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

Christians were not the only people to go on speaking Aramaic, though they have lasted longest. The Gnostic sect of southern Mesopotamia also spoke another dialect of Aramaic, known as Mandate or Mandaean, at least until the eighth century. And for a few centuries AD, the Jews of Babylonia and Persia also continued, producing most notably the vast Babylonian Talmud. Both these communities were prolific in writing literature.

There is a considerable modern diaspora too, to the major cities of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Many are said to have emigrated to Armenia and Georgia after the Russo-Persian war of 1827; and a sizeable number have gathered in the USA. The use of the Internet in binding them together is examined in McClure (2001). She quotes estimates of worldwide numbers around 1-3 million.

Its name is derived from Arabic qibt , ‘Egyptian’, a shortening of the Greek Aigyptios.

This caused some philological problems, since Muhammad’s dialect of Arabic was slightly nonstandard: it lacked the glottal stop ’, known as hamza (the stop heard in place of the tt of the London pronunciation of ‘bitter’), had lost the -n ending of the nominative, and had turned the -t ending of feminine nouns into -h. The scholars wanted to retain the text exactly as written, but recite it according to the rules of standard Arabic. As a result, all these consonants of Arabic had to be inserted in the written text with special accent marks, as if they were vowels. These marks are all now standard in Arabic spelling.

Arabic script turned out to be much more universally attractive than its language, and has been taken up wherever Islam was accepted. This has happened despite its functional weaknesses, with no marking of vowels or tones, and a need for elaborate accents even to distinguish all the consonants. Nevertheless, compromises have been found, and it has been applied to languages as various and as unrelated as Persian, Turkish, Kashmiri, Berber, Uighur, Somali, Hausa, Swahili and Malay, as well as Spanish and Serbo-Croat. It must owe this success to the fact that literacy in Muslim countries finds its alpha and its omega in the sacred text of the Qur’ān in Arabic script; so any other writing system can only be an extra complication.

It may be worth noting that the j in this word is pronounced as in judge.

But one is left wondering why the linguistic approach of the Germans, notably the Visigoths, had been so different, when in 410 they likewise took over control of the neighbouring higher civilisation, the Roman empire, only to cast themselves, almost immediately, as its protectors. But in the European case, there was no third language playing the role of Persian: Latin was still the only language of temporal power, as well as the language of the Roman Church.

Hausa, centred on Kano in northern Nigeria, is more of a problem for the constraint. It has certain features that are reminiscent of Arabic, e.g. two genders, masculine and feminine, the latter marked with - a (cf. Arabic - ah ); and the absence of p —as in Arabic, it usually replaces p in loan-words with f. Moreover, its predominantly Muslim speakers have filled it with loan words from Arabic, including most of the numerals above ten, and the days of the week, and even some productive prefixes, such as ma -. (’School’ is makaranta , formed from karanta , ‘read’, itself related to the word Qur ‘ān. In Arabic, ‘school’ is maktab , or madrasa , with the same prefix, but ktb, ‘write’, or drs, ‘lesson’, as the stem.) But it also has many features much more typical of its African neighbours, e.g. three contrasting tones, and explosive consonants. It may be that its own utility as a lingua franca, widely used in West Africa and not just among Muslims, has acted to maintain its independence.

They even plied, especially in the early centuries, to South-East Asia and China. Abū Zayd of Sīrāf wrote that sea traffic in 851 was regular because of a great exchange of merchants between Iraq and markets in India and China: in fact, he said, a trade colony of 120,000 Westerners (including Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians) were massacred in Canton in 878 (Hourani 1995: 76-7).

Zanzibar is in fact an Arabised form of Persian: Zangi-bar , ‘blacks’ land’.

In Turkish spelling (introduced by Atatürk in 1928-9), c is [dž] (j in judge ), ç is [č] (ch in church ), i is i pronounced with the tongue root drawn back (as in Scots kirk ), and ğ is either a gargling sound (like Greek gamma or Arabic ghain) or just a lengthening of the preceding vowel; ö and ü are as in German.

In the interests of readability and realism, Egyptian words are given according to the reconstruction of Loprieno 1995 for early Middle Egyptian, with the addition that vowels that he believes indiscernible are represented here by °. R is the French (or Israeli) uvular r, and j is pronounced as in German, like English y in yet.ḥ is a deeper h, as when huffing on a pair of glasses; and ẖ is like ch in ‘loch’ or ‘Bach’.’ is ayn, notorious from Semitic languages, the throat-clearing sound at the beginning of English ‘ahem’. It should be remembered, however, that as written in hieroglyphs, Egyptian words are totally without vowels.

This Pinyin romanisation represents a modern Mandarin pronunciation of this text from the fifth century BC. As such it represents the words and the sentence structure, but not the sounds that Confucius would have used.

In this book, Chinese is transcribed using the pīnyīn zìmŭ ‘phonetic alphabet’ system, usually known as Pinyin, officially promoted by the Chinese government since 1958. In it, the accents ( v,v,v,v ) denote tone patterns, not different vowel sounds. Among consonants, c is English ts, j is English j, q English ch, and x English sh. You will also see zh, ch and sh: these are pronounced similarly to j, q and x, but with retroflex tongue, as if there were an r immediately following. Most Chinese outside the north-east area are in fact incapable of making the distinction. Pinyin has the virtue of being compact, accurate and consistent (without the irritating apostrophes of the older Western systems, Wade-Giles and Yale) but it can only claim to represent modern pronunciation. This can be misleading when it is applied to very old words and names.

The word Mandarin is not Chinese at all, but a deformation of the Sanskrit word māntrin , ‘counsellor’, with some influence from the Portuguese verb mandar , ‘command’. Pŭtōnghuá means ‘common language’, a term with an inclusive feel, which has largely replaced older terms such as guāNnhuá , ‘official language’ (the closest to a Chinese equivalent for Mandarin ), or guòyŭ, ‘national language’, which referred to much the same thing. Hànyŭ , ‘Han language’, is another term used.

The origin of this name seems to be an early Greek attempt to represent late Egyptian n-irw-aR , ‘the-rivers-great’, referring to the Nile’s many streams in the Delta area. This is related to jatruw , ‘(the) river’, always its name in classical Egyptian (Luft 1992).