperor Trajan. But the north-western portion, Osroëne, was incorporated for two centuries after a Roman campaign in 164.

^*
Mango (1980: ch. 1) puts the population of the eastern Mediterranean provinces in the mid-sixth century at 30 million, with 8 million in Egypt, 9 million in Syria-Palestine-Mesopotamia, 10 million in Anatolia and 3-4 million in the Balkans. Note also how Anatolia had twice the population of Greece and the European provinces.

^*
The writing was on the wall for the Byzantines in that year of 1071: news also arrived that the Normans had taken Bari, ending 535 years of their empire in Italy.

^*
The Greek Orthodox patriarchate indeed gained from the Turkish conquest, since the Sultan Mehmet rationalised his Orthodox subjects after taking Constantinople, incorporating the Bulgarian and Serbian patriarchates under the authority of Constantinople. Linguistically, of course, they remained separate.

^*
e.g.
zingiberi
, ‘ginger’,
sakkharon
, ‘sugar’ (see Chapter 5, “The character of Sanskrit’, p. 192).

^*
Close to the full list seems to be
spíti
, ‘house’ (from Latin
hospitium
, ‘inn’),
skamnío
, ‘bench’
(scamnum), pórta
, ‘door’,
kámara
, ‘room’,
vérga
, ‘rod’, and possibly
áspros
, ‘white’ (from Latin
asper
, ‘rough’). Compare the vastly longer list of borrowings by Welsh (which was in close contact with Latin for half the time). (See Chapter 7, ‘Consilium: The rationale of Roman imperium’, p. 303.)

† It has been suggested that the favourite choice of the Christian word for ‘love’,
agápē
, is influenced by Hebrew
’āhēb
, ‘love’ (which happens to have much stronger sexual overtones than the Greek), and Greek
skébar;nē
, ‘tent’, by Hebrew &s
car;eken
, ‘dwelling’ (Moule 1959: 186).

The history of Europe, over the three thousand years for which we have evidence, is dominated by the changing fortunes of four closely related families of languages: Celtic, Italic, Germanic and Slavonic. In every age, their advances across the continent have been warlike: there is a depressing brutality about the heroics in which they all gloried. But like the languages themselves, the cultures they fostered characterise different peoples, each with rather different values.

This chapter focuses on the crucial part of that history, which witnessed a major shift in ambient language, all over western Europe, from Celtic to Latin. This linguistic shift was unambiguously due to military conquest, and the sheer clarity of it lives on to this day in Europe’s everyday conception of what changes languages: control, backed by military and economic strength. And yet, as if to provide an object lesson in the inadequacy of that simple view, this conquest was itself overwhelmed. After half a millennium of stability, the military balance was overturned in a wide-ranging military catastrophe from which there was no recovery: indeed, it set the pattern of political and national boundaries that has lasted to the present day. Yet while the linguistic effect of all this in most of the West was nil, in Britain, and in the Balkans, it proved decisive.

Looked at as a whole, the history of these crucial thousand years, approximately from 500 BC to AD 500, has a certain symmetry. It begins and ends with the triumph of mobile military societies organised round kinship relations, the Celts at the outset, the Germans and Slavs at the close. In between, we see the triumph of a civic society, which unified Europe, organised its defences and provided good communications throughout, through well-kept roads and well-patrolled sea routes.

For the first 250 years, Gaulish raiders (backed by the best weapons technology available, in iron) dominate the continent, then settle down. They may have participated then in large-scale trade up and down the Atlantic coast, which also spread their language. Then, over a period of 250 years, they are gradually but systematically overwhelmed, by a better-organised and strategically self-conscious foe, the Romans. Ironically, it is only when the raiders begin to unify and organise themselves jointly for defence (under Vercingetorix) that they can be undone with finality. Four hundred years of stability ensue, while the Roman empire effectively resists continuing pressure for immigration from Germany. Under greater stress (originating in north and east Asia), the resistance fails, first sporadically, then totally; and the last hundred years are spent watching the effects of allowing new sets of raiders to pass as they will through the old imperial domains.

All in all, the major changes of language in this period, the spread of Latin across Italy, and into Gaul and Iberia, the spread of English in Britain, and the spread of Slavic in the Balkans, are the best markers of serious cultural change. The cases where serious language change failed to follow on from conquests expose the hollowness of much military glory—the conquests in western Europe by Franks, Vandals and Visigoths, even the conquests in Britain by Romans and Normans.

We now turn to look at this tale in more detail. It costs some effort to forget the well-known recent centuries, and see these languages as they appeared at the beginning. Perhaps the best way to begin is to consider how they appeared to those ever curious, but in this case uninvolved, bystanders, the Greeks.

At the start the Greeks simply saw the Celts as one of the framing nations of their world: Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, says that they lived where the river Istros (Danube) came from, farthest west of all European nations, but for the Cynetes.
¹
He places them beyond the Pillars of Hercules, effectively on the Atlantic coast where Portugal is today, just as the historian Ephorus
²
does a century later, Celts in the west, Scythians in the north. There was something of conventional legend in this story, reminiscent of the Chinese world image which saw the familiar, civilised, world surrounded on all sides by unknown barbarians (see Chapter 4, ‘Foreign relations’, p. 158). But if so, the cliché had been a lucky guess. On modern evidence there were at the time Celtic speakers all the way across from the source of the Danube to the north of Iberia.

Their first real appearance is in the tale of the young prince Alexander’s reception of Celtic ambassadors from the coast of the Adriatic in 335 BC. It was apparently reported by his friend Ptolemy, who as it happened went on to be king of Egypt.
³
They were big men, he says, in stature and in opinion of themselves, and demonstrated this with a famous remark. They offered their friendship to Alexander—his empire-building had then yet to begin—but when challenged by him to say whether they were frightened, they declared that there was only one thing which filled them with dread, and that was the thought that the sky might one day crash down on them. This remained a byword for Celtic grandiloquence, but it seems to have been a misunderstanding of a Celtic oath formula. A thousand years later, Irishmen were still binding themselves ‘unless the firmament with its showers of stars fall upon the earth, or unless the blue-bordered fish-abounding sea come over the face of the world, or unless the earth quake… ‘
⁴

Subsequently the Celts (also known as Gauls:
Galatai
in Greek,
Galli
in Latin—Caesar comments that
Celtae
is the Gauls’ own word
⁵
) did gain a certain reputation. It is set out at length by the historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the late first century BC, and probably following the personal researches of the Greek polymath Posidonius.
⁶
Physically, they were supposed to be tall, lithe and fair, often with their hair artificially bleached with lime, the nobles sporting moustaches that covered their mouths and served as de facto wine-strainers. (This particular joke is over two thousand years old.) Their language sounded deep and altogether harsh. They were not without flair or subtlety, but did lack fixity of purpose, delighting to talk tersely in aphorisms and riddles. Nevertheless, they grew wordy when the time came to build themselves up, or belittle an opponent, in the lead-up to a fight. They dressed in bright colours, with cloaks often in check patterns, and—distinctively in the ancient world—the men wore trousers, called
bracae
^*

As for the Germans, the Greeks tended to confuse them with the Celts: after all, they all lived somewhere to the north-west, and no one had yet thought to look for significant differences among such impenetrably barbarous tongues.† For the ancients, clear distinguishing features could only be cultural; linguistically, the best that could be done was to note that one tribe had difficulty understanding another.

Even writing in the first century AD, after Caesar had subdued Gaul up to the Rhine, the Greek Strabo could not give much of a description of the Germans.
⁷
Living to the east of the Rhine, they were wilder, bigger and fairer than the Celts, but otherwise very similar. In fact, so quintessentially similar did they appear to Strabo that he etymologised their name
Germani
, as the Latin for ‘out and out [Celts]’. Caesar seems to have been responsible for setting the Rhine as a divider, but there is precious little evidence, archaeological or inscriptional, to back up his distinction, and he probably took the river as a convenient natural boundary to his conquests. Nevertheless, this did soon become the permanent boundary of the Roman empire, which meant that henceforth Gauls and Germans would be politically, if not ethnically, divided along this line.

Caesar’s view was that German society was simpler than that of the Gauls, without agriculture but more polarised around military prowess, and less capable of forming large-scale communities. In this he may have uncovered the secret of the Germans’ long-term success in fending off Roman conquest.

A century and a half later, the basic separation between Gaul and German at the Rhine was reiterated by Tacitus in his treatise
Germania
, although he noted that there were a few German tribes who had crossed over. He also provided the classic treatment of the character of German society, as Posidonius and Caesar had done for Gaul. He saw them as a society of small isolated families, feeling crowded if they could see their neighbours’ chimney smoke even in the distance, and coming together only for the ennobling purpose of glory in war. He rather admired their egalitarian upbringing, physical fitness in harsh conditions, and simple morality.