Reflection on Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler

    You know I hadn't read the subtitle of this book until just now and I was about to say, "You know, this isn't really a book about languages as much as it is a history of the world seen through the lens of linguistics." I guess I was right, lol. This was an excellent book that my sister got for me for Hannukah that I really couldn't put down. It is extremely well done and probably an early contender for one of my top books of the year.

    The book moves chronologically, starting with the semitic language, whose origin is unconfirmed, but may have started in modern Ethiopia/Somalia and moved into the Arabian Peninsula. It's a very cool chapter because Ostler shows the similarities between Akkadian, Aramaic, and modern Arabic. He shows us that Aramaic became the lingua franca of the ancient world, as the Persians adopted it as an official language, helping it to spread as far as modern-day Pakistan.

    Then, Ostler does a chapter that covers both ancient Egyptian language as well as ancient Chinese. Interestingly, he writes that hieroglyphics developed from pictures made by artists that developed phonetic meaning, so that the word for "knife" would also work for "enough" and "nephew." Compare this to Mesopotamia, where writing developed from number tallies. Chinese, writes Ostler, has no phonetic element at all, making it completely neutral in regard to dialects. While pronunciations of a character may vary, the written character is understood by all Chinese speakers, and will not drift and change on the page like pronunciation will on the tongue. On the other hand, this does make Chinese more difficult to learn than phonetic systems. Despite that difficulty, Chinese remains an influential and widely-spoken language outside of China. In the Philippines, Chinese people are 1% of the population but control over half of the stock market. In Indonesia, the numbers are 4% and 75% and in Malaysia it is 32% and 60%. In Thailand, overseas Chinese account for at least half the wealth. If you combined the wealth of the 51 million overseas Chinese, their GDP would be worth $700 billion. 

    Ultimately, when comparing Chinese and Egyptian, the biggest difference is that Chinese survived and Egyptian did not, even though both were invaded many times. In Egypt, the language linked the people to their religion. When traditional polytheism was replaced by Christianity, Egyptians took their language as the Christian language. That made it a target for Muslim invaders, who sought to destroy it. In China, on the other hand, no new religion came in, and with such a massive population, China was always able to "swallow up" its invaders. While the Egyptians changed to become Arabs and speak Arabic, it was the Mongols and other invaders who became Chinese and adopted Chinese culture and language.

    The chapter on Greek was very interesting to me and I took a lot of notes. For example, where the various names from the Greeks originate: "Hellenes" is the name the Greeks use for themselves and comes from the name of Achilles' people in the Iliad; "Yauna" is the Persian name and refers to "Ionia," the region of western Turkey where Greek colonists resided; "Graii" is the name the Romans used, regerring to a small town in southern Boeotia. I also learned that Greek used to be a tonal language, but lost the tones over time. Now the Greeks stress the syllable that used to have the high tone.

    The sections on the deaths of Latin were also very interesting. I learned that in the 8th Century. Charlemagne invited Alcuin of York to come and standardize Latin for use in masses. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Latin had been devolving into its Romance variants, and now they were beginning to lose mutual intelligibility. By standardizing Latin, mass was the same all over Western Europe. However, this meant that average people could no longer understand their priests, a problem that would return centuries later in the Reformation. We have very few examples of Romance language before it was solidified in the various modern Romance languages, but one of the surviving bits of writing is a sort of teleprompter for Ludwig and Charles, kings and grandsons of Charlemagne, who swore to support one another. They swore in Latin with a translation in the vernacular, which is similar, but quite different. 

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Italy and "veal" come from the same Greek word. The Greeks named the peninsula "(w)italoí, meaning "land of yearling cattle." This was a dialectical vaiant of "etaloi," borrowed into Italian as vituli, now in English as "veal."
• Eucharist comes from the Greek term for "I thank."
• 7% of English vocabulary is of Norse origin, including words such as, "take, get, keep, leg, sky, skin, and skirt."
• In the Middle Ages, Latin was referred to as "grammatica" and the vernacular language was known as "idioma," which was Greek for "peculiarity." I know that now, "idioma" is the Spanish word for "language."
• Apparently Columbus did not call Native Americans "Indians" for very long. He arrived in October 1492 and thought he was in China. By November he thought he was in India, and by December, he realized he wasn't. He literally stopped using the term "indios" by mid-December of that year but the term stuck.
• In Paraguay, a 1996 survey found that 96% of the population was fluent in Guarani and 53 % were monolingual in it, while only 2% were monolingual Spanish speakers.
• Ostler argues that languages of trade and business are more ephemeral whereas immigration brings about more significant linguistic changes.