Loe raamatut: «Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World»

PREFACE

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 languagecommunities 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.

It is not possible, even in a book as big as this one, to tell all those stories. Empires of the Word concentrates on the languages that, for one reason or another, grew out from their homes, and spread across the world. But even with such a stringent entry qualification, cutting the number of stories from many thousand to a couple of dozen, the remaining diversity is still overwhelming. In a way, there are so many tales to tell that the work is less a telling of a single story than a linguistic Thousand and One Nights.

We shall range over the amazing innovations, in education, culture and diplomacy, thought up by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and much later, the improbable details of how they were projected across the world.

Besides these epic achievements, language failures are no less interesting. The Western Roman Empire was thoroughly overrun by German-speakers in the fifth century. These conquests laid the basis for the countries of modern western Europe: so why did German get left behind? In Africa, Egyptian had been surviving foreign takeovers for over three millennia: why did it shrivel and disappear after the influx of Muammad’s Arabic? And in the modern era, the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for the same period that Britain ruled India: so why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia? Until such questions are answered, the global spread of English can never be understood.

On a cultural level, there is fascination too in the world-views that went with the advancing and receding languages. Ironies abound: Latin could make no headway with the sophisticates of the eastern Mediterranean, who spoke Greek and Aramaic, but it was quickly embraced by the illiterate peoples of Gaul and Spain. In the Americas, Catholic missionaries slowed for centuries the spread of Spanish, but in Asia, Evangelical Protestants turned out to be crucial to the take-up of English. We may as well admit at the outset that the mysteries of linguistic attraction and linguistic influence run deep: to tell the story is not always to understand it.

Nevertheless, I believe that the universal study of language history, of which this is a first attempt, is at least as enlightening and valid a focus for science as the more usual concerns of historical linguistics. It is as significant to compare the linguistic effects of the Roman and the Germanic conquests of Gaul as it is to compare the structures of the Latin and Germanic verbsystems—indeed just possibly one might throw some light on the other. Languages by their nature define communities, and so offer clearer units than most in social studies on which to base comparative analyses. Not enough attention has been paid to the growth, development and collapse of language communities through time, and the light these may shed on the kinds of society that spoke these languages. It is a received truth, for example, that in the Roman Empire the west was administered in Latin, the east in Greek, and the Greek administration lasted for many centuries more than the Latin: how surprising, but how revealing then, that when the time came for the defences to collapse and the Empire’s provinces to be overrun, Latin survived—and has never been replaced—but Greek largely evaporated within a couple of generations.

The language history of the world can be eloquent of the real character of peoples, their past movements and changes. It also offers some broad hints for the future. Asked in 1898 to choose a single defining event in recent history, the German chancellor Bismarck replied, ‘North America speaks English’. He was right, as the twentieth century showed. Twice the major powers of North America stepped in to determine the outcome of struggles that started in Europe, each time on the side of the English-speaking forces. Even more, the twentieth century’s technological revolutions in communications, telephones, films, car ownership, television, computing and the Internet, were led overwhelmingly from English-speaking America, projecting its language across the world, to parts untouched even by the British Empire. It seems almost as if a world language revolution is following on, borne by the new media.

But though the spread of a language is seldom reversible, it is never secure. Even a language as broadly based as English is in the twenty-first century cannot be immune. It is still threatened by those old causes of language succession: changes in population growth, patterns of trade and cultural prestige. For all the recent technical mastery of English, nothing guarantees long-term pre-eminence in publishing, broadcasting or the World Wide Web. Technology, like the jungle, is neutral.

Language history does not, in itself, explain the past, or predict the future. There are thousands of language traditions, and their relative sizes are changing dynamically. Important innovations can arise in any one of them; in modern conditions especially, innovations may spread fast. Languages such as Egyptian and Akkadian, Sanskrit and Persian, Greek and Latin, in their day all seemed irresistible in their dominance and their prestige. But as they found to their cost, speaker populations can be unsentimental.

The language future, like the language past, is set to be full of surprises. But to find out what has happened in history overall, the true winners and losers among human groups, we cannot ignore the outcomes of the language struggle.

Little Solsbury Hill, 28 July 2004

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

PREFACE

PROLOGUE: A CLASH OF LANGUAGES

PART I THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE HISTORY

1 Themistocles’ Carpet

2 What It Takes to Be a World Language; or, You Never Can Tell

PART II LANGUAGES BY LAND

3 The Desert Blooms: Language Innovation in the Middle East

4 Triumphs of Fertility: Egyptian and Chinese

5 Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit

6 Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek

7 Contesting Europe: Celt, Roman, German and Slav

8 The First Death of Latin

PART III LANGUAGES BY SEA

9 The Second Death of Latin

10 Usurpers of Greatness: Spanish in the New World

11 In the Train of Empire: Europe’s Languages Abroad

12 Microcosm or Distorting Mirror? The Career of English

Part IV Languages Today and Tomorrow

13 The Current Top Twenty

14 Looking Ahead

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE: A CLASH OF LANGUAGES

On 8 November 1519 Hernán Cortés and a band of three hundred Spaniards met for the first time the supreme ruler of Mexico. The venue was the causeway across the lake leading to its capital city, Tenochtitlán. All around them was water. On the eastern horizon a volcano could be seen in eruption. Cortés was on horseback, bearded, in shining armour, belying his recent career as a small-town law officer and amateur gold prospector. Motecuhzoma,* born to sit on the royal mat of Mexico and already victorious in many wars, was carried on a litter, resplendent in a vast circular headdress with plumes of lustrous green quetzal, ornaments on his nose, ears and lower lip, behind him an escort of warriors wearing jaguar hides and eagle feathers.

After an exchange of gifts, the Spaniards were led into the city, and accommodated in a palace that had been the residence of Motecuhzoma’s father. They were given a dinner of turkey, fruit and maize tamales. Then Motecuhzoma, whose official title was tlatoani, ‘speaker’, returned to greet his guests.

This was the first moment when the two leaders shared directly with each other their understanding of this epoch-making encounter: the ruler of the largest empire in the Americas, still at the height of his power, coming face to face with the self-appointed emissary of the king of Spain, who, though under guard in a well-kept and well-ordered city, larger than any to be seen in Europe, was yet strangely unawed. Their words set the tone for all that was to follow, above all the tragic diplomacy and incomprehension of the Aztecs, and the calculating, dissembling, but unremitting, aggression of the Spaniards. It was the first step towards the replacement of Nahuatl as the imperial language of Mexico, and the progress of Spanish towards its establishment as the language first of government and religion and then of everything else in the New World.¹

Motecuhzoma opened with a flowery speech in Nahuatl, translated by the interpreters whom Cortés had brought with him: Malin-tzin, a Mexican noblewoman, rendered the Nahuatl into Yucatec Maya, and Fray Géronimo de Aguilar, a Spanish priest, conveyed the sense of the Maya into Spanish. Cortés then replied in Spanish, and the process ran in reverse.

Totēukyoe, ōtikmihiyōwiltih ōtikmoziyawiltih.*

Our Lord, how you must have suffered, how fatigued you must be.

This was a conventional greeting, although there would have been few whom the tlatoani of all Mexico would address as tēukyoe, ‘Lordship’.

You have graciously come on earth, you have approached your water, your high place of Mexico, you have come down to your mat, your throne, which I have briefly kept for you, I who used to keep it for you.

This was already strange. Motecuhzoma was addressing Cortés as a steward to his sovereign. ‘For they have gone, your governors, the kings, Itzcoatl, the old Motecuhzoma, Axayacatl, Tizoc, Ahuitzotl, who hitherto have come to be guardians of your domain, to govern the water, the high place of Mexico, they behind whom, following whom your subjects have advanced.’†

This was really bizarre. Motecuhzoma seemed to place Cortés as a long-lost, supreme king of this very land. ‘Do they still haunt what they have left, what is behind them? If only one of them could see and admire what has happened to me today, what I now see in the absence of our lords, unbeknown to them. It is not just a fantasy, just a dream; I am not dreaming, not fantasising;

for I have seen you, I have looked upon you.’* Now he was claiming to have had a vision of some kind. Cortés must already have been thinking that chance, or God, was delivering the Mexican leader into his power. ‘For I have long (for five days, for ten days) been anxious to look far away to the mysterious place whence you are come, in the clouds, in the mists. So this is the fulfilment of what kings have said, that you would graciously return to your water, your high place, that you would return to sit upon your mat and your throne, that you would come.’† Too easy: Cortés was being recognised as a promised messiah, by none other than the leader of the country he hoped to conquer. ‘And now that has come true, you have graciously arrived, you have known pain, you have known weariness, now come on earth, take your rest, enter into your palace, rest your limbs; may our lords come on earth.’§

Cortés was not slow to take advantage of this astounding appearance of fealty on the part of the Mexican ruler, but he did not simply accept the apparent submission to him personally, as perhaps he could have. What further behaviour, after all, might an Aztec expect of him, if he had claimed to be a returning god? And how would his own men react? Instead he reinforced Motecuhzoma’s wonderment at the miraculous origin of his mission, and wove in a little flattery at how far the ruler’s reputation must have travelled. But immediately Cortés appealed to his own duties to his own God and king as he saw them, imposing them heavily on his interlocutor. He even ended with a gesture at a sermon.

An eyewitness recounts:

Cortés replied through our interpreters [lenguas, ‘tongues’], who were always with him, especially Doña Marina [Malin-tzin], and told him that he did not know with what to repay him, neither himself or any of us, for all the great favours received every day, and that certainly we came from where the sun rises, and we are vassals and servants of a

great lord called the great emperor Don Carlos, who has subject to him many great princes, and that having news of Motecuhzoma and of what a great lord he is, he sent us here to see him and ask him that they should be Christians, as is our emperor and are we all, and that he and all his vassals would save their souls. He went on to say that presently he would declare to him more of how and in what manner it must be, and how we worship a single true God, and who he is, and many other good things he should hear, as he had told his ambassadors…*

This exchange in Nahuatl and Spanish records a moment of destiny when the pattern was set for the irruption of one language community into another. It happens to be exceedingly well documented on both sides, but it is not unique. These pioneer moments of fatal impact have happened throughout human history: as when, on 11 July 1770, Captain James Cook of Great Britain’s Royal Navy encountered Australian aboriginals speaking Guugu Yimidhirr in what is now the north of Queensland; or in the first century ad, when a South Indian named Kauinya came ashore at Bnam in Cambodia, and soon married its queen, called Soma (or Liuye, ‘Willow-Leaf’, in the Chinese report), so transplanting Sanskrit culture into South-East Asia.

This book traces the history of those languages which, in the part of human history that we now know, have spread most widely. Somehow, and for a variety of reasons, the communities that spoke them were able to persuade others to join them, and so they expanded. The motives for that persuasion can be very diverse—including military domination, hopes of prosperity, religious conversion, attendance at a boarding school, service in an army, and many others beside. But at root this persuasion is the only way that a language can spread, and it is no small thing, as anyone who has ever tried deliberately to learn another language knows.

PART I THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE HISTORY

[King Xerxes] gave Themistocles leave to speak his mind freely on Greek affairs. Themistocles replied that the speech of man was like rich carpets, the patterns of which can only be shown by spreading them out; when the carpets are folded up, the patterns are obscured and lost; and therefore he asked for time. The king was pleased with the simile, and told him to take his time; and so he asked for a year. Then, having learnt the Persian language sufficiently, he spoke with the king on his own…

Plutarch, Themistocles, 29.5

1 Themistocles’ Carpet
The language view of human history

From the language point of view, the present population of the world is not six billion, but something over six thousand.

There are between six and seven thousand communities in the world today identified by the first language that they speak. They are not of equal weight. They range in size from Mandarin Chinese with some 900 million speakers, alone accounting for one sixth of all the people in the world, followed by English and Spanish with approximately 300 million apiece, to a long tail of tiny communities: over half the languages in the world, for example, have fewer than five thousand speakers, and over a thousand languages have under a dozen. This is a parlous time for languages.

In considering human history, the language community is a very natural unit. Languages, by their nature as means of communication, divide humanity into groups: only through a common language can a group of people act in concert, and therefore have a common history. Moreover the language that a group shares is precisely the medium in which memories of their joint history can be shared. Languages make possible both the living of a common history, and also the telling of it.

And every language possesses another feature, which makes it the readiest medium for preserving a group’s history. Every language is learnt by the young from the old, so that every living language is the embodiment of a tradition. That tradition is in principle immortal. Languages change, as they pass from the lips of one generation to the next, but there is nothing about this process of transmission which makes for decay or extinction. Like life itself, each new generation can receive the gift of its language afresh. And so it is that languages, unlike any of the people who speak them, need never grow infirm, or die.

Every language has a chance of immortality, but this is not to say that it will survive for ever. Genes too, and the species they encode, are immortal; but extinctions are a commonplace of palaeontology. Likewise, the actual lifespans of language communities vary enormously. The annals of language history are full of languages that have died out, traditions that have come to an end, leaving no speakers at all.

The language point of view on history can be contrasted with the genetic approach to human history, which is currently revolutionising our view of our distant past. Like membership in a biological species and a matrilineal lineage, membership in a language community is based on a clear relation. An individual is a member of a species if it can have offspring with other members of the species, and of a matrilineal lineage if its mother is in that lineage. Likewise, at the most basic level, you are a member of a language community if you can use its language.

The advantage of this linguistically defined unit is that it necessarily defines a community that is important to us as human beings. The species unit is interesting, in defining our prehistoric relations with related groups such as Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, but after the rise of Homo sapiens its usefulness yields to the evident fact that, species-wise, we are all in this together. The lineage unit too has its points, clearly marked down the aeons as it is by mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomes, and can yield interesting evidence on the origin of populations if some lineage clearly present today in the population is missing in one of the candidate groups put forward as ancestors. So it has been inferred that Polynesians could not have come from South America, that most of the European population have parentage away from the Near Eastern sources of agriculture, and that the ancestry of most of the population of the English Midlands is from Friesland.¹ But knowing that many people’s mothers, or fathers, are unaccounted for does not put a bound on a group as a whole in the way that language does.

Contrast a unit such as a race, whose boundaries are defined by nothing more than a chosen set of properties, whether as in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by superficial resemblances such as skin colour or cranial proportions, or more recently by blood and tissue groups and sequences of DNA. Likewise, there are insurmountable problems in defining its cultural analogue, the nation, which entail the further imponderables of a consciousness of shared history, and perhaps shared language too.² Given that so many of the properties get shuffled on to different individuals in different generations, it remains moot as to what to make of any set of characteristics for a race or a nation.* But use of a given language is an undeniable functioning

reality everywhere; above all, it is characteristic of every human group known, and persistent over generations. It provides a universal key for dividing human history into meaningful groups.

Admittedly, a language community is a more diffuse unit than a species or a lineage: a language changes much faster than a DNA sequence, and one cannot even be sure that it will always be transmitted from one generation to the next. Some children grow up speaking a language other than their parents’. As we shall soon see, language communities are not always easy to count, or to distinguish reliably. But they are undeniably real features of the human condition.

The task of this book is to chart some of the histories of the language traditions that have come to be most populous, ones that have spread themselves in the historic period over vast areas of the inhabited world. Our view will be restricted to language histories for which there is direct written evidence, and this means omitting some of the most ancient, such as the spread of Bantu across southern Africa, or of the Polynesian languages across the Pacific; but nevertheless the tale is almost always one that covers millennia. The history of humanity seen from its languages is a long view.