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

See Chapter 13. The six are English, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, German and French. There was a seventh, Dutch, which holds position 21 in the population league. Their imperial careers are reviewed in Chapters 10, 11 and 12.

Contrast Alcuin, propagating his new standard for Latin in the ninth century, and working in quite the opposite direction: for the important mission then was to put the intellectual world back in touch with itself, and its own ancient traditions.

This backward-looking spirit is still familiar to me from an education in the classical stream of an English public school in the 1960s. It is expressed in a thousand prefaces to school textbooks. Consider this from Ainger and Wintle (1890, 17th impression 1963: iii): ‘Latin verse composition … is the proof and the flower of that scholarship which loves the old writers with an unselfish love, and delights to clothe modern thoughts and modern expressions in the dress of ancient metre and rhythm.’ Or Pym and Silver (1952), who state that a chapter ‘illustrates the continuing vitality of the Latin language in England during the last two hundred years’ when all it contains is epitaphs, a couple of parliamentary speeches (in English) which allude to Latin literature, a section of a papal encyclical, a poem (admittedly witty) on the fuel crisis of 1947, and a number of jokey prize compositions from schools and the University of Oxford. The book’s very title. Alive on Men’s Lips , is a highly ironic lie, since it is simply a translation of a phrase from the epitaph of Ennius, ’vivu’ per ora virŭm’ , dead in the second century BC.

These fantasies were a mannered outgrowth of the heroic lays of early Romance three centuries earlier, such as Chanson de Roland , in Norman French, and Poema de Mio Cid , in Castilian Spanish. Many of the recent titles are listed in ch. 6 of Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (first half published 1605), where most of them are scheduled for burning. Enthusiasm for King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is part of the same European phenomenon. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was published by William Caxton at Westminster in 1485.

Linguistically, Galician was (and is) much the same as Portuguese, divided from it by the course of the River Minho, and the political fact that Portugal became independent of Castile in 1143.

A third (non-Germanic) group, the Alans, went south-west, not east, even if a popular etymology for Catalan is ‘Goth-Alan’. The Vandals left their name in Andalusia, but passed on to Tunisia, and were largely erased by the subsequent Muslim conquest.

‘… they reached an islet of the Lucayas, which was called Guanahani in the language of the Indians.’ Columbus, Diario de a bordo , Friday, 12 October 1492, quoted by De las Casas (1957 [ c. 1530]). Columbus had at first thought he was within the domain of the Chinese Great Khan, and then (12 November) amid ‘the islands of India’. He no longer called the people he met indios after mid-December of that year, but the name had stuck (Sale 1990: 109).

‘… These islands are inhabited by Canabilli , a wild, unconquered race which feeds on human flesh. I would be right to call them anthropophagi. They wage unceasing wars against gentle and timid Indians to supply flesh… ’ Letter of Guillermo Coma, De insulis meridiani … nuper inventis , on Columbus’s second voyage, for Sunday, 3 November 1493.

Columbus’s world-view was informed by copious reading. We have seven of his books with his personal annotations, preserved to this day in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville. They include works of Marco Polo and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History , and others more fanciful. His son Fernando also gave an account of his father’s reading, in chs 6 and 7 of his biography (Sale 1990: 15).

Although the contacts over the first few centuries always involved the projection of the mariners’ languages on to the peoples who received their landfalls, more recently we have seen that the new links can work in both directions, as immigrant communities from colonised countries gather in the homelands of once colonial powers, bringing their own languages with them.

The word ’ladino’ , indeed, carried over from its application to Moors in Spain, was a term often used of non-Spaniards who knew Spanish, first applied to Indians but later also to African slaves.

The people in Hispaniola, Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean islands, discovered in the previous generation, and immediately pressed into servitude by self-appointed Spanish masters, had spoken too many languages with too few speakers, and by and large died off too quickly, for a missionary effort to become established.

On the uniqueness of this, see Ostler (2004). Almost all the dictionaries are from Spanish into the alien language, not the reverse. The aim is to teach, rather than to learn: to encode a Spaniard’s thought, and so pass it to the Indians, rather than to try to decode anything novel that they might have to say.

Lengua mexicana refers to the Nahuatl language, the principal lingua franca of the Aztec (Mexica) empire, and at first also of its successor empire, New Spain.

Other than to misidentify some phrases in it, and apply them permanently to the lands he was ‘discovering’ (and of course claiming in the name of the Spanish Crown). Ekab kotoc , ‘we are from Ekab’, became Cabo (cape) Cotoche, its name to this day. And, if we follow Diego de Landa ( Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán , ch. ii, written c .1566), ciu yetel ceh than , ‘They call it land of turkeys and deer’, ended up as ‘Yucatán’.

Guaraní is so called for historical reasons, because the first people whom Europeans (with Sebastian Cabot in 1526-9) met who spoke this language were the Guaraní of the islands in the Río de la Plata and lower reaches of the Paraná. Its own preferred name is avaõe’e , ‘language of the men of the plain’.

The name is a nominalisation of the verb nawati , ‘to speak up’. We shall stick to the conventional spelling of this name, which is based on Spanish, and so pronounced nawatl. There are dialects, often called Nawat and Nawal, which (as their names show) differ in the pronunciation of this final consonant.

The x is authentically pronounced as English sh , and the stress falls on the i, followed by a glottal stop: Mēšíhko.

The dates quoted are actually specified with equivalent accuracy in the original text of the Crónica Mexicayotl. The many different peoples of central America shared an elaborate system of interlocking calendar cycles which tolerated no vagueness, even if not always compatible with one another.

The phraseology is very similar to Motecuhzoma’s formal greetings to Cortés. See Prologue and Chapter 1, ‘An inward history too’, p. 15. Note also that, in accord with the conceits of Aztec etiquette discussed there, the junior party, the Aztecs, represent themselves as the grandfathers.