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

285-287 From Lambert, Pierre-Yves (1997), La Langue Gauloise , Paris: Editions Errance

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The problem is not that the shared properties are always imaginary (as the Nazis’ criteria for Jewishness may have been), or even objectively unimportant for survival (e.g. as the possession of genes for sickle-cell anaemia and thalassaemia clearly predispose to inherited disease, while giving resistance to malaria). It stems from the logic of statistics: when picking out a population for study, a subset of properties always has to be chosen from a much larger set. But populations who share one subset may not share another—and who is to say (in advance of the study) which properties define the group with the interesting history? In practice, the properties chosen tend to bear out the preconceptions of the researchers, making (e.g.) the correspondence between genetic and traditional linguistic classification of the world’s population groups less than astounding. This necessary arbitrariness in setting up the statistical models is a fundamental flaw in the credibility of the population-gradient prehistory associated with Luca Cavalli-Sforza (e.g. 2001) and his many followers.

A common problem, ironically, is that writers’ conservatism has made their symbols refer to a version of the language already out of use. Memories of what was learnt in the scribal school can take precedence over what the scribe was actually hearing.

Egyptian has dropped hieroglyphs, and (now known as Coptic) is written in an alphabet derived from Greek. Akkadian and Sumerian are no longer written at all; so cuneiform is a dead letter. Phoenician too is gone, although every alphabet in use from Ireland to Siam is derived from its original script. Mayan glyphs were discontinued at the time of the Spanish conquest, and now all these languages are written in Roman. Meanwhile Chinese continues to be written in the script first standardised by the man who ordered the burning of every book in the country. See Chapter 4, ‘First Unity’, p. 137.

As such it is prominent in forming the present-day Top Twenty language communities, to be considered close to the conclusion of this book (see p. 527).

The widespread use of English in the European Union can be seen as Diffusion reinforced (after the UK’s accession in 1973) by Infiltration.

It is also an inherently dangerous term, hard to separate from sweeping attempts to evaluate the achievements of whole peoples. (See, e.g., Macaulay’s notorious verdict on Sanskrit- and Arabic-based cultures (see Chapter 12, ‘Changing perspective—English in India’, p. 496).)

This has led to the total omission of two important known language spreads, and one conjectured one. The Polynesian islands gained their dozens of closely related languages over the four millennia from 3000 BC in perhaps the most intrepid sustained exploration ever. And the Bantu languages spread across southern Africa over much the same period, beginning in Cameroon and ending at the Cape. Both of these stories are crucial to understanding the full pattern of languages in today’s world, but they are based purely on archaeology and linguistic comparisons. We have not a single word recorded from all the talk of those aeons. As for the geographical path of Indo-European, the ancestral language that is reconstructed to make sense of the evident systematic relationships among Hittite, Sanskrit, Russian, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Gaulish, Lithuanian and English, and many, many more, we can only speculate, and those speculations are the stuff of historical linguistics, not of language history.

The family is named after Noah’s second son, Shem, introduced in Genesis ix.18, and the linguistic use goes back to A. L. Schloezer, writing in 1781. He drew his inspiration from the fact that many of the peoples named as the descendants of Shem in Genesis x.21-31 spoke languages of this family, notably Hebrew (coming via Arphaxad), Asshur and Aram. But the term is not well chosen: Shem also had among his sons Elam and Lud, the patriarchs for Elamite and Lydian, which are quite unrelated languages; and Canaan (first of the Sidonians, as well as Amorites and Arwadites) and Nimrod (first of the Babylonians and Akkadians) are given as descendants of Ham, though their languages are in fact closely related to Hebrew, Assyrian and Aramaic.

The first Semitic names (in fact from Akkadian) appear even earlier, in Sumerian documents c. 2800 BC (Caplice 1988: 3).

Pronounce š as English ‘sh’, h as the sound for blowing on glasses to mist them, θ as English ‘th’ in thin , ‘ as the clearing of a throat, ā as a long ‘a’ as in father , and ē as the long ‘e’ in Beethoven.

The Greeks, on the scene too late to know any of these early origins, called the place Mesopotamia, ‘Mid-River-land’, emphasising the framing role of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, Greek versions of the names Purattu and Idiqlat. But in this early period the Euphrates is much more central, flowing through Babylon and Ur, and watering the lands of both Akkad and Sumer. The Tigris, farther to the east, grows in importance with the rise of Assyria. ‘Assyria’ is the Greek attempt to name Asshur.

The name Hittite (from the Hebrew ẖittī ) comes from their power centre in the land of Hatti, where the natives spoke a quite unrelated language, Hattic. The Hittites in fact called their language Nesian ( nešili ), after their city of Nešaš (or Kanesh, modern Kültepe, in south-eastern Turkey) but the biblical misnomer ‘Hittite’ has stuck.

Croesus, the proverbially rich last king of Lydia, fell to Cyrus the Persian in 547 BC. Linguistically, this was the ultimate death rattle of Hittite power.

This is his name in Hebrew. His real name was Tukulti-apil-Esharra , meaning ‘my trust is in the son of Esharra’, namely the Assyrian god Asshur. The Mushki are equated b55555tty Igor Diakonov with the Mysians, Thracian settlers in western Anatolia, and also the Armenians, named Sa-mekhi by the Georgians. The Bible also speaks of Meshech as a foreign people.

The Phoinîkes , especially the Sidonians, are renowned in the Iliad for fine weaving and metalwork, and in the Odyssey as travelling merchants.

There are 6 million tons of ancient slag, covering 3/4 of a square kilometre, at the silver mines of Rio Tinto, near Huelva (probably the site of Tartessos, believed to be the same as Tarshish in Hebrew). Despite this massive activity, extending over centuries, archaeological evidence tends to show that Phoenician settlements in Spain were commercial enclaves rather than towns (Markoe 2000: 182-6).

Another ideographic system, invented at the other end of Asia, had similar effects. The Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, all of which became literate through the use of Chinese characters, have sustained major linguistic (and cultural) borrowings from Chinese which are by and large still present today.