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

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The first seed for this book came from John Coates of BRLSI, Bath’s cultural society; he invited me to give a lecture on language, as part of a millennium series on ‘Histories of the Future’. Only when I sat down to consider the histories of a few major languages, did I realise what a vast and important theme this opened up, yet one that was largely omitted from general knowledge.

Lola Bubbosh guided my first steps into the world of literary agents. There I was fortunate to find Natasha Fairweather, who could see how best to present my theme to publishers. Besides that, she pointed out other works which have enriched my own understanding of it. It is thanks to her, and my perceptive and conducive editors, Richard Johnson, Andrew Proctor and Terry Karten, that my first foray into publishing has been so straightforward. Colleagues of theirs have also amazed me in different ways—at A. P. Watt Linda Shaughnessy selling translation rights across the world before I had even written a word; and at HarperCollins Kate Hyde coping with unprecedented material coming from all sides, and the UK and US cover-designers Dominic Forbes and Roberto de Vicq. Others closer to home gave stern but helpful criticism on early drafts, my daughter Sophia, my father-in-law David Thesen, above all my wife, and prime literary consultant, Jane Dunn. The faults that they found were not—as they charitably thought—the result of my being too deep, but just of my being too opaque. At any rate, their efforts have made it much easier for others to see what I have been getting at all along.

As for intellectual debts while writing, I have been aided by scholars all over the world, who have given of their time and generously clarified details of languages in which they were far more learned than I: Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Geoffrey Khan (Akkadian and Aramaic); Rashad Ahmad Azami (Arabic); Hassan Ouzzate, Salem Mezhoud (Berber); Abdou Elimam (Punic); Christopher Child (Swahili); E. Bruce Brooks (Chinese); Harekrishna Satpathy, Radha Madhav Dash, Sanghamitra Mohanty, Prativa Manjari Ralt (Sanskrit), Ether Soselia (Georgian), María Stella González de Perez (Spanish and Portuguese), Frances Karttunen (Nahuatl), Aurolyn Luykx (Quechua), Emma Volodarskaya (Russian) and David Crystal (English). Andy Pawley and Darrell Tryon have sharpened my knowledge of languages in the Pacific, and Otto Zwartjes, Even Hovdhaugen and Françoise Douay of language studies in Europe and the Middle East. Above all, Peter T. Daniels, after benefiting me with his profound expertise in Aramaic and Middle-Eastern languages, has gone on to improve the whole text in a variety of ways both as attentive reader and punctilious typesetter, even unto cuneiform. Other readers who have corrected errors include Frank Abate, Bart Holland, Dan Hughes, Tim Nau, Noriko Akimoto Sugimori, Mark Turin and most of all Stephen Benham and Fran Karttunen. I am sincerely grateful to them all. But needless to say, I am still responsible for mistakes that remain.

The intellectual journey to complete this book has incurred other debts. Most recently, my debts are to Tony McEnery, who conjured up my trips to India in 2001; and to Jane Simpson and David Nash, who—after twenty-five years of shared insights about languages and theories—made it possible for me in 2002 to visit Australia. That dawn-land of today’s linguistics has access to the great feed-stocks of language data, and there I could present this material to audiences of the learned and enthusiastic in Perth, Sydney and Armidale. Among them I have John Henderson and Nick Reid to thank too, for invitations and memorable hospitality.

More distantly, but no less importantly, the background knowledge harvested here has come to me from a long and varied line of language teachers: I think particularly of Maurice Bickmore, Bella Thompson, Ken Batterby, James Howarth, Geoffrey Allibone, Jack Ind, Robert Ogilvie, Jasper Griffin, Peter Parsons, Oliver Gurney, Anna Morpurgo Davies, Wayne O’Neil, Paul Kiparsky, Ken Hale, Daniel Ingalls, Rama Nath Sharma, Susumu Kuno, Bart Matthias, Edwin Cranston, Rosalind Howard, Martin Prechtel, Damian McManus, Kim McCone and Stiofáin Ó Direáin.

These guides are like prophets. In our country language teaching is often misrepresented as misguided drudgery; and really to learn another language can often seem a nigh impossible task. There is no royal road to it, but gold glints in unexpected places all along the path. For me it has always been the surest route to new worlds that lie beyond my imagination, sic ITVR AD ASTRA.

NICHOLAS OSTLER’S serious interest in languages took him from first-class honors in Classics at Oxford and a doctorate in linguistics and Sanskrit at MIT to teaching in Japan and a succession of research projects from Crete to New Mexico, aimed at introducing languages to computers. He then moved on to the problems of human speakers and made himself an expert on the Chibcha language of ancient South America, which yielded to Spanish in the eighteenth century.

Nicholas Ostler is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (www.ogmios.org), a charity that supports the efforts of small communities worldwide to know and use their languages more. He lives in Bath, England.

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32-33, 202 Text specimens and translations from Daniels, Peter & William Bright (1996), The World’s Writing Systems , New York: Oxford University Press. Copyright $cP 1996 by Oxford University Press, Inc.