Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (72 page)

Chinese has retained its role as the high-level focus, political and intellectual, for all the communities that speak related dialects (or daughter languages). Unlike Greek, it has lost linguistic unity, all over its south-eastern provinces; but political unity by and large has held firm. The phonetic inexplicitness of its writing system has, to an extent, allowed it to ignore emergent differences between its standard core and those dialects. This same ambiguity has enabled it, in the last century, to switch its linguistic norm from classical
wényán
to Beijing
báihuà
without losing the allegiance of the whole set of Chinese-speaking communities. The logographic writing system, then, has enabled Chinese to escape the ‘first death’, without preventing numbers of its daughter languages from diverging.

Sanskrit, like Latin, has given rise to (or been closely associated with) a number of daughter languages; this marks the major common feature of its history and Latin’s, namely the breakdown of political unity over its speech area for a long time. As such Sanskrit shared what we have called the ‘first death’ of Latin. As in the case of Latin, this led to the daughter languages establishing themselves as independent literary languages for popular themes. But it long retained its role as high-level intellectual centre, and hence in some sense linguistic ideal, for these independent languages. Despite the impact of English from overseas, eliminating its high-level secular role, it has never been replaced as the focal religious vehicle for the majority of Indians.

The next tale in this history is the phenomenal spread of Latin’s daughter languages; to this we shall very soon pass. This, after all, is the real, continuing, story of the Latin speech community. And yet, in a way, Latin as a living language did find a new disguise.

In the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, western Europe had been enlightened by a new and more direct knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin, aided by the influx of Byzantine scholars after the fall of Constantinople and its empire. Westerners began for the first time in a thousand years to have a reading knowledge of Greek, and eagerly lapped up the associated stylistic doctrines of Atticism (see Chapter 6, ‘Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning’, p. 254). Perhaps by contact, perhaps because of the nature of self-consciously classical studies, many began to develop a corresponding linguistic snobbery about their Latin, wanting to go back to the most ancient sources. Only Cicero’s work would do. Not all humanists caught this bug: in particular Erasmus, a witty Dutch classicist writing in the early sixteenth century, wrote a
Dialogus Ciceronianus
to satirise the aspiration, envisioning a character called Nosoponus (’labouring under a disease’) exerting himself to work out which inflected forms of each verb were actually found in Cicero’s work, and which (more importantly) were not. For such a man, even his dreams were restricted to Cicero (
’Nec aliud simulachrum in somnis occurrit praeterquam Ciceronis…’
); the naive witness Hypologus comments that he looks more like a ghost than a man (
’Larvae similior videtur quam homini’
).

When this kind of devotion to the details of expression established itself as respectable, it became possible to see the style of expression as far more important than the content, and the knowledge of what had been said as far superior to the ability to innovate and strive for progress. So just as the highest aspiration for Greek scholars in the West was to read the texts (and perhaps write a pastiche—but only in classical style), now people came to think they were preserving the value of Latin if they became experts in the language and its extant early literature, for their own sake alone. The primary uses of a language, to think and feel, to express ideas and to communicate them, became purely subordinate to this ‘classicism’.
^*

It would have been better if Latinists had accepted the resigned verdict of one of their favourite poets:

The beginnings of the global spread of European languages came just as printing presses and publishers were asserting the existence of vernaculars, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, English, Dutch and German, over the body of a Latin that was gradually being drained of life. The languages that spread were those of the successor states of the western Roman empire; and so their educated elites were no strangers to the ideal, and indeed the romance, of vast, multinational empires. They had been brought up on the histories of Rome and Alexander; and they were filling their imaginations with tales of chivalry, conquest and adventure in strange lands, of Amadís de Gaula (hero of a popular romance of the fifteenth century, published in Zaragoza in 1508), his son Esplandián (1510), and many, many others.
^*
History was about to make their dreams come true.

The country that would play the leading role in the conquest and colonisation of the New World already felt itself entering a golden age. A century of uncertain intrigue had been resolved in the peaceful union of Spain’s competing kingdoms, Castile in the north and centre, and Aragon in the east: Castile had come to Isabella in 1474, and Aragon to Fernando in 1479; princes already joined in marriage, they were so acceptable to the Pope that they went on to be granted the title of
’Reyes Católicos’.
They were to reign together for another twenty-five years, during which they completed the Christian conquest of Spain. The last Moorish kingdom, Granada, fell on the second day of 1492, but the ten-year war had stretched the Spanish treasury to its limit.

Linguistically, Spain was an alliance of three major Romance languages, Galician (
gallego
) in the west, Castilian (
castellano
) in the centre, and Catalan (
català
) in the east.
^†
Catalan is much more similar, as a language, to Occitan or Provençal, as spoken in southern France. It is possible to see part of the origins of the Spanish three in the different Germanic groups who took control of Iberia in the fifth century, the Suevi in the north-west, Visigoths in the centre and south.
^§
At any rate, Castile established itself as the most powerful state in the region, having absorbed the western kingdom (ruled from León) in 1230. Aragon, in parallel, had come to dominate the west, uniting in a fairly equal partnership with Catalonia in 1140.

The linguistic effect of the union of Castile and Aragon, with Aragon as the junior partner, was to make Castilian the
de jure
standard for the whole of Spain, just before the flowering of literature in the early seventeenth century. And as Christians went on to replace Moors in the southern reaches of Andalusia, they recolonised the south of Spain with speakers of this Castilian. Henceforth, although Galician and Catalan retained their independence and still have their own literary traditions,
Castilian
became a synonym for ‘the Spanish language’, as it is to this day.

The Spanish approach to Christianity emphasised high-level authority as a guarantee of orthodoxy, and led all Christendom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in vigorously prosecuting this belief. The Inquisition had been founded in 1480, and in 1492 the extraordinary measure was taken of expelling all Jews from the kingdom. Then, in 1502, all practice of Islamic faith was abruptly banned, although it had been explicitly guaranteed in the terms of the Muslims’ surrender of Granada ten years before. There was a sense in the ruling circles of Spain that the truth was only to be found in inherited tradition; likewise the political ideal was for total unity of purpose between Pope and King, Church and State.

This was to have some strange effects on language policy in the Americas. Free thinking was seen as pernicious and indeed contagious; and a consequence of this was the preference, when Spain became responsible for education in the Americas, that native students should learn Latin, rather than Castilian; vernacular literature could never be guaranteed free of deceptive influences. But in spreading Spanish civilisation among foreign-language speakers, it would also become clear that the linguistic priorities of the secular and the sacred diverged: nothing matched the symbolic power of the Spanish language to signify empire—but it was easier, quicker and more reliable to spread understanding, and hence faith, in one of the native languages.

Faith and righteous government might be one thing: but the getting of wealth was another. Here there was scope for innovation. Indeed, the new departure that Castile authorised was so far reaching in its consequences that it transcended even the wildest fifteenth-century romance. The Portuguese were exploring south and eastward in this period, finding a route round Africa to India and the spice islands; they had rounded the Cape in 1488, and were to reach the fabled orient on follow-up expeditions, India in 1499, Melaka (Malacca) in 1511, Guangzhou (Canton) in 1514. But in that same cardinal year of 1492, the Spanish were offered, by the Genoese adventurer Christopher Columbus, a more speculative path to the same destination, travelling due west. Queen Isabella backed him, and the result was quite different from what had been hoped: not an economic back door to the Orient, but a whole new set of worlds to conquer, ultimately a far richer prize.

The spread of Spanish into the Americas was the first linguistic effect of a totally new development in recorded human history. The Spanish and the Portuguese discovered, in the late fifteenth century, that a new technology, the ocean-going ship, powered by sail, and guided by the magnetic compass and an evolving knowledge of prevailing winds, could give them direct access to distant parts of the world. Although this came as a surprise to these navigating nations, the shock was much greater to the peoples already living in the parts of the world on to which they burst. The Arabs of the Indian Ocean instantly lost their monopoly of trade with India and China; the Indians, the Chinese and all between them faced a new military threat from rapacious Europeans. But for the inhabitants of the Americas, without a seafaring tradition of their own, and so isolated for millennia from the hazards of long-distance contact, it was a shock that was usually fatal.