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

Mediterranean from the Persians; or a particular trend may assert itself little by little, mile by mile, village by village, over thousands of years: just so did Chinese percolate in East Asia.

      This means that, for all its bewildering variety, this history told through languages can give an insight into the long-term effects of sudden changes. This is true especially where what is changing is how nation shall speak unto nation, as it is today.

      In fact, the complex effects on languages when cultures come into contact is the best record we have of real influence: contrast the more familiar analyses based on military conquest or commercial dominance, which may offer a quite spurious clarity. How thoroughgoing was the Germanic tribes’ lightning conquest of the western Roman empire in the fifth century AD? Though it changed for good all the crowned heads, it left France, Spain and northern Italy still speaking variations of Latin, and they have gone on doing so to this day. What was really happening in Assyria in the seventh century BC? It was a period when the rulers’ ascendancy was assured and new conquests were being made: yet all the while its language was changing from Akkadian, the age-old language of its rulers, to Aramaic, the language of the nomads it was reputedly conquering.

      The language history of the world shows more of the true impacts of past movements and changes of peoples, beyond the heraldic claims of their largely self-appointed leaders. They reveal a subtle interweave of cultural relations with power politics and economic expediency.

      It also offers some broad hints for the future. It suggests rather strongly that no language spread is ultimately secure: even the largest languages in the twenty-first century will be subject either to the old determinants of language succession or some new ones that have arisen in the last five hundred years or the last fifty. Migrations, population growth, changing techniques of education and communication—all shift the balance of language identities across the world, while the focus of prestige and aspiration varies as the world’s economies adjust to the rise of new centres of wealth. Future situations may well be unprecedented, with potential for languages to achieve truly global use, but they will still be human. And human beings seldom stay united for long.

       An inward history too

      But we can expect the language history of the world to be revealing in another way. A language community is not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language: it is an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition. A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements and inspirations. In some sense, then, when one language replaces another, a people’s view of the world must also be changing.

      So as we survey the outward history of the large and influential language communities, in their expansions and retrenchments across the face of the earth, we shall also try to show some aspects of the inward sense of the communities who spoke the languages.

      This is something that is very difficult to express, most difficult of all perhaps in the language itself. As Wittgenstein remarked, the limits of my language are the limits of my world; and these limits, he felt, could only be indicated indirectly, never stated explicitly. This book attempts in various indirect ways—and with copious use of translation—to show something of the temper of mind that was conditioned by a language, even as it gained or lost speakers.

      It is a dangerous undertaking, but it is crucial if the succession of languages which have dominated human cultures is to have more meaning than the mere list of names and dates in a chronology. It is part of the contention of this book that there is an exchange of something far more subtle than an allegiance when one generation comes to speak a language other than its parents’.

      We can get a first inkling of what that might be by comparing more for style than substance those speeches of Motecuhzoma and Cortés. Their languages, Nahuatl and Spanish, are quite distinct from one another, in ways that recall the traits of individual people. Most obviously, just as each person has a recognisable voice, each language has its own sound system or phonology. Consider the phrase ‘your city of Mexico’, in Nahuatl in mātzin in motepētzin, Mešihko, in Spanish Su ciudad de México. The phrase in Nahuatl uses a sound, tz (as in English bits), which is not used in Spanish, just as ciudad begins with a sound, θ (as in English thin), which is absent from Nahuatl. And even where Spanish was attempting to imitate Nahuatl directly, as in the name of México (pronounced MEH-shi-ko), it failed to capture the glottal stop, written with an h in Mešihko, which probably sounded more like a word that would be spelt in modern English as Meshitko.

      But the rules of combination, to create longer words and sentences, are also radically different between the two languages. So the respect implicit in the Spanish use of Su for ‘your’ at the beginning is expressed in Nahuatl by adding tzin at the end of each of the words. In this same phrase, the Nahuatl word for ‘city’ is quite clearly a combination of a-tl, ‘water’, and tepe-tl, ‘mountain’, corresponding to nothing in Spanish, where the word ciudad has more connotations of civic status than geographical eminence. In general, Nahuatl words are mostly long sequences of short parts, often containing as much meaning as a whole sentence in Spanish: ōtikmihiyōwiltih is made up of ō-ti-k-m-ihiyōwi-ltih (past-you-it-yourself-suffer-cause), ‘you have consented to suffer it’, where the reflexive and causative bits (in fourth and final place) actually serve to show special respect, and to raise the formality of the utterance.

      But phonology, vocabulary and grammar are just the beginning of what makes languages differ. Just as each person has a distinctive manner of speaking, quite apart from a recognisable voice, there is a characteristic style of expression which goes with each language. This difference may be minimised when languages are in close proximity, and very often translated one into another, as tends to be the case, say, among the languages of western Europe. But it is always there implicitly, and stands out very clearly in the encounter of Nahuatl with Spanish.

      The most evident aspect of Nahuatl style is the constant doubling of near-synonyms: ōtikmihiyōwiltih ōtikmoziyawiltih, ‘you have suffered, you are tired’; in mopetlatzin, in mokpaltzin, ‘your mat, your throne’; ahmo zan nikočitlēwa, ahmo zan nikkočitta, amo zan niktēmiki, ka yē ōnimitznottili, mīštzinko ōnitlačiš, ‘I am not dreaming, not fantasising; for I have seen you, I have looked upon you.’ By contrast, the characteristic European style of reporting, where a whole speech is retailed curtly in the third person, as in the Spanish account of Cortés’s words, is something quite alien to Nahuatl: not ‘He said: “I do not know how to pay you…”’ but ‘He told him that he did not know how to pay him…’, etc.

      These are examples of the characteristic differences between languages in daily use. But then there is the area of language’s past record, in the minds of its speakers as well as in writing.

      Both Motecuhzoma and Cortés were in thrall to their verbal pasts. Cortés was soon engaged in giving an impromptu sermon, which would naturally have made little sense, since his audience lacked a knowledge of the Christian texts with which he had grown up in Catholic Spain. But the tlatoani’s speech, too, is a polished production, redolent of the wewe-tlatolli, ‘the speech of the ancients’, which was part of the curriculum at the kalmékak, the school for Mexican elite youth. This included, for example, a speech on duty, to be delivered to a recently appointed tlatoani: ‘Our lord of greatest serenity and humanity, and our king of great generosity and valour, more precious than all precious stones, even than sapphire! Could it be a dream that we are seeing? Could we be drunk in seeing what our lord has done for us in giving us you for king and lord? And truly our lord God has set over us a new sun of great splendour and a light like the dawn’s…’³

      The same themes are here in this classic school text, of a new leader appearing as in a dream, and being like a light from the sky. But what was missing in Motecuhzoma’s greetings to Cortés was anything like the speech that always preceded this one in the ceremonies of welcome to a new tlatoani, a speech in which he would be fully reminded of his duties, and the need not to let