The History of Languages An Introduction

by Janson, Tore

• ISBN13: 9780199604296
• ISBN10: 0199604290
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-12-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This is an introduction to the history of languages, from the distant past to a glimpse at what languages may be like in the distant future. It looks at how languages arise, change, and ultimately vanish, and what lies behind their different destinies. What happens to languages, he argues, has to do with what happens to the people who use them, and what happens to people, individually and collectively, is affected by the languages they speak. The book opens by examining what the languages are the hunter-gatherers might have spoken and the changes to language that took place when agriculture made settled communities possible. It then looks at the effects of the invention of writing, the formation of empires, the spread of religions, and the recent dominance of world powers, and shows how these relate to great changes in the use of languages. Tore Janson discusses the appearance of new languages, the reasons why some languages spread and others die, considers whether similar cyclical processes are found at different times and places, and examines the causes of internal changes in languages and dialects. The book ranges widely among the world's languages and mixes thematic chapters on general processes of change with accounts of specific languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Greek, and English.

Author Biography

Tore Janson is now affiliated to the Department of Linguistics Stockholm University. Until his retirement in 2001, he was Professor of African Languages at the University of Gothenburg. Previously, he had been Professor of Latin at the same university and is a world expert on its history. He is the author of the international bestsellers Speak: A Short History of Languages (OUP 2002, paperback 2003) and The Natural History of Latin (OUP 2004, paperback 2005).

Table of Contents

List of maps	p. x
List of figures and tables	p. xi
Preface	p. xii
Before history
Unwritten languages	p. 3
When did languages come into being?	p. 3
Forty thousand or two million years?	p. 5
What was the reason?	p. 6
Languages of gatherers and hunters	p. 9
Were languages then just like languages now?	p. 11
Vocabulary and society	p. 13
How many Khoisan languages are there?	p. 15
'What language do you speak?' 'Don't know.'	p. 16
The many languages of Australia	p. 18
What is a language?	p. 19
How many languages existed twelve thousand years ago?	p. 21
The large language groups	p. 24
Societal and linguistic changes	p. 24
Germanic, Slavic, Romance	p. 25
Indo-European languages	p. 28
Bantu languages	p. 34
What is a Bantu language like?	p. 36
Other language groups	p. 38
How language groups were formed	p. 40
Further reading, review questions, etc.	p. 44
The basis of history
History and writing	p. 51
Hieroglyphs and Egyptian	p. 53
River valleys and states	p. 53
The state, the language, and the script	p. 54
Hieroglyphs	p. 56
Chineseùthe oldest survivor	p. 59
Writing in another way	p. 60
Culture and states	p. 63
The large state	p. 65
Unity and splits	p. 67
Devouring other languages	p. 68
Neighbours	p. 70
Writing and society	p. 71
Further reading, review questions, etc.	p. 73
Language expansions
Greekùconquest and culture	p. 77
Language and alphabet	p. 77
Language as creation	p. 80
Are languages equal?	p. 81
Alphabet and dialect	p. 83
From city states to empire	p. 85
The New Greek	p. 87
Learning from the Greeks	p. 88
Latinùconquest and order	p. 91
Empire and language	p. 91
Language shift and language extinction	p. 96
Latin as an international language	p. 97
The influence of Latin	p. 101
Arabicùconquest and religion	p. 103
Invasion and languages	p. 103
Arabic as a language of high culture	p. 109
Decline, splits, and dialects	p. 110
One language or many?	p. 111
Further reading, review questions, etc.	p. 117
Languages and nations
Did Dante write in Italian?	p. 121
How languages become languages	p. 121
Latin and French	p. 123
Oc, oil, and si	p. 127
Written language and language name	p. 131
From Germanic to Modern English	p. 133
How English came to Britain	p. 133
Germani, Angles, Saxons	p. 136
The language of the Angles and Saxons	p. 137
Runes in Britain	p. 138
The Roman script and English	p. 140
The first centuries of English literature	p. 142
Bede, Latin, and English	p. 144
King Alfred and West Saxon	p. 146
Normans and French	p. 148
The transformation of English	p. 149
The new standard	p. 152
Nation state and national language	p. 153
The era of national languages	p. 156
State, school, and languages	p. 158
National languages and national poets	p. 161
Language and politics	p. 163
The language competition	p. 165
Further reading, review questions etc.	p. 168
Europe and the world
Languages of Europe and of the world	p. 173
Portuguese in the West	p. 173
	p. 176
Americaùa continent with three languages	p. 179
Portugal and the rest of the world	p. 181
English overseas	p. 182
What happened?	p. 183
How languages are bornùor made	p. 185
Slave trade, language mutilation, and language birth	p. 185
Are Creoles languages?	p. 189
The remarkable similarities	p. 190
Creole languages and language change	p. 192
AfrikaansùGermanic and African	p. 193
Afrikaansùdialect or Creole language?	p. 195
Norwegianùone language or two?	p. 197
How spoken language becomes written languageùor vice versa	p. 199
How languages come into being	p. 203
How languages disappear	p. 204
Death of a language	p. 204
The languages without a future	p. 207
The realignment of dialects	p. 208
What will be left?	p. 208
How languages disappear	p. 209
Shiyeyi and Thimbukushu	p. 213
The disappearance of languagesùgood or bad?	p. 215
Further reading, review questions, etc.	p. 218
Recent past, present, future
The heyday of English	p. 223
The new internationalism	p. 223
French, German, Russian, English	p. 225
The time of English	p. 226
Images of English	p. 229
Chinese and English in China	p. 233
East and West	p. 233
Baihua, Putonghua, and the simplified script	p. 235
From antiquity to modern times in a hundred years	p. 237
Language in school, language in life	p. 238
English and China	p. 240
Words, script, thought	p. 242
The future	p. 243
What next?	p. 246
In two hundred years	p. 247
In two thousand years	p. 255
In two million years	p. 258
Further reading, review questions, etc	p. 259
Chronology	p. 261
References	p. 264
Guidelines for answers to review questions	p. 268
Index	p. 271
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