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

Geographically, Chinese was moving from the cold, dry northern plains where wheat and millet were cultivated into the warmer, wetter uplands where the staple was rice. As well as a difference in climate, there was a difference in terrain, which made the going much tougher in the south: nán chuán běi mš , ‘south boat, north horse’, as the proverb has it. In practice waterways, defined by nature rather than human resource, are the only way to travel easily in the south. This was not a barrier to Chinese cultural and linguistic spread, but it did mean that uniformity, cultural or linguistic, was never so easily imposed there.

The motive behind the movement southward was no doubt the quest for more fertile soil, and its success must have been backed by the advantages in technology that the northerners were accumulating, symbolised by possession of a written language and large-scale organisation. The first reflection of this on politics comes in 221 BC, with the command of Shi Huang Di, the First Emperor, who unified most of central China, to half a million colonists to go and fill his newly conquered territories ‘among the various Yue peoples’. By this time there was a political motive to add to the economic one: the despot of a united China desired to separate the traditional families from their ancestral power bases; and the political push was renewed from time to time over the next millennium. [63] Mencius ( c. 250 BC according to Brooks 2002), 3.B.6: ‘Suppose some great officer of Chu wanted his son to learn to speak Qi …’ Evidently, the ambitious were already setting themselves to learn Chinese. Qi was approximately modern Shandong, at the mouth of the Huang-he, and so at the centre of the spread of Chinese. Strangely, a text written only a decade or so later seems to pick Chu to contrast with an eastern barbarian language: ‘Let a Chu man grow up among Rong, or a Rong man grow up in Chu, and the Chu man will speak Rong, while the Rong man will speak Chu’ ( Lushi Chunqiu , 4.E).

Shi Huang Di (’First Emperor’), who had converted his rule of the Qin state [65] This is often proposed as the etymology for the name China , a name that seems to have reached the West through Persian and Italian. But the Chinese use rather the names of the Han or Tang dynasties as the name of their nation, and the form of the name suggests that it is derived from the Sanskrit name, Cīna. This applied mainly to the area of Tibet, though also on occasions included Assam and Burma (Sircar 1971: 104-5). China as a whole was known to the Indians as Mahācīna , ‘Great China’: this, for example, is where the Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang told the Indians he was from, when he visited in 629. Si-Yu-Ki, v. 1 (in Beal 1884, part 1: 216). into the first overlordship of all the known states of the Chinese world, was for many reasons a significant figure. He reigned over China for only eleven years (221-210 BC), after thirty-seven on the throne of Qin, but what years they were: besides completing the Great Wall (invaders from the north were already a problem), abolishing the power of feudal lords, carrying through an intellectual purge in a notorious rampage of book-burning, and installing the Terracotta Army in his tomb in the then capital, Chang-an, he is also famous for the standardisation of Chinese characters, as part of a general programme to introduce common laws, weights and measures. This meant imposing the local standard of his (far western) state of Qin, which happened to be one of the most conservative in use at that time. It existed in two versions, the heavily pictorial zhuànshū , ‘seal script’, still occasionally seen on ornate inscriptions and official seals, and the more cursive lìshū , ‘clerical script’. This latter was taken up under the Han empire that followed, and codified in a dictionary of the time, the Shuōwèn Jiězì of Xŭ Shèn. This system has been the basis of Chinese writing, kšishū ( , ‘standard script’), ever since.

Conscious of a common language in wényán and a common script in kšishū , Chinese people took a millennium to begin to notice people diverging: early Tang literature (seventh century AD) talks of the south differing from the north in its fāng-yán , ‘regional speech’, the normal word for a dialect: this came to be a pretty strong term, also to be applied (much later [339] By the Translators’ Bureau in late imperial times: Ramsey (1987: 32). ) to refer to foreign languages such as Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, Manchu and Vietnamese.

The languages spoken by China’s equestrian neighbours to its north and west were quite unrelated to the family that includes Chinese, the Sino-Tibetan languages already mentioned. Furthermore—and in this they differed from the tongues of China’s southern neighbours—they were not like Chinese typologically either. Like their modern descendants, the so-called Altaic languages [64] These moves can be compared with the depopulations ordered by the kings of Assyria and Babylon after major military victories. (See Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 64.) But since the Mesopotamian kings saw the greatest threat in foreigners, they ended up seeding their empire with a foreign language, Aramaic; the Chinese emperor, seeing threat in Chinese feudal lords, disseminated them (and therewith the Chinese language) to the farthest corners of his realm. of central Asia, including the Turkic, the Mongol and the Tungus families, they are all highly polysyllabic; their words, at least the nouns and verbs, are built up systematically and agglutinatively out of strings of short elements. They are not tone languages, but they make extensive use of the principle of vowel harmony, so that the vowels in the suffixes echo the vowels of the word’s root. Their word order places the verb at the end of the sentence. In all these respects, they are radically different from Chinese, a monosyllabic tone language with little or no word formation, and a basic order in which the verb comes second in the sentence.

The Xiōngnú [66] The Altai mountains of central Asia, the source of this name, are themselves named for their gold: cf. Turkish altin. were the principal steppe nomads of Mongolia and Turkestan in the third century BC. Despite their major role in Chinese history it is extremely difficult to find evidence of what their language was like. There is, however, a single quotation of ten Chinese characters, giving some advice of the Buddhist monk Fotudeng to a Xiongnu king. The characters would have been read in the fourth century AD as

syog tieg t’iei liəd kāng b’uok kuk g’iw t’uk tāng.

If we follow Louis Bazin in reading this as

süg tägti idqang, boqughigh tutqang

your army send-out, warlord hold

we can infer that their language was Turkic, rather than Mongol or Tungus. [340] Bazin (1948).

Three Chinese kingdoms of the north, the Qin, the Zhao and the Yan, had each built sections of wall to keep the Xiongnu out. The walls were unified and lengthened when the Qin emperor incorporated all the kingdoms into his realm. The Chinese also learnt how to oppose the Xiongnu with their own cavalry tactics. Hostilities continued for five hundred years, and for all this time the Chinese were successful in keeping the barbarians out of China, and in maintaining a forward policy that kept control throughout the western regions now known as Gansu and Qinghai; in this way, the Silk Road was secured, as well as access to the far-away horse-breeding grounds of Ferghana by the Pamirs, vital for the Chinese defence. However, their defence also depended on maintaining an active frontier garrison, and it was a costly exercise to keep the guards supplied. When the centralised government of China broke down at the end of the Han dynasty, this failed, and it became possible for the Xiongnu to penetrate the wall.