Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [148]
Things changed after the Greeks were disempowered by the Fourth Crusade. Latin elements came into the language and stuck: bánio, ‘bath’, bastar$rTcross;o, ‘bastard’, bíra, ‘beer’. After this, within a Turkish-run world, Greek did behave more like a colonised language, and absorbed a whole host of Turkish words, not just for new concepts such as tzamí, ‘mosque’, χatzís, ‘Mecca pilgrim’, o$rTcross;alíski, ‘concubine’ (from Turkish oda-lik, ‘roomer’, combined with a Greek diminutive), but for such mundane and apparently gratuitous things as boyatzís, ‘painter’, tembélis, ‘lazy’, yakás, ‘collar’, bólikos, ‘abundant’ and sokáki, ‘street’. A lot of such vocabulary has since dropped out, or been suppressed by language planning policies since independence. But the new tolerance of borrowed words since the collapse of the empire is evidence in itself that we were right to see Greek’s self-image as changing around that time: relieved of responsibilities to keep order in its historic dominions, and indeed to stand as the bulwark of Christian Orthodoxy, the language was no longer maintained in such conscious isolation from its neighbours.
Having developed autonomously as a cultural area, linked primarily by a common language, a common set of gods and a general sense of kinship, Greek effectively had global reach pressed upon it: this was its reward for impressing so mightily the imperial powers of Macedon and Rome. Over the centuries, those powers ebbed away, leaving large-scale political units in their wake, and Greek speakers as the de facto guardians of a political dispensation not of their making. They reacted by holding to the core of their own traditions, which in the last analysis turned out not to be political, or even intellectual, but linguistic. Their distinctive, civic, approach to government fell away when confronted with units larger than city-states; their rationalist, or polytheistic, philosophies yielded to Christianity; but they never lost faith in the rhetoric of Lysias or Demosthenes, the poetry of Aeschylus or Euripides, or the prose of Plato and Xenophon. It was a curious faith, confronted with a multinational, multilinguistic empire. But it served.
Greek’s solipsism in effect came to an end with the downfall of its associated empire. After two millennia of steadfast concentration, it was no longer constrained to preserve its unity by holding the line that the unchanging standard of excellence, linguistic if not spiritual, was the language of one Greek city in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. From our perspective in the twenty-first century, and especially in a language community, such as English, which has cut itself free from adoration of classics, whether in its own language or anyone else’s, it is hard to see real value in this central myth. But the Greek achievement stands as an interesting monument of one way to keep a language tradition, even one of vast extent, self-consciously united. The absence of serious division in the Greek language is quite striking to this day. While Latin is succeeded by a handful of separate national language traditions, all of which have moved on from their common roots in the Latin of Rome in, say, the second century BC, Greek—even as spoken on the Turkish shores of the Black Sea, and in villages in the remote south of Italy—knows what is its common centre. The adulation of Attic did actually work, in the grand programme of making sure that Greek remained the language of a single community.
* It was the name for some of Achilles’ people in Homer’s Iliad (ii.684), and since he was the greatest Greek hero in that greatest of Greek poems, this may have been sufficient to name the whole race by association.
† w, written as f in some Greek alphabets, dropped out of pronunciation (and hence spelling) in most dialects. Hence the w in this Homeric word is, strictly speaking, conjectural, lōTnes is the same word, with a common contraction of a+o into ô. Later the Indians