Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler

       Zheng-He tablet

      In the Philippines, the overseas Chinese make up 1% of the country’s population, but control over half of the stock market. In Indonesia the proportions are 4% and 75% respectively, in Malaysia 32% and 60%. In Thailand the overseas Chinese account for at least half of the wealth…According to one estimate, the 51 million overseas Chinese control an economy worth $700 billion—roughly the same size as the 1.2 billion mainlanders.³⁴

      Growing Chinese-dominated businesses will have the opportunity of communicating with one another in Chinese, whether Mandarin or Southern Min; and so for the first time the Chinese language has potential for expansion outside the mainland. China itself is no longer keeping its distance from its fellow-Chinese who have chosen to make their living abroad, and it is possible that this new, more diplomatic face of China will become openly influential, perhaps even hegemonic.

       China’s disciples

      Although China was always reserved in accepting any influence from foreigners, its smaller neighbours who achieved some level of settled civilisation and independent statehood were nothing like so circumspect in their acceptance of influence from China. The states and peoples of Korea, Japan and Vietnam adopted this position. Each of them spoke a language unrelated to Chinese. Each of them had to resist sporadic Chinese attempts at conquest (though Japan suffered this only in the first flush of Mongol imperialism). But each first learnt to read and write not in their own languages but in classical Chinese. And each developed writing systems for their own languages by transforming or supplementing the use of Chinese characters.

      Unlike Chinese with Sanskrit and Pali, they each adopted vocabulary from Chinese as it was, regardless of the fact that it did not fit well within the sound systems of their own languages. For them, after all, China represented the fountainhead of advanced civilisation.* As a result their languages became full of Chinese loan vocabulary, modified for their own pronunciation, and have remained so ever since. They soon had as clear an appreciation of the meanings of the syllables they borrowed, and the characters associated with them, as the Chinese had themselves—indeed, perhaps clearer, since they also used the same characters to represent words in their own languages, related only by meaning.

      This faithful adoption and incorporation of Chinese language has provided a useful time capsule of a kind for modern comparative research on the history of Chinese. These three ‘Sinoxenic’ dialects, Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese, Sino-Vietnamese, are made up of syllables and words borrowed from Chinese. They are so complete that it is possible to use them to read out whole texts in wényán. As such, they have preserved an echo of Chinese as it was pronounced when the words were borrowed. In fact, in the case of Japanese—complex as ever—there are three distinct echoes: go-on, kan-on and tō-on, depending on whether the word was borrowed in the sixth century, the eighth century or early in the second millennium. So the Mandarin word nèi, ‘within’, written , is now noi, pronounced in the sixth tone in Vietnamese, nae in Korean and dai or nai in Japanese. These antiquated styles proved vital when in 1954 the Swedish scholar Bernhard Karlgren came up with a reconstruction of the sounds of seventh-century Chinese.³⁵

      This avid cultural discipleship of its neighbours could be considered a major secondary spread of the Chinese language. It is often compared to the role of Latin within English and other modern European languages, or Arabic within Persian and Turkish, but it is really more comparable with the fundamental role of Sumerian within Akkadian. Chinese was a language quite unrelated to its disciple languages, and totally unlike them structurally. Nevertheless, its writing system became the root of their literacy, its words became inescapable for any sort of educated discourse, and its literature was adopted as the foundation for their own education system.

      With their neighbours so in awe of them, it must have been hard for the Chinese to see their superiority as anything but a universal, objective fact.

       Coping with invasions: Egyptian undercut

      Foreigners from the desert have become people everywhere…Indeed, the desert is spread throughout the land. The cultivated districts are destroyed. Barbarians from outside have come to Egypt…There are really no people anywhere…

      Admonitions of Ipuwer, lines i.5, iii.1ff. (Egyptian, late third millennium BC)³⁶

      This is from a pessimistic analysis of Egyptian society, which became a literary classic. (The one surviving manuscript was copied out some thousand years after the text was written.) It shows that even early in its recorded history conservatives were bewailing barbarian influxes into Egypt, which as they saw it disrupted the social order: ‘Serfs have become owners…She who looked at her face in the water is now the owner of a mirror…’ The word for barbarian is pīdjeti, ‘bowman’, bringing his desert home (Rswt) with him, and pointedly contrasted with real people, proper Egyptians.

      This text pre-dates any foreign incursions into Egypt that we know about, but evidently the immigrant, particularly unwelcome if he was a social success, was already a stock figure. Yet this ancient Egyptian insularity is telling us more about perennial attitudes than any actual crisis for patriots: the persistence of the Egyptian language shows that the country was able to absorb all the foreign immigration of the following two millennia without losing its central character and traditions.

      It is an interesting feature of Egyptian history that, until the advent of the Muslims, they suffered no overwhelming nomadic invasions comparable to the coming of the Amorites and Aramaeans to Mesopotamia. Yet we know that Libyan immigration was significant over many centuries, and among Egyptian dynasties at least the Hyksos kings and the Kushites were foreigners who installed themselves by force. Why, then, so little effect on Egypt’s language and culture? Part of the reason must have been the high density of the Egyptians on the ground (pace Ipuwer): there were so many of them, benefiting from the bounty of the Nile, that interlopers were doomed to merge.

      And so despite the incursions, and the splits and discontinuities in the dynastic tradition, Egypt remained true to its religion, and the concept of a pharaoh ruling through maR ‘at.

      But invasions ultimately did undo the Egyptian language in its homeland: after all, Egypt is today a predominantly Muslim country with a Christian minority, everyone speaking Arabic. How did Egyptian finally come to lose its grip on its speakers?

      First of all, there must have been a progressive weakening and dilution of the Egyptian-speaking part of the population. It gradually became a highly multilingual society. Egypt, after all, underwent many invasions in its last five hundred years of independent existence, at the hands of Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans. In the Hellenistic period (332–30 BC) there was also a major influx of Jews, whose major lingua franca was Greek. None of these brought a language that was to achieve full vernacular status in Egypt. But as we have seen, the Aramaic associated with the Assyrians and the Persians did spread within Egyptian society beyond the official sphere, and each of these succeeding powers brought in and fostered new communities that would have spoken something other than Egyptian.

      Nevertheless, when Arabs in the first flush of Islam took possession of the country in the mid-seventh century AD, Egyptian was still the principal language spoken in its streets and fields.

      The Arabs were not the first force of nomads to penetrate Egypt: the Libyans, and perhaps the Hyksos, had achieved this long before in the second millennium, and there may have been many other smaller incursions over the three poorly documented Intermediate Periods of Egyptian history. The Arabs were not the first power to use a foreign language for purposes of government: all of the Persians, Greeks and Romans had done this. The Arabs were not the