Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [56]
Nevertheless, it remains in many ways characteristically Bantu, with lots of nasals before stops (-nd-, -ng-, -mb-, -nt-, -nk-, -mp-), a variety of special prefixes that show what type of concept is designated by a noun, and heavy agglutinative prefixing on its verbs, doing most of the work that would be done by pronouns, verb inflexions and auxiliaries in languages like English, or indeed Arabic: for example,
wa-zee ha-wa-ju-i a-li-ko-kwenda
people-oldster not-they-know-not he-past-there-go
The old men don’t know where he has gone.
The reckoning is that the spread of Bantu languages from the Great Lakes region would have reached the Zanzibar* area early in this millennium, so that an early version of the language may well have been learnt by the Arab visitors mentioned in the Períplous. When Europeans first arrived on the scene (the Portuguese in 1498), Swahili was spoken in a thin strip all along the coast from Mogadishu in Somalia to Beira in Mozambique. The oldest surviving Arabic inscription in the region is from a mosque built in 1107, and it is clear that Arabic was much used as a trade language here, often in mixtures with other languages that have since died out. There may also have been influence in the opposite direction: it is said that some coastal dialects of Arabic in Arabia and Iraq show signs of Swahili influence.79
Be this as it may, Swahili is now the official language in the states of Tanzania and Kenya, and widely used in the neighbouring countries of Uganda, Mozambique, Rwanda, Burundi, the Congos, Madagascar and the Comoros. Since the advent of European colonists, it has played a major role as a lingua franca of empires, as well as a less honourable one as the argot of slave-traders and their victims. Despite the vast numbers who use it (estimated at 40 million), Swahili is learnt as a native language only on the islands and coast close to Zanzibar. Perhaps as always, the vast majority of its speakers (some 90 per cent) pick it up later in life. Without Arab trade there would have been no Swahili as we know it, but Arabic influence on it ceased long ago.
THIRD INTERLUDE:
TURKIC AND PERSIAN, OUTRIDERS OF ISLAM
Kalkip ta yerimden doğrulayim, derdim,
Yelesi-kara Kazihk atima bineyim, derdim,
Kalabalik Oğuz içine gireyim, derdim,
Ala-gözlü gelin alayim, derdim,
Kara yere ak otaklar dikeyim, derdim,
Yürüyüp oğulu ak gerdeğe göçüreyim, derdim,
Muradina, maksuduna eri$sLtireyim, derdim,
Murada erdirmedin beni!
Kara ba$sLim ilenci tutsun, Kazan, seni!*
I said to myself, let me get up from my seat and stand,
I said to myself, let me ride my black-maned Kazilik horse,
I said to myself, let me go among the throngs of Oghuz,
I said to myself, let me find a chestnut-eyed daughter-in-law,
I said to myself, let me pitch white tents on the black earth,
I said to myself, let me walk the boy to his bridal chamber,
I said to myself, let me bring him to his wish, to his desire,
You did not let me attain my wish,
May the dark head’s curse seize you, Kazan!
Dede Korkut, The Lineage of Uzun the Prisoner, son of Kazan Bey
(A mother berates her husband for losing their son on a raid)
Two other major languages, Turkic (spoken in a variety of forms, but all fairly close to modern Turkish) and Persian, are now best known as the auxiliary languages of Islamic civilisation. We have had to give them walk-on roles in the history of Arabic, but unjustly: both have interesting histories which go back for a thousand years before their speakers’ fateful conversions to Islam, and have contributed equally to their characters today and in the past.
The Turkic languages spread out over a vast area