Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [63]
* They even plied, especially in the early centuries, to South-East Asia and China. Abū Zayd of Sīrāf wrote that sea traffic in 851 was regular because of a great exchange of merchants between Iraq and markets in India and China: in fact, he said, a trade colony of 120,000 Westerners (including Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians) were massacred in Canton in 878 (Hourani 1995: 76-7).
* Zanzibar is in fact an Arabised form of Persian: Zangi-bar, ‘blacks’ land’.
* In Turkish spelling (introduced by Atatürk in 1928-9), c is [dž] (j in judge), ç is [č] (ch in church), i is i pronounced with the tongue root drawn back (as in Scots kirk), and ğ is either a gargling sound (like Greek gamma or Arabic ghain) or just a lengthening of the preceding vowel; ö and ü are as in German.
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Triumphs of Fertility: Egyptian and Chinese
* In the interests of readability and realism, Egyptian words are given according to the reconstruction of Loprieno 1995 for early Middle Egyptian, with the addition that vowels that he believes indiscernible are represented here by °. R is the French (or Israeli) uvular r, and j is pronounced as in German, like English y in yet. is a deeper h, as when huffing on a pair of glasses; and is like ch in ‘loch’ or ‘Bach’.’ is ayn, notorious from Semitic languages, the throat-clearing sound at the beginning of English ‘ahem’. It should be remembered, however, that as written in hieroglyphs, Egyptian words are totally without vowels.
1
Zi-lu said, ‘If the Prince of Wei were awaiting you, Sir, to take control of his administration, what would be the Master’s priority?’
’The one thing needed is the correction of names!’ the Master replied.
’Are you as wide of the mark as that, Sir?’ said Zi-lu. ‘Why this correcting?’
’How uncultivated you are, Yu!’ responded the Master. ‘A wise man, in regard to what he does not understand, maintains an attitude of reserve. If names are not correct then statements do not accord with facts. And when statements and facts do not accord, then business cannot be properly executed. When business is not properly executed, order and harmony do not flourish. When order and harmony do not flourish, then justice becomes arbitrary. And when justice becomes arbitrary, people do not know how to move hand or foot. Hence whatever a wise man states he can always define, and what he so defines he can always carry into practice; for the wise man will on no account have anything remiss in his definitions.’
Confucius, Lúnyŭ† (Analects), xiii:3 (Chinese, early fifth century BC)2
Two ancient languages, widely distant in their lands and their eras, are yet strangely similar in their careers. In their attributes they are unmatched, except by each other.
Egyptian and Chinese are both vehicles of single cultural traditions of immense prestige. For each, the role as universal language was uncontested in their homeland. By the dawn of their recorded histories they were already established over the central zone of the lands where they were to be spoken. Each maintained this position of solitary and basically unchanging dominance for an awesome period of over three thousand years, or more than 120 generations. Yet, in each case, despite the fame and prestige of the culture among neighbours, who were often dominated politically by these powers, the languages never assumed any role as lingua franca beyond the territory that they considered their homeland.
Another parallel concerns their scripts. Each language originated its own unique system of writing, based on pictograms in a particular style; and each of these scripts early attained a form that would not change. Each was