Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [125]
* To an extent, this still continues: so Megawati Sukarnoputri, at the time of writing president of Indonesia, has a name that translates as ‘Cloudy, Beneficent’s Daughter’.
* A variant called Siddha-mātka, ‘settled alphabet’, or simply Siddha, is the version of the script most generally used in the East Asian (i.e. Mahayana) Buddhist traditions.
† The motivation for this is purely historic. It ultimately goes back to an equally arbitrary ‘aleph beth gimel daleth…’ specified by the Phoenicians.
* The items in parentheses do not exist separately, in the spelling or the language, for phonetic reasons.
* Nevertheless, the script had been modified deftly to represent more effectively features of Tibetan which are alien to the Aryan languages for which Brahmi and all its successors had been designed. Notably, it can distinguish initial vowels that have glottal stops in front of them and those that do not. (In Sanskrit, as in English, a glottal jerk is inserted automatically when a vowel begins an utterance.) The script was later (in the thirteenth century) borrowed by the Chinese at the court of Kublai Khan, to create the ‘Phagspa script for Mongolian, this even being declared the official script of the empire in 1269. It was also used to write Chinese. (See Chapter 4, ‘Holding fast to a system of writing’, p. 156.)
* Malacca’s role as an entrepôt firmly established Malay, Bahasa Mělayu, as the lingua franca of the region, and this has lasted up to the present day. (See Chapter 11, ‘Dutch interlopers’, p. 400.) Malacca was itself a colony of šrī Vijaya (Palembang) on Sumatra, also a major trade centre, and that is where the earliest (seventh century) inscriptions in Malay have been found, one of them upriver from the city of Jambi, previously known as Malayu (Hall 1981: 47-8). Ironically enough, ’Bahasa’ is none other than the Sanskrit word bhāā, ‘language’.
* Although we know that some features, e.g. the tonal accent, and the pronunciation of over-long (pluti) vowels, have been lost along the way.
† Most famously NRWN KSR (’Nero Emperor’) added up to 666, the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation.
* Ironically, the most lasting contribution of Kanishka’s rule was ‘Shaka’ era, a dating system still in use in India. It runs from AD 78, and is even used in many of the Sanskrit inscriptions of South-East Asia.
* The three fabled libraries of Nalanda, Ratnodadhi (’sea of jewels’), Ratnasāgara (’ocean of jewels’) and Ratnarajaka (’jewel-adorned’), were all to be burnt down. Perhaps it is significant that, according to Tibetan Buddhist accounts of their end, the fires resulted from spells cast by visitors affronted by the rudeness they received from the scholars of Nalanda.
* The name Urdu is short for zabān eurdū e muallā, Persian for ‘language of the camp exalted’, where the first and last words are originally Arabic, the middle one Turkic, and the linking e’s pure Persian. Hindi is a shortening of Hindui or Hindvi, the word for ‘Indian talk’ originally used by Muslims, since the word Hind itself is a Persian version of the name of the Sindhu river, known to the Greeks (and Europeans) as the Indus.
* For the view from the English side, see Chapter 12, ‘Changing perspective—English in India’, p. 501.
6
Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek
Spartans to Athenians (urging an alliance to resist the Persians, 480 BC):
Barbarians have nothing trustworthy or true.
Athenians to Spartans (in reply):
There is nowhere so much gold or a country so outstanding in beauty and merit that we should be willing to take it as a reward for going over to the Medes and so enslaving Greece. In fact there are many important things stopping us from doing