Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [94]
* But this same trend can be seen in all Chinese dialects (and indeed farther south in the Yi and Vietnamese languages).
* ‘Southern Yue’. Mandarin Nán-Yuè and modern Vietnamese Vi&t Nam are just the same words, pronounced differently and reordered, so the name is still going strong two millennia on, its designation moved 750 kilometres to the south-west.
* In the Philippines, there are half a million Chinese, and in Thailand 1.8 million, almost all speaking Southern Min. Of Malaysia’s 4.5 million Chinese speakers, half speak Southern or Eastern Min, a quarter speak Hakka, a sixth speak Yue, the rest (still half a million of them) speaking Mandarin. Chinese has largely died on the lips of Indonesia’s 6 million ethnic Chinese, and only a third of them still speak some form of it in the home: but of those who do, over a third speak Min, a little less than a third Hakka, just under a tenth Yue. The remaining quarter speak Mandarin (Grimes 2000).
* This term, first applied to the Portuguese, derives from Arab-Persian firengi, ultimately from Frank.
* Both empires very occasionally permitted a woman to take up the office of king, notably Hatshepsut ( 1473-1458 BC) and Cleopatra (51-30 BC) of Egypt, and the empresses Wu (AD 690-705) and Ci Xi (AD 1895-1908) of China. Eerily, it was in the reign of a woman that both monarchies, after so many millennia, came to their end.
* Their views of India are considered at pp. 192ff. below.
† Sanskrit atlta, pratyutpanna, anagata, ‘past by’, ‘given in the presence’, ‘not come’.
* So generally impressed were they with the way that their Chinese contemporaries did things that in the seventh century AD Korea and Japan even introduced the system of public examinations for entry into the government. (Vietnam, meanwhile, was spending the whole first millennium AD under direct Chinese rule.) But they did it as copycats, emphatically not because they appreciated the point of the system: the Japanese permitted only nobles to sit the examination; and in Korea, sons of higher-graded families were exempted.
* Aside from Cleopatra’s well-known bravura performance, Peremans ( 1964) finds little evidence of bilingualism in Ptolemaic Egypt, and much of Greeks and Egyptians (egkhōrioi, ‘locals’) sticking to their own languages. Some famous Egyptians, such as the high priest and Greek historian of Egypt, Maněthō, did reach high rank in what remained to the end a Greek-speaking hierarchy. But so many public documents were bilingual (the most famous being the Rosetta Stone, but also judicial notices relating to private cases) that the population could not have been. He also quotes a touching letter: ‘I was glad, both for you and for myself, to learn that you were learning Egyptian writing, because now you can come to the city and teach the children of Phalu … es the enema doctor, and have a means of support for your old age’ (p. 57). Despite the mention of writing, the tutor was presumably to be employed to teach the middle-class Egyptian children Greek, not vice versa.
* The Chinese have been unlike most other dominant language communities reviewed in this book in one way: they have not lumped all those speaking other languages under one unflattering name. The single term ‘barbarian’ is inescapable in English translation, but Chinese has many words, in principle all with different designations. Already in the third-century BC dictionary Erya (’Examples of Refined Usage’), the term sìhši is defined: jiŭyí bādí qīróng liŭmán, ‘the 9 Yi, the 8 Di, the 7 Rong and the 6 Man’ (Erya, s.v. Sidí, cited in Wilkinson 2000: 710). Yet another term was Fān, from the Chinese point of view divided into the , shēngfān, and , shúfān, ‘raw