Empires of the Word

by Ostler, Nicholas

• ISBN13: 9780060935726
• ISBN10: 0060935723
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-03-16
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world's great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that binds communities together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. From the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions to the engaging self-regard of Greek and to the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe, these epic achievements and more are brilliantly explored, as are the fascinating failures of once "universal" languages. A splendid, authoritative, and remarkable work, it demonstrates how the language history of the world eloquently reveals the real character of our planet's diverse peoples and prepares us for a linguistic future full of surprises.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	xiii
List of Maps, Tables and Figures	xv
Maps	xv
Tables	xvii
Figures	xvii
Preface	xix
Prologue: A Clash of Languages	1	(4)
PART I: THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE HISTORY	5	(22)
Themistocles' Carpet	7	(11)
The language view of human history	7	(2)
The state of nature	9	(1)
Literacy and the beginning of language history	10	(3)
An inward history too	13	(5)
What It Takes to Be a World Language; or, You Never Can Tell	18	(9)
PART II: LANGUAGES BY LAND	27	(296)
The Desert Blooms: Language Innovation in the Middle East	29	(84)
Three sisters who span the history of 4500 years	35	(3)
The story in brief: Language leapfrog	38	(11)
Sumerian---the first classical language: Life after death	49	(7)
First Interlude: Whatever Happened to Elamite?	56	(2)
Akkadian---world-beating technology: A model of literacy	58	(10)
Phoenician---commerce without culture: Canaan, and points west	68	(10)
Aramaic---the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia	78	(8)
Second Interlude: The Shield of Faith	86	(7)
Arabic---eloquence and equality: The triumph of 'submission'	93	(12)
Third Interlude: Turkic and Persian, Outriders of Islam	105	(5)
A Middle Eastern inheritance: The glamour of the desert nomad	110	(3)
Triumphs of Fertility: Egyptian and Chinese	113	(61)
Careers in parallel	117	(5)
Language along the Nile	122	(12)
A stately progress	124	(2)
Immigrants from Libya and Kush	126	(3)
Competition from Aramaic and Greek	129	(3)
Changes in writing	132	(1)
Final paradoxes	133	(1)
Language from Huang-he to Yangtze	134	(15)
Origins	134	(3)
First Unity	137	(3)
Retreat to the south	140	(3)
Northern influences	143	(3)
Beyond the southern sea	146	(1)
Dealing with foreign devils	147	(2)
Whys and wherefores	149	(5)
Holding fast to a system of writing	154	(4)
Foreign relations	158	(5)
China's disciples	162	(1)
Coping with invasions: Egyptian undercut	163	(4)
Coping with invasions: Chinese unsettled	167	(7)
Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit	174	(53)
The story in brief	174	(6)
The character of Sanskrit	180	(15)
Intrinsic qualities	180	(5)
Sanskrit in Indian life	185	(5)
Outsiders' views	190	(5)
The spread of Sanskrit	195	(19)
Sanskrit in India	195	(4)
Sanskrit in South-East Asia	199	(8)
Sanskrit carried by Buddhism: Central and eastern Asia	207	(5)
Sanskrit supplanted	212	(2)
The charm of Sanskrit	214	(8)
The roots of Sanskrit's charm	214	(4)
Limiting weaknesses	218	(4)
Sanskrit no longer alone	222	(5)
Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek	227	(45)
Greek at its acme	229	(1)
Who is a Greek?	230	(4)
What kind of a language?	234	(5)
Homes from home: Greek spread through settlement	239	(4)
Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war	243	(7)
A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture	250	(4)
Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning	254	(3)
Intimations of decline	257	(8)
Bactria, Persia, Mesopotamia	257	(2)
Syria, Palestine, Egypt	259	(2)
Greece	261	(2)
Anatolia	263	(2)
Consolations in age	265	(2)
Retrospect: The life cycle of a classic	267	(5)
Contesting Europe: Celt, Roman, German and Slav	272	(43)
Reversals of fortune	273	(3)
The contenders: Greek and Roman views	276	(5)
The Celts	276	(1)
The Germans	277	(1)
The Romans	278	(2)
The Slavs	280	(1)
Run: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts	281	(14)
Traces of Celtic languages	281	(2)
How to recognise Celtic	283	(1)
Celtic literacy	284	(4)
How Gaulish spread	288	(4)
The Gauls' advances in the historic record	292	(3)
Consilium: The rationale of Roman imperium	295	(9)
Mos Maiorum---the Roman way	295	(4)
The desertion of Gaulish	299	(2)
Latin among the Basques and the Britons	301	(3)
Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances	304	(11)
The Germanic invasions---irresistible and ineffectual	304	(5)
Slavonic dawn in the Balkans	309	(1)
Against the odds: The advent of English	310	(5)
The First Death of Latin	315	(8)
PART III: LANGUAGES BY SEA	323	(200)
The Second Death of Latin	325	(6)
Usurpers of Greatness: Spanish in the New World	331	(49)
Portrait of a conquistador	331	(3)
An unprecedented empire	334	(7)
First chinks in the language barrier: Interpreters, bilinguals, grammarians	341	(9)
Past struggles: How American languages had spread	348	(2)
The spread of Nahuatl	350	(23)
The spread of Quechua	355	(6)
The spreads of Chibcha, Guarani, Mapudungun	361	(3)
The Church's solution: The lenguas generales	364	(9)
The state's solution: Hispanizacion	373	(4)
Coda: Across the Pacific	377	(3)
In the Train of Empire: Europe's Languages Abroad	380	(76)
Portuguese pioneers	381	(14)
An Asian empire	385	(6)
Portuguese in America	391	(4)
Dutch interlopers	395	(8)
La francophonie	403	(18)
French in Europe	404	(7)
The first empire	411	(5)
The second empire	416	(5)
The Third Rome, and all the Russias	421	(23)
The origins of Russian	423	(4)
Russian east then west	427	(5)
Russian north then south	432	(5)
The status of Russian	437	(4)
The Soviet experiment	441	(3)
Conclusions	444	(2)
Curiously ineffective---German ambitions	446	(3)
Imperial epilogue: Kominka	449	(7)
Microcosm or Distorting Mirror? The Career of English	456	(67)
Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French	458	(10)
English overlaid	460	(1)
Spreading the Anglo-Norman package	461	(4)
The waning of Norman French	465	(3)
Stabilising the language	468	(9)
What sort of a language?	474	(3)
Westward Ho!	477	(19)
Pirates and planters	478	(2)
Someone else's land	480	(5)
Manifest destiny	485	(5)
Winning ways	490	(6)
Changing perspective---English in India	496	(9)
A merchant venture	496	(3)
Protestantism, profit and progress	499	(5)
Success, despite the best intentions	504	(1)
The world taken by storm	505	(18)
An empire completed	505	(5)
Wonder upon wonder	510	(6)
English among its peers	516	(7)
PART IV: LANGUAGES TODAY AND TOMORROW	523	(38)
The Current Top Twenty	525	(9)
Looking Ahead	534	(27)
What is old	534	(4)
What is new	538	(3)
Way to go	541	(8)
Three threads: Freedom, prestige and learnability	549	(7)
Freedom	549	(1)
Prestige	550	(2)
What makes a language learnable	552	(4)
Vaster than empires	556	(5)
Notes	561	(18)
Bibliography	579	(12)
Index	591

Excerpts

Empires of the Word
A Language History of the World

Chapter One

Themistocles' Carpet

The language view of human history

From the language point of view, the present population of the world is not six billion, but something over six thousand.

There are between six and seven thousand communities in the world today identified by the first language that they speak. They are not of equal weight. They range in size from Mandarin Chinese with some 900 million speakers, alone accounting for one sixth of all the people in the world, followed by English and Spanish with approximately 300 million apiece, to a long tail of tiny communities: over half the languages in the world, for example, have fewer than five thousand speakers, and over a thousand languages have under a dozen. This is a parlous time for languages.

In considering human history, the language community is a very naturalunit. Languages, by their nature as means of communication, divide humanity into groups: only through a common language can a group of people act in concert, and therefore have a common history. Moreover the language that a group shares is precisely the medium in which memories of their joint history can be shared. Languages make possible both the living of a common history, and also the telling of it.

And every language possesses another feature, which makes it the readiest medium for preserving a group's history. Every language is learnt by the young from the old, so that every living language is the embodiment of a tradition. That tradition is in principle immortal. Languages change, as they pass from the lips of one generation to the next, but there is nothing about this process of transmission which makes for decay or extinction. Like life itself, each new generation can receive the gift of its language afresh. And so it is that languages, unlike any of the people who speak them, need never grow infirm, or die.

Every language has a chance of immortality, but this is not to say that itwill survive for ever. Genes too, and the species they encode, are immortal; but extinctions are a commonplace of palaeontology. Likewise, the actuallifespans of language communities vary enormously. The annals of languagehistory are full of languages that have died out, traditions that have come toan end, leaving no speakers at all.

The language point of view on history can be contrasted with the geneticapproach to human history, which is currently revolutionising our view of ourdistant past. Like membership in a biological species and a matrilineal lineage,membership in a language community is based on a clear relation. Anindividual is a member of a species if it can have offspring with other members of the species, and of a matrilineal lineage if its mother is in that lineage. Likewise, at the most basic level, you are a member of a language community if you can use its language.

The advantage of this linguistically defined unit is that it necessarilydefines a community that is important to us as human beings. The species unit is interesting, in defining our prehistoric relations with related groups such as Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, but after the rise of Homo sapiens its usefulness yields to the evident fact that, species-wise, we are all in this together. The lineage unit too has its points, clearly marked down the aeons as it is by mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes, and can yield interesting evidence on the origin of populations if some lineage clearly present today in the population is missing in one of the candidate groups put forward as ancestors. So it has been inferred that Polynesians could not have come from South America, that most of the European population have parentage away from the Near Eastern sources of agriculture, and that the ancestry of most of the population of the English Midlands is from Friesland.But knowing that many people's mothers, or fathers, are unaccounted for does not put a bound on a group as a whole in the way that language does.

Contrast a unit such as a race, whose boundaries are defined by nothingmore than a chosen set of properties, whether as in the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries by superficial resemblances such as skin colour or cranialproportions, or more recently by blood and tissue groups and sequences ofDNA. Likewise, there are insurmountable problems in defining its culturalanalogue, the nation, which entail the further imponderables of a consciousness of shared history, and perhaps shared language too. Given that so many of the properties get shuffled on to different individuals in different generations, it remains moot as to what to make of any set of characteristics for a race or a nation.* But use of a given language is an undeniable functioning reality everywhere; above all, it is characteristic of every human group known, and persistent over generations. It provides a universal key for dividing human history into meaningful groups.

Admittedly, a language community is a more diffuse unit than a species or a lineage: a language changes much faster than a DNA sequence, and onecannot even be sure that it will always be transmitted from one generation tothe next. Some children grow up speaking a language other than their parents'. As we shall soon see, language communities are not always easy tocount, or to distinguish reliably. But they are undeniably real features of thehuman condition.

The task of this book is to chart some of the histories of the language traditions that have come to be most populous, ones that have spread themselves in the historic period over vast areas of the inhabited world. Our view will be restricted to language histories for which there is direct written evidence, and this means omitting some of the most ancient, such as the spread of Bantu across southern Africa, or of the Polynesian languages across the Pacific; but nevertheless the tale is almost always one that covers millennia ...

Empires of the Word
A Language History of the World. Copyright © by Nicholas Ostler. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler
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