Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (21 page)
Read Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Online
Authors: Nicholas Ostler
Tags: #History, #Language, #Linguistics, #Nonfiction, #V5
The glamour of the desert nomad
The present-day globalised world is full of Arabic. It is the language that would-be Islamist revolutionaries in Europe and the USA feel they have to learn to give authenticity to their struggle; and its ironic similarity to Hebrew, newly revived in the land of Canaan, is a standing reminder of how the bitterest conflicts set long-lost cousins at each other’s throats:
salām
contends against
šəlōm
, but the common meaning, ‘peace’, continues to elude them. Meanwhile the classical language is still intoned every day in Muslim prayer, and broadcast to an audience of well over 200 million souls, all of whom think when they converse, in their very different ways, that they are talking Arabic,
’arabīya.
The language tradition of large-scale, unitary Semitic languages to which they are all heirs goes back demonstrably for five thousand years. In that time, there has been opportunity for a lot of innovations; the world has seen in their tradition the first adoption of a foreign language as a classic model for literature, the first system of writing with multilingual application, the first lingua franca of international diplomacy, the first archival libraries, the first alphabetic scripts, the first spread of language through trading colonies, the first substitution of one language for another without breakdown of a single literate tradition, the first use of a language as the talisman of a minority religious sect, the first designation of the written record of a particular language as the unchangeable word of God.
That is a fair record of firsts for a single tradition, even if its dominant language has twice been replaced, or, to put it perhaps better, renewed. We shall consider elsewhere the significance of all these examples in the general pattern of the development of human language systems.
An appropriate final reflection here might be to consider whether there is any distinctive continuity of character in this ancient tradition. Is there something about Arabic which it shares with Aramaic and Akkadian? Or have so many innovations, on the way through remote antiquity and the Middle Ages into the modern world, in effect revised away any common core?
Fernand Braudel saw in the total success of Muslim advance, so sudden and apparently so inexplicable, the natural reassertion of the Near Eastern tradition, after a Greek and Roman interruption of a thousand years.
84
He did see the Arabic language as the surest proof that countries are truly part of Muslim civilisation,
85
yet the examples he gives of continuity in Near Eastern civilisation—dress, food, domestic architecture, even monotheistic faith—have nothing to do with language.
86
At the most obvious level, the values promoted in Islam are the polar opposite of what their great imperialist predecessors the Assyrians embraced. The Muslims put forward their unique conception of God as a reason to accept their rule, emphasising all the while His infinite compassion. The Assyrian armies rolled over their neighbours to prove the greater might of their kings, and demonstrated their power through orgies of ruthlessness. Their gods followed, and if many chose to worship them, this was purely an acknowledgement of the greater power of all they stood for, an act of prudence and diplomacy, not the acceptance of a revelation or an act of sincere submission.
The Arabs going into battle for Islam can be seen in fact as an alloy of three very different preceding traditions among their fellow-speakers of Semitic languages: the abstract theology of the Jews, the embracing inclusiveness of the Aramaic Christians, and the military momentum of the Assyrians. Indeed, if one includes their propensity for long-distance navigation and speculative trading, they can also be ranged with the Phoenicians.
But there is one thing in the cultural background which does unite all the Semites, of whatever religion or desired level of opulence. However successful their cities, however developed their religions and philosophies, they never escaped the memory that they had all arisen from desert nomads. Arabic was the language of nomads, and Islam was founded by nomad aggression from Arabia. Aramaic penetrated the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, and so became established, through nomads spreading from Aram. The Hebrews and Phoenicians developed their cities and their cultures when Habiru nomads had finally settled down in the land of Canaan; explicitly, the Torah talks of the children of Israel wandering through the wilderness of Sinai for forty years. And the Akkadians might never have taken over from Sumer without the incursions of those little-known nomads of the west, the Amorites. Ultimately, surely, it must have been nomads who brought the Semitic languages in prehistoric times out of Africa and into the Fertile Crescent.
Nomads may be hard to find in the modern Semitic world. But aspects of nomadism are still central to the unsolved problems of the Arabs: the home-lessness of the Palestinians, the moral queasiness about the unearned riches welling up from the desert wastes of Arabia, the wild men of al-Qa’eda in self-imposed exile while they plan destruction for the iniquitous cities. In all this, speakers of Arabic are very true to their tradition. Indeed, the histories of Akkadian, Phoenician, Aramaic and Arabic are a five-thousand-year demonstration of the benefits of the desert—as a place to come in from.
*
The family is named after Noah’s second son, Shem, introduced in Genesis ix.18, and the linguistic use goes back to A. L. Schloezer, writing in 1781. He drew his inspiration from the fact that many of the peoples named as the descendants of Shem in Genesis x.21-31 spoke languages of this family, notably Hebrew (coming via Arphaxad), Asshur and Aram. But the term is not well chosen: Shem also had among his sons Elam and Lud, the patriarchs for Elamite and Lydian, which are quite unrelated languages; and Canaan (first of the Sidonians, as well as Amorites and Arwadites) and Nimrod (first of the Babylonians and Akkadians) are given as descendants of Ham, though their languages are in fact closely related to Hebrew, Assyrian and Aramaic.
*
The first Semitic names (in fact from Akkadian) appear even earlier, in Sumerian documents
c.
2800 BC (Caplice 1988: 3).
†
Pronounce š as English ‘sh’, h as the sound for blowing on glasses to mist them, θ as English ‘th’ in
thin
, ‘ as the clearing of a throat, ā as a long ‘a’ as in
father
, and ē as the long ‘e’ in
Beethoven.
*
The Greeks, on the scene too late to know any of these early origins, called the place Mesopotamia, ‘Mid-River-land’, emphasising the framing role of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, Greek versions of the names
Purattu
and
Idiqlat.
But in this early period the Euphrates is much more central, flowing through Babylon and Ur, and watering the lands of both Akkad and Sumer. The Tigris, farther to the east, grows in importance with the rise of Assyria. ‘Assyria’ is the Greek attempt to name
Asshur.
*
The name Hittite (from the Hebrewittī
) comes from their power centre in the land of Hatti, where the natives spoke a quite unrelated language, Hattic. The Hittites in fact called their language Nesian (
nešili
), after their city of Nešaš (or Kanesh, modern Kültepe, in south-eastern Turkey) but the biblical misnomer ‘Hittite’ has stuck.
†
Croesus, the proverbially rich last king of Lydia, fell to Cyrus the Persian in 547 BC. Linguistically, this was the ultimate death rattle of Hittite power.
*
This is his name in Hebrew. His real name was
Tukulti-apil-Esharra
, meaning ‘my trust is in the son of Esharra’, namely the Assyrian god Asshur. The Mushki are equated b55555tty Igor Diakonov with the Mysians, Thracian settlers in western Anatolia, and also the Armenians, named
Sa-mekhi
by the Georgians. The Bible also speaks of
Meshech
as a foreign people.
*
The
Phoinîkes
, especially the Sidonians, are renowned in the
Iliad
for fine weaving and metalwork, and in the
Odyssey
as travelling merchants.
*
There are 6 million tons of ancient slag, covering 3/4 of a square kilometre, at the silver mines of Rio Tinto, near Huelva (probably the site of Tartessos, believed to be the same as Tarshish in Hebrew). Despite this massive activity, extending over centuries, archaeological evidence tends to show that Phoenician settlements in Spain were commercial enclaves rather than towns (Markoe 2000: 182-6).
†
Another ideographic system, invented at the other end of Asia, had similar effects. The Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, all of which became literate through the use of Chinese characters, have sustained major linguistic (and cultural) borrowings from Chinese which are by and large still present today.
*
The one exception is Bactrian, later to become the language of the Kushāna empire (first to second centuries AD), written in the Greek alphabet. This shows the lasting cultural influence of the independent Greek dynasties in the far east, whom the Kushāna supplanted.
*
And this is precisely what we do with our number symbols, whether Arabic or Roman.
*
The Amorites did not have their own literate tradition, but their language can be partially reconstructed when their names are quoted in other languages, usually Sumerian. This provides a link with the later western Semitic languages, such as Ugaritic, Phoenician and Hebrew, which do not show up in the written record for another five hundred years or more. Since there was a tendency to assign names that are full sentences, they give a fuller picture of the language than might have been expected:
Aya-dadu
, ‘Where is Daddu?’,
Šūb-addu
, ‘Return, Addu!’,
Yašub-’ilu
, ‘God returns’,
Samsu-’ilu-na
, ‘The Sun is our god.’
*
This, after all, is exactly what happened to the various tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes who settled along with Frisians in Britain in the first millennium AD. Middle English, closest to Frisian, was the result.
*
In Babylon some diehards were still writing Akkadian on clay six centuries later.
*
As it happens, the last we hear about Akkadian is from a Syrian novelist writing in Greek in the second century AD: Iamblikhos (whose strange name is evidently Aramaic or Arabic,
ya-mlik
, ‘may he rule’) said he had learnt ‘Babylonian’ from his Babylonian tutor, a man ‘learned in the wisdom of the barbarians’. (The third-hand source for this can be traced from Stephens and Winkler 1995:181.)
†
Hebrew and Phoenician include some of the complexities of their grammar in their spelling: most of the stop consonants are pronounced as fricatives in the middle of a word. In our romanisation, we represent this with an under- or overline: thus,
, g,
, p,
are pronounced
v, th
(as in
then
),
gh
(a gargling sound),
ch
(as in
loch
),
f, th
(as in
thin
). Dots under s, t and d in Phoenician, Hebrew and Arabic mean that they are pronounced ‘emphatically’, giving them a somewhat dull, throaty quality.
*
Agreement has never been reached on why the Greeks picked on
phoinīkes
as their word for these roaming Semitic traders. Literally it means ‘date palms’ (or indeed the mythical phoenix birds), but the association with
phoinos
or
phoinios
, ‘gory, blood red’, was always kept in mind, since the Phoenicians were the purveyors par excellence of purple-dyed fabrics, and farmed the dye’s raw material, murex shellfish, on an industrial scale. The association of the colour with this part of the world goes beyond Greek: the Akkadian word for ‘purple’ was
kina
, derived from the place name
Kina
, ‘Canaan’ (Black et al. 2000: s.v.). Although the Hebrews lived in Canaan themselves, they used the word
kəna ‘aniy
, as Greeks did
phoinix
, to refer indifferently to a Phoenician or a merchant; and this seems to be what the Phoenicians called themselves.