Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [17]
How new and unprecedented are modern forces of language diffusion? Do they share significant properties with language spread in the past?
How will the age-old characteristics of language communities assert themselves? In particular, can all languages still act as outward symbols of communities? And can they effectively weave together the tissues of associations which come from a shared experience? Can each language still create its own world? Will they want to, when science—and some revealed religions—claim universal validity?
These are the questions we shall want to ask. But first we must examine the vast materials of human language history.
*As such it is prominent in forming the present-day Top Twenty language communities, to be considered close to the conclusion of this book (see p. 527).
†The widespread use of English in the European Union can be seen as Diffusion reinforced (after the UK’s accession in 1973) by Infiltration.
* It is also an inherently dangerous term, hard to separate from sweeping attempts to evaluate the achievements of whole peoples. (See, e.g., Macaulay’s notorious verdict on Sanskrit- and Arabic-based cultures (see Chapter 12, ‘Changing perspective—English in India’, p. 496).)
* This has led to the total omission of two important known language spreads, and one conjectured one. The Polynesian islands gained their dozens of closely related languages over the four millennia from 3000 BC in perhaps the most intrepid sustained exploration ever. And the Bantu languages spread across southern Africa over much the same period, beginning in Cameroon and ending at the Cape. Both of these stories are crucial to understanding the full pattern of languages in today’s world, but they are based purely on archaeology and linguistic comparisons. We have not a single word recorded from all the talk of those aeons. As for the geographical path of Indo-European, the ancestral language that is reconstructed to make sense of the evident systematic relationships among Hittite, Sanskrit, Russian, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Gaulish, Lithuanian and English, and many, many more, we can only speculate, and those speculations are the stuff of historical linguistics, not of language history.
PART II
LANGUAGES BY LAND
Two Italian opinions, separated by fifteen centuries, on the value of an imposed common language:
nec ignoro ingrati et segnis animi existimari posse merito si, obiter atque in transcursu ad hunc modum dicatur terra omnium terrarum alumna eadem et parens, numine deum electa quae caelum ipsum clarius faceret, sparsa congregaret imperia ritusque molliret et tot populorum discordes ferasque linguas sermonis commercio contraheret ad colloquia et humanitatem homini daret, breviterque una cunctarum gentium in toto orbe patria fieret.
I am aware that I may be quite rightly thought thankless and lazy if I touch so lightly on that land which is both the foster-child and parent of all lands, called by Providence to make the very sky brighter, to bring together its far-flung domains, to civilise their ways of life, to unite in conversation the wild, quarrelsome tongues of all their many peoples through common use of its language, to give culture to mankind, and in short to become the one fatherland of every nation in the world.
Pliny the Elder (AD 24-79), Naturalis Historia, iii.39
The yoke of arms is shaken off more readily by subject peoples than the yoke of language.
attributed to Lorenzo Valla, Italian humanist (1406-57),
in his Elegantiarum Libri VI
3
The Desert Blooms: Language Innovation in the Middle East
ayu ém ilī qereb šamě ilammad
milik ša anzanunzî iakkim mannu
ēkšma ilmada alakti ili apšti
ša ina amšat ibluu imūt uddeš
surriš uštādir zamar utabar
ina ibit appi izammur elī la
in pīt purīdi usarrap lallariš
kī petě u katāmi ēnšina Šitni
immuama immš šalamtíš
išebbšma išannana ilšin
ina ābi itammš elš šamā ’i
ūtaššašama idabbuba arād irkalla
ana annāta ušta- qerebšina la altanda
Who can know the will of the gods in heaven?