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

China is now in a period of extremely rapid economic development, in which it has consciously adopted Western methods. In a sense this is the third Western-inspired revolution in a century, since the foundation of the republic in 1911, the communist revolution in 1949 and the initiation of capitalist reforms since Mao’s death were all applications of Western ideas. All this in a country that had not internalised a major Western idea since the widespread take-up of Buddhism in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. If China succeeds in adopting and adapting these ideas in its own long-term interests, it will once again have turned the apparently conclusive victory of its adversary into a longer-scale triumph of its own. New beams and pillars indeed.

But if we take up again our comparison with the Egyptian case, the long-term future of the Chinese language may be hanging in the balance. The common feature we have found, which explains both Egyptian and Chinese persistence over so many millennia, is the maintenance of a distinct centre of identity and loyalty within the language community.

Gradually losing aspects of its historic centre, in the form first of its monarchy, then of its political independence, then of its own national religion, and finally of its national form of Christianity, Egyptian weakened steadily over the ages, and has now, as a language simply recited in formal liturgy, come close to disappearing altogether. If the analogy is valid, Chinese, despite its billion speakers, might consider that it too has now entered on a perilous path. To accommodate the challenge from the modern, European-inspired, world, it has already given up the link with its own monarchy, an ideal with which it had identified for over two millennia. It has not given up its political independence, but it has, at least officially, resigned its own religion: since the fall of the monarchy, it has no longer actively sustained the value of Confucian, much less Taoist, ideas.

China’s political independence may yet save its language from the downward slide of Egyptian. And even under foreign rule, Chinese has shown itself much more resilient, and indeed absorbent, than Egyptian ever was in its last two millennia. It has the advantage, which Egyptian never had, not just of high density but also of vast absolute population size. In its written mode, there is nothing yet in the history of Chinese to compare with Egyptian’s loss of its indigenous writing system and adoption of the Greek script, though romanisation may yet come.

In sum, the cultural retreats that we identified as leading to Egyptian’s demise all have their analogues in the recent history of Chinese, except for political conquest. The writing may already be on the wall for the language now spoken by one fifth of mankind.

bhāṣā praśastā sumano lateva

keṣām na cetāṃsy āvarjayati

Language, auspicious, charming, like a creeper, whose minds does it not win over? [754] In the romanised script for Sanskrit, c is pronounced as ch in church , j as in judge. A dot under t, d or n means that it must be sounded with tongue turned back, retroflex. A dot under an h means that it is followed by an echo of the previous vowel (e.g. kaẖ , ‘who’, as kah a ). A dot under an r or an I means that it is pronounced as a separate syllable, as bitter, little in American English. A dot under an m means that is pronounced simply by nasalising the preceding vowel: ahaṃ , ‘I’, is like American ‘uhuh?’. All the stop consonants (k, g, c, j, t, d, ṯ, ḏ, p, b) can be aspirated, and this is shown by a following h. There are three sibilants, ś, ṣ and s: the first two are close to English sh , the former as in sheet , the latter with the darker sound as in push.

( sūkta —traditional maxim)

There is a persistent image of Sanskrit as a creeping plant, luxuriant and full blossomed. Over two thousand years it spread itself round the centres of Asian population: from north to south of the Indian subcontinent, and thence to South-East Asia and the East Indies, to the Tibetan plateau and to the Far East.

The word Sanskrit (saṃskṛta ) means ‘composed’ or ‘synthesised’. It is a term for the language as formulated in the grammar books, contrasting it with its colloquial dialects, known as the Prakrits (prāṛta ), the ‘naturals’. It also distinguishes it from an older form, sometimes called Vedic, known from its use in the Veda , ‘the knowledge’: these are hymns to the gods which appear to go back to the earliest days of the language as spoken in India, in the last centuries of the second millennium BC, but which are still recited unchanged in Hindu rituals today. Most of the modern languages of northern and central India are descendants of Sanskrit, developed versions of the Prakrits, much as the Romance languages developed from forms of vulgar Latin. But outside the Indian subcontinent, Sanskrit was never taken up as a popular language; it remained purely a medium of learned communication and sacred expression, strongest where the dominant religion had come from India.

Although it is religious tradition which has proved the most reliable preserver of Sanskrit in many an avatāra (’descent’, as of a divine being from heaven), and despite the heavy association, in the West today, of the language with transcendental spiritualism, Sanskrit was never just a liturgical language.

Even the Vedic corpus contains a joyous yet wry evocation of māṇḏūkāẖ , [366] Rig Veda, vii. 103. ‘frogs’, doubly like the priestly caste of Brahmans: they take a vow of silence for a year (until the rainy season); and when they do pipe up ‘one of them repeats the speech of the other, as the learner does of his teacher’. It also brings us the wry self-pity of a compulsive gambler, [367] ibid., x.34. enslaved to babhravaẖ , ‘the browns’, the nuts then used as dice: rājā cid ebhyo nama it kṛṇoti , ‘even a king bows before them…’ he excuses himself, going on: tasmai kṛṇomi, ‘na dhanā ruṇadhmi’ daśāham prācīs, ‘tad ṛtam vadāmi’. ‘I show him my empty palms: “I am not holding out on you—it’s the truth, I tell you."’

Later on, Sanskrit becomes very wide ranging in its content, including among its most widely known works romantic comedy, theoretical linguistics, economics, sexology (notably the Kāma Sūtra ), lyrical verse, history and moral fables, along with a continuing production of epic poetry and religious and philosophical tracts. It is a very self-conscious literary tradition, full of learned allusions, and above all the most elaborate development of the pun known anywhere on earth.

We begin with an outline of how Sanskrit was spread across Asia.

A dialect of Indo-Iranian, it is first heard of in the North-West Frontier area of Swat and the northern Panjab (now in Pakistan), spoken by peoples who have evidently come from farther north or west, and who like to call themselves ārya (later a common word for ‘gentleman’, and always the Buddhists’ favourite word for sheer nobility of spirit). Somehow their descendants, and even more their language, spread down over the vast Indo-Gangetic plain, as well as up into the southern reaches of the Himālaya (’snow-abode’) mountains, so that by the beginning of the fifth century BC the language was spoken in an area extending as far east as Bihar, and as far south, perhaps, as the Narmada. Sanskrit literature from the period, principally the epic poems Mahābhārata (’Great Bharata’) and Rāmāyaṇa (’The Coming of Rama’), is full of military exploits and conquests.