Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [182]
This second death was more profound than Latin’s first. It was not like the vernacular movements of five hundred years before, when Latin had just lost its use as a written disguise for Romance languages. They had moved on from Latin, and apart, in phonetics and structure; trying to access in written form through a Latin overlay was hard work, and increasingly pointless. But even as it made way for vernacular literature, Latin had retained a significant use: it was still the vehicle for the intellectual discourse that went beyond the popular themes being produced (and appreciated) in Romance. Now, Latin was ceasing to be used in any new thinking at all.
It is revealing to compare the final stages in the life of Latin with those of its fellow classic languages, Greek, Chinese and Sanskrit. Each of these languages, after all, represented the unitary linguistic ideals of an area large enough to split into a number of popular varieties. But only Latin ended up largely replaced by the set of its daughter languages.
Greek never put down deep roots in the regions to which it spread; and when these regions were conquered by others, so that Greeks ceased to be their governing elite, Greek was essentially lost in them. The result was that Greek ended up confined to a relatively small region, mostly under a single, authoritarian government. When the government was reduced in power and then ceased to exist, after the Latin and especially the Turkish conquests, the classical norms that had kept the language united were weakened; but when unitary government was returned, it proved possible, gradually, to move to a new, single, standard for the whole language.
Chinese has retained its role as the high-level focus, political and intellectual, for all the communities that speak related dialects (or daughter languages). Unlike Greek, it has lost linguistic unity, all over its south-eastern provinces; but political unity by and large has held firm. The phonetic inexplicitness of its writing system has, to an extent, allowed it to ignore emergent differences between its standard core and those dialects. This same ambiguity has enabled it, in the last century, to switch its linguistic norm from classical wényán to Beijing báihuà without losing the allegiance of the whole set of Chinese-speaking communities. The logographic writing system, then, has enabled Chinese to escape the ‘first death’, without preventing numbers of its daughter languages from diverging.
Sanskrit, like Latin, has given rise to (or been closely associated with) a number of daughter languages; this marks the major common feature of its history and Latin’s, namely the breakdown of political unity over its speech area for a long time. As such Sanskrit shared what we have called the ‘first death’ of Latin. As in the case of Latin, this led to the daughter languages establishing themselves as independent literary languages for popular themes. But it long retained its role as high-level intellectual centre, and hence in some sense linguistic ideal, for these independent languages. Despite the impact of English from overseas, eliminating its high-level secular role, it has never been replaced as the focal religious vehicle for the majority of Indians.
The next tale in this history is the phenomenal spread of Latin’s daughter languages; to this we shall very soon pass. This, after all, is the real, continuing, story of the Latin speech community. And yet, in a way, Latin as a living language did find a new disguise.
In the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, western Europe had been enlightened by a new and more direct knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin, aided by the influx of Byzantine scholars after the fall of Constantinople and its empire. Westerners began for the first time in a thousand years to have a reading knowledge