Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [180]
Surprisingly, Dante sees oc as marking Spanish Romance, not the Provençal of southern France (known anyway as Langue d’oc). Perhaps he was affected by Provençal’s similarity to Catalan.
PART III: LANGUAGES BY SEA
And who, in time, knows whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gain of our best glory shall be sent,
To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
What worlds in the yet unformèd Occident
May come refined with accents that are ours?
from Samuel Daniel, Musophilus (1599)
DAVID: What newes? haue you heard nothing of the coming of any ship?
ABRAHAM: I heard the thundering of Ordnance, which is a signe of ships coming.
D.: And I heard that a shippe was come from Guiserat.
A.: And what Marchandizes doth she bring?
D.: She is laden with rice, almonds and raysons, she bringeth also many cloathes of all sortes, and very much bombace.
A.: Is this so? surely this news is very much desired.
D.: I heard it so affirmed for a truth.
DAOEDT: Appa ach gabar? tieda ga-barbarou derribarang cappal?
EBRAHIM: Souda beta denga’r boenij bedil, iang itoe alamat derri cappal dagang.
D.: Lagihamba deng’ar catta iang satoe cappal derri Guiserat souda datan.
E.: Appa peruiniága debaua dia?
D.: Ini ber’isi, ken bras, ken gorma, zebibt; lagi bauadia bania káyin alus derri samoe’ aieni: lagicapas bania.
E.: Begitou? itoe gabar bania baick.
D.: Ia beta deng’ar catta sach begitoe.
Augustine Spaulding, Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages, 1614, pp. 1-21
9
The Second Death of Latin
The discovery by the western Europeans that their ships could cross oceans, and bring them directly to distant lands, whether for trade or outright conquest and exploitation, opens a new era in the global history of language spread. All too often, the language communities at the destinations of European shipping proved unable to mount effective military, or political, resistance to the adventuring invaders. When this happened, the victims were frequently decimated, and always forced to submit to a new elite. The spread of languages through the dominance of the new elites was far more pervasive than anything that had been seen before. The results are evident today in the presence of six colonising languages in the list of the world’s top ten languages by population.*
The Romance half of these colonising languages, as we have just seen, owed their very existence to the changes that came over the Roman empire after its western regions were dissolved by the Germanic conquests; the decline in mutual intelligibility, and the redefinition of Latin or grammatica, to be no longer just their written form but a language separate from them, had led to their development as vehicles of a different sort of community. This community was less intellectual, but often as rich culturally as the Church, which continued to rely on Latin, spoken and written.1
Yet before these languages began their accelerated progress round the world, there came an epoch-making development, which emphasised and reinforced the spread of literacy in western Europe. It widened the range of competition between Latin and the vernacular languages, including the Romance ones, and massively raised the stakes in the contest. The result was the dethronement of Latin as the lingua franca of western Christendom: in effect its death, after two millennia, as a language of any real communication and innovation.
The event was the rise of a mass market in printed books. Like the information revolution reorganising the world in our own time, it was in essence the economic effect of the spread of a new technology. Johannes Gutenberg published his edition of the Bible in Mainz in 1450. Very soon, publishing houses sprang up all over Europe, and by 1475 most of the classic works in Latin were available in print.2 By 1500, 20 million printed volumes had been produced, estimated to