Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [12]
This book attempts to convey something of the characteristic viewpoint on the world of each language whose story it tells. Evidently, living in a particular language does not define a total philosophy of life: but some metaphors will come to mind more readily than others; and some states of mind, or attitudes to others, are easier to assume in one language than another. It cannot be a matter of indifference which language we speak, or which languages our ancestors spoke. Languages frame, analyse and colour our views of the world. ‘I have three hearts,’ claimed Ennius, an early master poet in Latin, on the strength of his fluency in Latin, Greek and Oscan.6
* The problem is not that the shared properties are always imaginary (as the Nazis’ criteria for Jewishness may have been), or even objectively unimportant for survival (e.g. as the possession of genes for sickle-cell anaemia and thalassaemia clearly predispose to inherited disease, while giving resistance to malaria). It stems from the logic of statistics: when picking out a population for study, a subset of properties always has to be chosen from a much larger set. But populations who share one subset may not share another—and who is to say (in advance of the study) which properties define the group with the interesting history? In practice, the properties chosen tend to bear out the preconceptions of the researchers, making (e.g.) the correspondence between genetic and traditional linguistic classification of the world’s population groups less than astounding. This necessary arbitrariness in setting up the statistical models is a fundamental flaw in the credibility of the population-gradient prehistory associated with Luca Cavalli-Sforza (e.g. 2001) and his many followers.
* A common problem, ironically, is that writers’ conservatism has made their symbols refer to a version of the language already out of use. Memories of what was learnt in the scribal school can take precedence over what the scribe was actually hearing.
†Egyptian has dropped hieroglyphs, and (now known as Coptic) is written in an alphabet derived from Greek. Akkadian and Sumerian are no longer written at all; so cuneiform is a dead letter. Phoenician too is gone, although every alphabet in use from Ireland to Siam is derived from its original script. Mayan glyphs were discontinued at the time of the Spanish conquest, and now all these languages are written in Roman. Meanwhile Chinese continues to be written in the script first standardised by the man who ordered the burning of every book in the country. See Chapter 4, ‘First Unity’, p. 137.
2
What It Takes to Be a World Language; or, You Never Can Tell
The historic forces of merger and acquisition which, over the last five hundred years, built up many of the European languages in the world’s Top Twenty seemed to have spent themselves—or at least to be dammed up—by the end of the twentieth century.
Overt imperialism is no longer defended. The end is no longer openly willed, though the two surgical wars that led off the twenty-first century, to conquer Afghanistan and Iraq, show that the means are still accepted. Likewise, the flow of large-scale migration is for the time being halted. In the past two centuries, flows from European countries had created much of what are now the English-speaking and the Portuguese-speaking worlds, mostly in the Americas, but also in Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, there was a significant, but much smaller, flow from once colonised countries, which has created new language communities insulated in the heart of European lands.
The trends that will form the future are still obscure. At present, there is still a multitude of migration volunteers, found in a much wider range of countries, not just ex-colonies; the main brake on their movement and resettlement is the unwillingness of their desired host countries to take them in. While some pundits write of an impending