Read Languages In the World Online
Authors: Julie Tetel Andresen,Phillip M. Carter
Languages In the World (37 page)
We now step back in time to take account of Roman colonialism, because the Roman Empire is a story in itself. Legend has it that Rome the city-state was founded in
753 BCE. It became a Republic in 510 BCE. The linguistic consequence of the Roman Empire is found across southern, central, and eastern Europe in languages such as Catalan, French, Italian, Occitan (France), Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Romansch (Switzerland), and Walloon (Belgium). In the discipline of linguistics, these languages are said to belong to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. However, they are known popularly as the Romance languages. The term
Romance
comes from a meaning that the Latin word
Romanus
took on in 212 CE when the Emperor Caracalla decreed that all freeborn inhabitants of the Empire should thereafter be Roman citizens. The wider scope of the adjective called for a new noun. The Roman provinces had names such as Gallia, Hibernia, Hispania, and Italia; and the area to the north of the Empire where uncivilized tribes lived was called Germania. Thus, on the model of these names, the term
Romania
was coined.
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The word is first attested in the fourth century as a comprehensive name for the whole commonwealth, which included its large Greek-speaking area. The
Romani
in the broad political sense were opposed to the
Barbari
, all who lived outside the confines of the Empire, and this latter term was a borrowing from Greek, as was pointed out in Chapter 3, which originally meant âof unintelligible speech.'
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Latin first replaced Etruscan on the Italian peninsula. It later replaced Celtic in Gallia and Hispania as well as Thracian in its eastern outpost, today's Romania. The Celtic substratum influence is present in both modern French and Spanish. In French, a part of the standard counting system is vigesimal, which is based on the number 20. The French word for âeighty' is
quatre-vingts
âfour-twenties,' and âninety' is
quatre-vingt-dix
âfour-twenties-ten.' This counting system is deemed to be a relic of Celtic counting practices.
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In Modern Spanish, the borrowed word
izquierdo
âleft' is a replacement of Latin
sinister
, and it is similarly deemed to be from the Celtic substratum, although there was a hint it might come from Basque which has the word
ezke(r)
for âleft.' Philologists have concluded, however, that the Basque word is a borrowing from Celtic, because of the widespread use of cognate forms of Western Romance: Portuguese (Iberian peninsula)
esquerdo
, Catalan (Iberian peninsula)
esquerre
, Provençal (France)
esquer
, Gascon (France)
esquerr
. In the extreme east, namely Romania, the only traces of the early Thracian/Dacian substratum are found in three vocabulary items:
varzÄ
âcabbage,'
barzÄ
âstork,' and
brânzÄ
â(feta) cheese.'
Latin was spread around the empire primarily by the army, which was originally made up of citizens but later came to enlist men from all over, who were drawn to Roman policy of granting soldiers their own land after their discharge. Today, when educated people think of Latin, they likely think of the Classical writers such as Cato, Catullus, Cicero, and Ovid. For the early writers of Latin, there was an obvious model, namely Greek, the prestige language of the day, and as the Roman Republic and then Empire developed, so did the Roman intelligentsia's interest in Greek. Written Classical Latin was thus a studied literary style and counted as H. As always, when there is an H, there is an L. In the days of the Roman Empire, L was âcountry speech' known as
sermo rusticus
as opposed to H known as
sermo urbanus
. L was also called âpopular speech'
sermo plebius
or
sermo vulgaris
or just plain âeveryday speech'
sermo cotidianus
,
sermo usualis
. Whatever the name, it was all Latin. The Roman soldiers spoke this rustic, plebian, cotidian, and usual Latin, known by convention as Vulgar Latin. The no-fun academic name is Proto-Romance.
Because Vulgar Latin was, by definition, nonliterary speech, it was not typically written down and remains largely unattested. Nevertheless, it is easy enough to reconstruct. For instance, the Romance word for âhorse' must have come from a Vulgar Latin word much like
caballus
, because there is French
cheval
, Italian,
cavallo
, Portuguese
cavalo
, Spanish
caballo
, and Romanian
cal
. The Classical Latin word for âhorse' is
equus
, and that is what the Classical writers use. However,
caballus
makes an appearance in Horace's
Satires
in a clearly deprecatory meaning, probably something like ânag.' So,
equus
is Classical Latin, and
caballus
is Vulgar Latin. We can also infer quite a bit about the spoken language from the comedies of Plautus, a writer who represents popular speech better than any other Latin author before the development of Christian literature. The hallmarks of colloquial Latin are:
- the frequent introduction of the personal pronoun with the verb;
- the use of the indicative mood where Latin would use subjunctive;
- the assimilation of the neuter declension into the masculine; feminine, neuter, and masculine have remained distinct only in Romanian;
- the lack of distinction between the interrogative and relative pronouns:
qui vocat?
for
quis vocat?
âwho speaks?'; - a larger proportion of words that are derived â substantives expanded by suffixes or prefixes â which accounts for so much of the evolution of Romance vocabulary.
In short, what can be considered the major characteristics of today's Romance languages were already alive in spoken Latin during Classical times.
Given the crisscrossing patterns of contact, as Roman soldiers and administrators patrolled the territory, linguist John Green (1987) has pointed out it is impossible for the Romance philologist to make definitive subgroupings for these languages. Instead, he proposes three different geographic groups, based on the particular feature under review:
- a North/South grouping, where French is North, and everything else is South; when looking at the phonology of these languages, French is clearly the most radically different than the Latin/Vulgar Latin base, in having lost the original final vowels and most of the final consonants; it thus stands alone in this category;
- an East/West grouping, where Italian and Romanian are East, while French, Spanish, and Portuguese are West; when considering how the various languages form the plurals of nouns, the West plurals are indicated with â
s
, for example, Spanish
casa/casas
âhouse/houses,' while East plurals are indicated by vocalic alternations, for example, Romanian
casa/case
âhouse/houses'; and - a Center/Periphery grouping where French and Italian (and sometimes Spanish) are in the Center, while Portuguese and Romanian are on the Periphery; quite a few vocabulary items illustrate this split â to name but one, the word for âbeautiful' (masculine form given here): in Portuguese it is
formos
, in Spanish it is
hermos
, and in Romanian it is
frumos
, while in French it is
beau
/
bel
(before vowels) and Italian
bel
.
The Romance languages thus offer a third graphic model, beyond the tree and the wave discussed in Chapter 7, for how to represent linguistic expansions. It is the rhizome, from Greek
rhizÅma
âmass of roots.' In botany, a rhizome is the root system of plants like bamboo or bunch grasses, which have shoots that can be seen above ground but which are held together with a highly entangled set of roots. Only a rhizome can capture the tangled, intertwined sets of relationships among the Romance languages.
We have arrived at the moment when many of the world's stocks reached their geographic limits, and this was the time before the beginning of widespread literacy, world religions, and colonialism pursued on a global scale. One thousand years after the end of the Roman Empire, those speakers of Romance languages with cities on the Atlantic â the French, the Spanish, and the Portuguese â were poised to push off from those ports to sail around the world in order to claim what they could claim. This post-Columbian colonialism was to spread the tangled Romance roots all over the world.
In the beginning, religious ideology shaped linguistic ideology. For centuries, Western European scholars tried to put Western European languages in a lineage with what they considered to be the God-given language, Hebrew. A theory of language occurs in Genesis when Adam names the animals God made. The view of language-as-inventory resides within the larger frame of a belief in an immediate, that is, nonlinguistically mediated, reality. Given that in this view there is only one reality, different languages are understood to be inventories of different labels for the same parts of the same reality. A moral issue has already stolen into the picture: Eden was monolingual; because of the sins of Babel, the world is now cursed with multilingualism. It is no wonder, then, that certain missionaries will seek to convert not only the faiths but also the languages of those to whom they are ministering, to bring all of God's children back to the word of God â or to the closest equivalent of that word on earth at the time of the ministering.
Before nation-states and their titular national languages had their twin birth in the late eighteenth century, there were religions, and religions organized the identities of the Us versus the Them: the Christians versus the Infidels, the Muslims versus the Infidels, the Protestants versus the Catholics versus the Eastern Orthodox, the Sunni versus the Shiite, the Hindu versus the Buddhists, ad infinitum.
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Religions cohere around sacred narratives which function as origin stories, identifying those who belong in the tribe and those who do not. Thus, they preceded by hundreds and sometimes thousands of years' identification by nationality and what language a person speaks. Even today, when nation-states are supposedly secularized, it is difficult to tease apart, say, Greek, Polish, or Tibetan national identity from their religious identity as Greek Orthodox, Catholics, or Buddhists (Safran 2008:179). This is because religious identity is bound to the language of the sacred narratives, which, in turn, helped form the national identities in the first place. Two further examples: Henry VIII's authorization of an English version of the Bible, which helped to create a sense of English national identity, and Luther's German translation, which helped to foster a sense of a German nation.
No group exemplifies the religionânationâlanguage intersection better than the Jews. The Hebrew Bible has sometimes been called a
portable fatherland
. At the end of the nineteenth century, after almost 2000 years of Jewish diaspora and in the midst of a wave of global nation formations, the Hebrew Bible served as the authoritative reference for the claim of the Jewish nation on their ancestral homeland. When they returned to their homeland, the spoken Hebrew language revival began. Before the revival, Jews had maintained their tribal/national identity not only in their religious practice, preserved in textual Biblical Hebrew, but also in their linguistic practice: the Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire spoke the Judeo-Spanish language Ladino, not Turkish, and the Ashkenazi Jews in eastern Europe spoke the Germanic language Yiddish, thereby distinguishing themselves from their Slavic-speaking neighbors. Many Jews in the United States have assimilated to English and, in the transfer, brought to American English the zest of Yiddish in words like
bupkis
ânothing,'
goy
ânon-Jew,'
maven
âexpert,'
meshugena
âcrazy,'
mishagos
âconfusion,'
shiksa
ânon-Jewish girl,'
shtick
,
spiel
, and so forth. The Orthodox Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, however, maintain their identity by continuing to speak Yiddish.
Religions, like languages, simultaneously unite (define the Us) and divide (identify the Them). In addition, religion and language share the following characteristics, as noted by Brubaker (2013): (i) individuals are born into one, the other, or both; they are sources of social, cultural, and political identification; (ii) languages that are not institutionalized are considered to be dialects, just as religions that are not institutionalized are considered to be sects or superstitions; (iii) they can be changed; a person can move to a new country and learn a new language, even forgetting the native language; a person can have a religious conversion. Religions and languages differ in that: (i) language is additive, while religion is not; a person can speak two or more languages; a person does not usually practice two or more religions; and (ii) language is unavoidable, as noted in Chapter 6, while religion is not; a person may choose not to practice a religion, but a person cannot not speak a particular language. It is the
unavoidability
of the use of a particular language in terms of the human condition that makes a particular language as precious to its speakers as breathing.
Religions, as belief systems, are vast, but they are not, point for point, coextensive with the even greater epistemological framework(s) created by and spread throughout the languages in which different religions find expression. Religions aspire, nevertheless, to universalism in a way that particular languages and then certainly nations, which have borders, do not. In the last 1400 years, Islam has conquered the hearts and minds of one billion people from West Africa to Indonesia, and the status of Classical Arabic is unparalleled. The Buddha attained enlightenment under a fig tree in India some 2500 years ago, and Buddhism spread east and west. Now Buddhist temples can be found coast to coast in the United States, and the associated terminology â
satori
,
karma
,
dharma
,
nirvana
â came along with the religion.
The Catholic Church, founded in 1 CE, is perhaps the world's oldest global organization.
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In the post-Columbian New World, Catholic missionaries converted millions of indigenous peoples to Catholicism and shifted their languages to Spanish and French. In Indochina, the French Fathers not only romanized Vietnamese writing but also banned Chinese characters as a way to stamp out the Confucianism that had held sway in that part of the world for millennia. They began the process
of transliterating the dynastic records and ancient literatures, which activity French administrators later took over. In Cambodia, for instance, these administrators were struck by what they considered the backwardness of the societies they set out to rule. Upon arriving in Phnom Penh in the 1860s, for instance, French explorers encountered the heads of executed criminals rotting under a swarm of flies atop bamboo poles, grim testimonies to the foolhardiness of anyone daring to disobey even the slightest whim of the king. The French in
Indochine
were on a
mission civilisatrice
, which meant stamping out old ways of thinking, writing, and behaving, and the most effective way was to make a clean, visual, and written break with China and the Chinese belief system of Confucianism. Above all, the French did not subscribe to the Chinese proverb: âThe wise man does not seek an empire, and the empire comes to him.' Neither did they, however, achieve full-scale language shift.
Today, English-speaking Anglicans, Protestants, Mormons, and Evangelicals make up the bulk of worldwide missions, and they are continuing the Western tradition of disrupting long-existing social, religious, and linguistic ecosystems in Papua New Guinea, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. Pennycook and Makoni (2005) note that these missionaries are following British practice, established in Africa in the nineteenth century: (i) move the first converts to the new religion up in social class to become the literate proto-bourgeoisie with English as the language of upward mobility; (ii) have missionaries translate the Bible into the local languages; whether or not the missionaries demarcate one language from another in a way that corresponds to how the speakers of those languages understand their own relationships to those norms is not important; (iii) use these translations in the native populations' own languages against their own belief systems.
In the developing world today, classes in English as a second language are sometime venues of stealth religious conversion. In short, missionary work has long worked hand in glove with the colonialists who paved the way for the missionaries and then used them to civilize the native populations. We, the authors, are not against religion. We are also not against all forms of neoliberal political and economic organization. We do, however, deplore the fact that many missionaries, business people, and politicians involve themselves in linguistic ecosystems with no understanding of the language loop and no appreciation for the value of its many different and beautiful configurations.