Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
Read Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Online
Authors: Nicholas Ostler
Tags: #History, #Language, #Linguistics, #Nonfiction, #V5
EMPIRES
OF THE
WORD
A Language History of the World
NICHOLAS OSTLER
To Jane
SINE QVA NON
PROLOGUE: A CLASH OF LANGUAGES
PART I: THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE HISTORY
The language view of human history
Literacy and the beginning of language history
2 What It Takes to Be a World Language; or, You Never Can Tell
Three sisters who span the history of 4500 years
The story in brief: Language leapfrog
Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death
FIRST INTERLUDE: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ELAMITE?
Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy
Phoenician—commerce without culture:
Canaan, and points west
Aramaic—the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia
SECOND INTERLUDE: THE SHIELD OF FAITH
Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission’
THIRD INTERLUDE:
TURKIC AND PERSIAN, OUTRIDERS OF ISLAM
A Middle Eastern inheritance:
The glamour of the desert nomad
Immigrants from Libya and Kush
Competition from Aramaic and Greek
Language from Huang-he to Yangtze
Holding fast to a system of writing
Coping with invasions: Egyptian undercut
Coping with invasions: Chinese unsettled
Sanskrit carried by Buddhism: Central and eastern Asia
6 Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek
Homes from home: Greek spread through settlement
Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war
A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture
Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning
Retrospect: The life cycle of a classic
The contenders: Greek and Roman views
Rún: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts
The Gauls’ advances in the historic record
Consilium: The rationale of Roman Imperium
Latin among the Basques and the Britons
Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances
The Germanic invasions—irresistible and ineffectual
Against the odds: The advent of English
First chinks in the language barrier:
Interpreters, bilinguals, grammarians
Past struggles: How American languages had spread
The spreads of Chibcha, Guaraní, Mapudungun
The Church’s solution: The lenguas generales
The state’s solution: Hispanización
The Third Rome, and all the Russias
Curiously ineffective—German ambitions
Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French
Spreading the Anglo-Norman package
Changing perspective—English in India
Protestantism, profit and progress
Success, despite the best intentions
PART IV: LANGUAGES TODAY AND TOMORROW
Three threads: Freedom, prestige and learnability
What makes a language learnable
qūwatu l- ’insāni fi ‘aqlihi wa lisānihi.
The strength of a person is in his intelligence and his tongue.
(Arabic proverb)
If language is what makes us human, it is languages that make us superhuman.
Human thought is unthinkable without the faculty of language, but language pure and undifferentiated is a fantasy of philosophers. Real language is always found in some local variant: English, Navajo, Chinese, Swahili, Burushaski or one of several thousand others. And every one of these links its speakers into a tradition that has survived for thousands of years. Once learnt in a human community, it will provide access to a vast array of knowledge and belief: assets that empower us, when we think, when we listen, when we speak, read or write, to stand on the shoulders of so much ancestral thought and feeling. Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers.
This book is fundamental. It is about the history of those traditions, the languages. Far more than princes, states or economies, it is language-communities who are the real players in world history, persisting through the ages, clearly and consciously perceived by their speakers as symbols of identity, but nonetheless gradually changing, and perhaps splitting or even merging as the communities react to new realities. This interplay of languages is an aspect of history that has too long been neglected.
As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories.