Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (90 page)

^*
Camões is the doyen of Portuguese literature, and his great work celebrates the achievements of the Portuguese mariners. The name
Lusiadas
, although it recalls ‘Iliad’, is actually a learned equivalent for ‘the Portuguese’, meaning the progeny of Lusus, the mythical founder of the race who lived in (Roman) Lusitania. The work was actually written, for the most part, in Goa, so it is a product of Ultramar, as well as a celebration of it. It was published in 1572.

^*
‘Father, what has brought you to this land so far from India?’ Reported in his
Itinerario da Índia por terra
, quoted in Lopes (1936: 33-5).

^†
Now Bandar Khomeini, on the Straits of Hormuz.

^*
It became the default European language in the Indies, and apparently in western Java, in the region of Preanger, even Dutch was known popularly as
basa Perteges
—an interesting conflation of language misnomers, with
basa
, through Malay
bahasa
, from Sanskrit
bhā⋅ā
, and
Perteges
a corruption of
Portugues
(reported in Lopes 1936: viii).

^*
To compare with English dialects, Indo-Portuguese makes it like the E in a refined Scots pronunciation of ‘Edinburgh’, standard Portuguese more like the a in Cockney ‘mate’.

^†
Even so, in 2000 the state’s official language was declared to be Konkani, an Aryan language related to Marathi and Hindi.

^*
This was part of the global impact of the Enlightenment on Catholic governments (see Chapter 10, ‘The state’s solution: Hispanización’, p. 374).

^*
Palembang in Sumatra was the principal city of Śrī Vijaya, the ancient state that was most likely responsible for the spread of Malay round the markets of the East Indies. This proverbial statement of wasted effort is said to refer to a failed Dutch attempt to take Palembang, in their day a prime source of pepper (Hamilton 1987: 60).

^*
Each country had between 1.25 and 1.5 million people in the seventeenth century (Boxer 1969: 114).

^*
The Batavi were a Germanic tribe who had lived in the area of modern Holland, north of the Scheldt, around the turn of the first centuries BC-AD. They thus provided a useful classical pseudonym for historically minded Dutchmen, perhaps little appreciated by the Javanese among whom they settled.

^†
A major motive was the association of the Portuguese with Christianity, which the Japanese government of Tokugawa Iemitsu was determined to stamp out within their shores. The Dutch, prepared to restrict their concerns to secular matters of trade, were therefore the only foreign contact of the Japanese for the following two centuries.

This led to a famous linguistic incident in Japanese history (comparable to the use of Portuguese mentioned above, [’An Asian empire’, p. 388]). In 1853, when the American Commodore Perry entered the port of Uraga with his ‘black ships’, determined to end Japan’s isolation, one of the first Japanese to come alongside, Hori Tatsunosuke, said in very good English, ‘I can speak Dutch.’ Since one of the Americans, a Mr Portman, also knew the language, the first sustained exchange between an American and a Japanese actually took place in Dutch. (Hawks 1954, pp. 48-9)

^*
They originally stepped in to take pre-emptive control of Dutch possessions when revolutionary France occupied the Netherlands in 1795, but permanently annexed the Cape colony in 1806.

^*
Anderson (1991: 110) suggests two other motives: the absence of nationalism as such in the early seventeenth century (the VOC was after all a corporation, not a nationality), and Dutch lack of self-confidence in their own language. Neither seems particularly convincing, especially in comparison with the Portuguese competitors whom the Dutch were quite consciously outdoing. On p. 133, he suggests further that the Netherlands, with only one substantial colony, could afford to adopt a non-European language for administration: it would have been unworkable, he says, for a multi-continental empire such as the British. But the Dutch empire too, for its first 150 years, had been just as multi-continental.

On the other hand, he may be right in pointing (p. 110) to the language policy as a means of keeping the native population underdeveloped: ‘in 1940, when the indigenous population numbered well over 70 millions, there were only 637 “natives” in college, and only 37 graduated with BAs.’

^*
The Italian Pigafetta, accompanying the Spanish circumnavigators in 1521, had been able to compile a list of 450 Malay words at Tidore in the Moluccas. Nevertheless, it was not yet well established there: ‘even the scribes who had to write it for the infant Sultan of Tidore in 1521 and 1522 showed that they were “certainly very imperfectly acquainted with it’” (Hoffman 1979: 66-7, n. 9).

^*
There was always speculation that the strange unwillingness of the Dutch to share their language with their colonial subjects was a sort of snobbery, to enhance their prestige among the Dutchless natives. This was roundly discouraged by the Dutch administration as a harmful attitude. Nevertheless, it was widely believed by foreign observers (e.g. Bousquet 1940: 88-9); and it did happen to fit in with a certain aspect of Javanese etiquette, whereby social status was marked by styles of language (
taalsoorten).

^*
It might even be seen, by an unsympathetic Anglo-Saxon, as an example of ‘that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit’, a phrase of Peter Medawar in a review of Teilhard de Chardin’s
Le Phénomène humain
(accessible at ).

^*
The term was invented by the geographer Onésime Reclus in 1880, to refer to the French-speaking community in the world. Nowadays, at least in the French-speaking world, it refers preferably to a voluntary association of states under a charter, not all of them ex-colonies of France, in spirit rather comparable with the British Commonwealth. (See .)

^†
These figures are from Grimes (2000). The French Foreign Ministry’s
francophonie
website claims that there are 160 million first-language and second-language speakers. Leclerc (2000) states that 145 million people have been to school in French. Either figure might lift its rank above German, but not to the level of Portuguese.

^*
Je
is a remnant of what was once a Latin pronoun of emphasis,
ego
(brutally reduced, after changing to something like
eieu
—cf. the Provençal equivalent,
eu, ieu).

^*
There will be more to say of this retreat of French, from the viewpoint of the language that benefited from it, in the next chapter.

^†
The term, and the institution, continued in the Mediterranean until the nineteenth century, but the actual language used was based not on French but Italian, probably because of the later influence of merchants from Venice.

^§
Eleanor (Aliénor) of Aquitaine (1122-1204) played a cardinal role as a cultural sponsor. She could hardly have been better connected in society, being the wife of two kings, mother of two, and the mother-in-law of yet two more. But in the mid-twelfth century she made her court at Poitiers a centre for courtly love poetry and historical narrative.

^*
It has continued to enjoy the sponsorship of the highest level in French government ever since, broken only during the Revolution in 1793-1803. Its first task was to compile a dictionary; the first edition took almost sixty years, coming out in 1694, but it has been updated periodically ever since, the latest edition, the eighth, appearing in 1992.

^*
Hence the
bon mot
of Antoine de Rivarol, in his
Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française
, of 1784:
’Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français!’
(’What is not clear is not French!’),

^†
’Eh bien, mon prince, Gěnes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des, de la famille Buonaparte. Non. je vous préviens, que si vous ne me dites pas, que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j’ y crois)—je ne vous connais plus, vous n’ětes plus mon ami, vous n’ětes plus, comme vous dites.’

^*
In the eighteenth century, it yielded only to Spain; in the twentieth, only to Britain.

^*
Estimates of the French-speaking population of Algeria vary from the
Ethnologue
’s almost absurdly low 110,000 (out of a population of 30 million) to 25 per cent of the population (i.e. 7.5 million). Many believe that it is still the second-largest francophone population in the world, ahead of Quebec with 6.7 million, and Belgium with 4 million. (These latter figures also come from the
Ethnologue
—Grimes 2000.) It is widely believed that the Algerian government’s attempted ‘arabisation’ since 1962 has perversely increased use of other languages, notably Berber and French; but no survey data is available.

^†
One village he visited near Quebec City was known as
ganāda
, ‘settlement’ in the Huron language, which served as lingua franca along the river. This is the origin of the name
Canada.

^*
The mission flourished, although it did not lead to any French settlement at the time; indeed, de Rhodes was the only Frenchman in a Jesuit team consisting of six Europeans and a Japanese.
However, the need to protect the missions was later used to justify the massive French invasion of Indo-china which came in 1859. And de Rhodes himself is significant as the man who devised the script now known as
Quôc-ngu
(
, ‘National Language’), using Roman letters and accents. He had designed it as an aid to foreign missionaries learning Vietnamese. But in the late nineteenth century it was taken up, even by nationalists, as the key to mass literacy, and is now used universally in Vietnam.

^*
The poor Acadians were to fall victim to great power politics, their lands traded to England under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 in return for trading concessions in India. They were subsequently scattered along the coast, especially in Maine and the mouths of the Mississippi (where they became known as ‘Cajuns’), some in the Antilles and many back to the maritime provinces. Wherever they went, French-speaking communities sprang up, at least for a time.

^*
This can hardly have been a fundamental cause, since two decades later it was French naval power which crucially denied the British access to America when they were trying to hold on to their own colonies.

^†
The French had the satisfaction of providing Versailles as the site for the 1783 conference that divested Britain of its American colonies, just twenty years after the Paris conference when the British had taken Nouvelle-France from them.

^§
These figures are drawn from a French source, Leclerc (2001,

^*
Cayenne was founded in 1643 and with Caribbean sugar aplenty had been part of Colbert’s plans for systematic colonisation. It was briefly used after the French Revolution as a place of exile for political prisoners (1794-1805). It never recovered economically from France’s abolition of slavery in 1848, and thereafter was famous mainly for its prison camp, Devil’s Island, in operation from 1852 to 1946.

^†
By a happy coincidence, during the reign of Napoleon III, 1852-70, the regime was even known as
le second Empire.

^*
The Belgians, relying much more on foreign expertise to run their empire, also made less use of French as a pervasive language of administration. As in the British colonies, there was widespread use of any pre-existing lingua franca, notably Swahili and Lingala.