Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

It is a paradox that this book, which has told the stories of languages that have so vastly extended their reach, often at the expense of others, is above all a tale of diversity. After all, the kinds of developments recounted here are what have led to the modern crisis of language endangerment, a situation so serious that it is reasonable to believe that, for half the world’s languages, their last speakers may already be alive today. [745]But there are still over six thousand languages in the world, even if the dozen or so whose tales have been told in this book now account for about two-fifths of the world’s speakers.

It is worth asking whether the diversity of consciousness and identity that each language represents can or should survive in the modern world. Past industrial and scientific revolutions argue that there is a single, unified path to valid knowledge and industrial organisation, and boast a display of seemingly magical achievements to prove it. Nevertheless, at least until the mid-nineteenth century it was the interplay of research in half a dozen different languages which kept up the pace of intellectual advance. And even today, a penetrating observer of the role of English in the modern world can remark: ‘in 500 years’ time…if [English] is by then the only language left…it will have been the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known’. [746]

But we should not be too overwhelmed by forecasts of impending unity. Half a dozen spiritual revelations have offered themselves as universal truths in the past 2500 years, and most of them are still in contention. Likewise the languages whose histories this book has reviewed have been spreading in increasing circles for twice that period of time. Despite all this rampant competition, almost all of them—or their successors—are still in existence at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

A lingua franca is a convenience: for speakers to convey a message across the world, certainly, but also for listeners when one language community appears to have more than its fair share of useful knowledge. But despite the myth of the Tower of Babel, and its vulgar interpretation as a cautionary tale, language diversity is not a liability for the human race. Most people in the world are multilingual, and everyone could be; no one is rigorously excluded from another’s language community except through lack of time or effort. Different languages protect and nourish the growth of different cultures, where different pathways of human knowledge can be discovered. They certainly make life richer for those who know more than one of them.

In writing this book, I have consciously been embarking on a new approach within the general field of linguistics. Instead of looking at the current status of the world’s major languages, I have taken a historical view. But instead of comparing words in different languages systematically, with a view to reconstructing their past, as a historical linguist usually does, or comparing the overall structures of different languages, like a language typologist, I have considered the evolving status of each language over the centuries of its career. Where any comparison has been attempted, it is the comparison of those careers. This kind of work might be called the study of language dynamics. [230]It is an approach, previously little explored, to understanding human societies: how language, in all its evolving variety, organises not just the human mind but also the large groups of human minds that constitute themselves into societies, which communicate and interact, as well as think and act.

From this point of view, our focus on large languages has been above all a convenience. All languages have their own histories, but few are well enough documented to reveal very much about them. It is the large and famous languages that typically have the most adequate documentation. This is where we needed to start, to lay down the outlines of this new field. And this we have done. But ultimately language dynamics must encompass the history of human language in all its diversity.

kva sūryabhavo vaṃśaṃ kva cālpaviṣ;ayā matiẖ

titīrṣur dustaraṃ mohād uḏupenāsmi sāgaram

here the lineage born of the Sun, and here my weakly endowed mind: would I in folly cross the impassable ocean in my canoe?

Kālidāsa, The Line of Raghu , i.2

In fact the introduction of the script is traditionally (i.e. in a history from the fourteenth century) credited to a Tibetan scholar and government minister, Thon-mi Anui-bu, said to have been sent on a mission to India in the mid-seventh century. But Thon-mi may have been an invented figure, since he is omitted from genuinely ancient records of Tibet found in central Asia, while the earliest grammatical works on Tibetan are also attributed to him.

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