Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [359]
More distantly, but no less importantly, the background knowledge harvested here has come to me from a long and varied line of language teachers: I think particularly of Maurice Bickmore, Bella Thompson, Ken Batterby, James Howarth, Geoffrey Allibone, Jack Ind, Robert Ogilvie, Jasper Griffin, Peter Parsons, Oliver Gurney, Anna Morpurgo Davies, Wayne O’Neil, Paul Kiparsky, Ken Hale, Daniel Ingalls, Rama Nath Sharma, Susumu Kuno, Bart Matthias, Edwin Cranston, Rosalind Howard, Martin Prechtel, Damian McManus, Kim McCone and Stiofáin Ó Direáin.
These guides are like prophets. In our country language teaching is often misrepresented as misguided drudgery; and really to learn another language can often seem a nigh impossible task. There is no royal road to it, but gold glints in unexpected places all along the path. For me it has always been the surest route to new worlds that lie beyond my imagination, sic ITVR AD ASTRA.
About the Author
NICHOLAS OSTLER’S serious interest in languages took him from first-class honors in Classics at Oxford and a doctorate in linguistics and Sanskrit at MIT to teaching in Japan and a succession of research projects from Crete to New Mexico, aimed at introducing languages to computers. He then moved on to the problems of human speakers and made himself an expert on the Chibcha language of ancient South America, which yielded to Spanish in the eighteenth century.
Nicholas Ostler is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (www.ogmios.org), a charity that supports the efforts of small communities worldwide to know and use their languages more. He lives in Bath, England.
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PICTURE CREDITS
32-33, 202 Text specimens and translations from Daniels, Peter & William Bright (1996), The World’s Writing Systems, New York: Oxford University Press. Copyright $cP 1996 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
285-287 From Lambert, Pierre-Yves (1997), La Langue Gauloise, Paris: Editions Errance
All reasonable efforts have been made by the author and publisher to trace copyright holders of the materials featured in this book. In the event that the author or publisher are contacted by any of the untraceable copyright holders after the publication of this book, the author and publisher will endeavour to rectify the position accordingly.
PRAISE FOR Empires of the Word
“Covers more rambunctious territory than any other single volume I’m aware of, with greater wit than we’ve a right to expect in the service of such ambition, and a wonderful ear for the project’s poetry.”
—John Leonard, Harper’s
“[A] monumental new book…. Ostler furnishes many fresh insights, useful historical anecdotes, and charming linguistic oddities…. His massive overview of major languages in world history puts the current global spread of English in perspective.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The variables are so many, and the historical precedents so contradictory, one can do little more than pose the questions. This Ostler does, with all the clarity and humility of true scholarship. A marvelous book, learned and instructive.”
—National Review
“Empires of the Word is a story of dramatic reversals and puzzling paradoxes. A rich … text with many piercing observations and startling comparisons.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Revolutionary…. This is more than ambitious: it’s a colossal undertaking, executed with a giddying depth of scholarship, yet the detail is never too thick to swamp the general reader.”
—Boston magazine
“A work of immense erudition, surveying the world’s major languages, starting with the Sumerians of the Euphrates valley and concluding with the contemporary hegemony of English.”
—Christian Science Monitor