Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [1]
Curiously ineffective—German ambitions
Imperial epilogue: Kōminka
12 Microcosm or Distorting Mirror? The Career of English
Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French
English overlaid
Spreading the Anglo-Norman package
The waning of Norman French
Stabilising the language
What sort of a language?
Westward Ho!
Pirates and planters
Someone else’s land
Manifest destiny
Winning ways
Changing perspective—English in India
A merchant venture
Protestantism, profit and progress
Success, despite the best intentions
The world taken by storm
An empire completed
Wonder upon wonder
English among its peers
PART IV: LANGUAGES TODAY AND TOMORROW
13 The Current Top Twenty
14 Looking Ahead
What is old
What is new
Way to go
Three threads: Freedom, prestige and learnability
Freedom
Prestige
What makes a language learnable
Vaster than empires
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Author
PRAISE FOR Empires of the Word
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
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.
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