Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

Super interesting look at a subset of languages. Notably lack of African languages, but a good look at many of the Indo-European in the context of conquest/imperialism. Also looks at Chinese and small section on Semitic languages. A bit long if not deeply interested in languages and the mix of original language and English translations is inconsistent (and so a touch annoying). Worth the read.

In the fashion of Jorge Luis Borges, I have always dreamed of a book that contained the history of the world in which languages were the main actors. Thanks to Nicholas Ostler, PHD in linguistics from MIT, we now have such a book. Not only was I not disappointed, it exceded even my wildest dreams. It takes great knowledge and audacity to undertake this project, and Ostler has both.This work focuses mainly on languages that have been widely influential. The first part of the book, starting 5,300 years ago, describes the spread of languages by land, from 3,300 BC up to the Middle Ages. The second part is an account of the spread of European languages as they conquered and colonized the world by sea. In the last part of the book, Ostler makes some predictions as to which languages will dominate in the coming century.Instead of trying to summarize the book - which would be impossible in this space - I will highlight some of the more interesting points.1)Why did Latin or one of its vernacualars not take root in England as it did in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal? After all they were all domains of the Roman Empire. And why did Anglo-Saxon take root in England and nowhere else? Ostler speculates that most of the population died out from the plague leaving a linguistic void for the conquering Anglo-Saxons. However, there is no one determinent that will guarantee a language's staying power: factors include conquest, migration, economic power, and religion.2)Why did Greek survive long after Greek civilization disappeared? It became a language of learning and prestige during the Roman Empire, and also latter in Constantinople during the Byzantium era. In a sense, it has parallels with Hebrew. Hebrew was not a vernacular from 100 BC until the 20th century, it survived mainly as a liturgical language, a language of learning.3)In an excellent chapter called "The Triumphs of Fertility," Ostler compares Egyptian and Chinese. Both are rather cumbersome and unwieldy pictographic languages, but this also served as a unifying force in civlilizations with many mutually unintelligible dialects. Chinese and Egyptian civilizations were highly centralized with densely populated heartlands. Hence, their tremendous fertility prevented invading languages from overtaking them for thousands of years. Chinese is still with us today, but Egyptian was finally conquered by Arabic around 700 AD.4)Sanskrit and Arabic are examples of languages that spread by being bearers of major religions. Arabic spread quickly across the Arabian peninsula and across North Africa through conquest. Arabic did not supplant the dominant languages of what are now Turkey and Iran, but both Turkish and Persian retain many Arabic words. It is a belief of devout Muslims that God's truth will only be revealed in Arabic, thus giving great impetus to its study. Sanskrit, which Ostler affectionately calls the "charming creeper," spread, not by conquest, but more by seduction and by organic growth. Sanskrit, as the language of Hinduism, gradually established itself in the subcontinent and latter in Southeast Asia. Today, however, only the vernaculars of Sanskrit are mainly spoken, Sanskrit itself has only about 200,000 speakers left.5)After 1500, the European powers and languages began expanding by sea. Ostler gives accounts of why Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English established themselves in some places but not others. In most cases, where the conquering language takes root is where entire families migrate and establish themselves in the rural areas, away from the imperial center. The English in America, Australia, and Canada, as well as the Portuguese in Brazil are examples of this axiom. This is why English did not do well in, say, India nor Portuguese in Indonesia.This book is simply a tour de force. Ostler asks all the right questions and answers them very judiciously. After reading it you will start to think of the future in terms of which languages will be spoken.

Ostler's "Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World" is in actuality very little of what it claims to be. Ostler is neither a linguist nor a historian, as he is quick to mention early in the work as though these two disciplines are beneath him. Instead, he intends to write "the universal study of language history, of which this [book] is a first attempt" (xx). He further contends that "this book is fundamental" (xix). These sweeping claims for his own work aside, the book is really a lamentation on the decline of Sanskrit and Greek as major languages in "new worlds that lie beyond my imagination" (xiv) while the author nervously witnesses the fluidity of people, culture, and language in the real world he resists embracing.Ostler certainly is learned. His frequent, distracting tangents seek to prove this erudition as though he was showing his notes to a mentor and asking "See? I know this!" His insistent use of Romanized versions of paragraph-long non-English quotations is odd indeed, unless viewed with the lens of insecurity, a constant need to prove. But what is Ostler trying to prove?A qualitative look at how the book is constructed tells us much about what Ostler is actually saying. Ostler devotes 9 pages in a 559-page book about "the currency of human communities" (9) to the Phoenicians and their alphabet, a derivative of which he uses to compose the book all while spending a chapter discussing the Greek alphabet, writing, and koine, itself a direct, first-generation child of the Phoenician alphabet. Similarly, in a "book as big as this one" (xix), Ostler relegates the entire language history of the pre-Columbian Western hemisphere to just 20 pages. Perhaps most telling, there are zero, yes zero, pages discussing the linguistic history of sub-Saharan Africa.Over the course of over 500 pages, Ostler is actually sending a very simple message: Ostler enjoys Greek, Chinese, and Sanskrit. He is sad that Arabic is a major world language. He is confused about where Persian actually came from and how the Persian writing system developed. He views cultures as monoliths led by singular "great men," like Alexander, Asoka, and Augustus. He has some peripheral familiarity with language families in contact with his big Grreek and Sanskrit favorites, such as Indo-Iranian, Turkic, Celtic, Latin, but he does not know enough about the ancient Near East, the Americas, or Africa to make educated synthesis about the linguistic history of those falling into the latter category, or especially outside of it. Where are the Austronesian languages? Ostler wishes Greek and Sanskrit still dominated what he considers to be "the world," though this weltanschauung (worldview -- happy, Ostler?) is incredibly narrow, biased, and sometimes flat wrong. This outcome is not worth the reader's slog.

This is a history of languages which have left written works or records - how and why they spread or went into decline, what causes languages to become dominant and so on. A final section looks at factors which may affect the relative importance of different languages in coming decades. The focus is not on linguistic evolution - how vocabulary and grammar of languages have developed - but on the relationship of languages to political, economic, cultural and societal history. As far as I know this approach to language history is original, and for me the book was an eye-opener. Thoroughly recommended.

Nicholas Ostler's tour of empires and the languages they used, from the dawn of history to the present day, teaches us one thing - the unpredictability of language spread and domination. Empires may be able to impose the conqueror's language, conversely they may adopt the language of the conquered, or else may employ another language entirely, a lingua franca from elsewhere. The language may continue after the fall of the empire, or may be supplanted by another language entirely. The causes are invariably complex and often not well understood.Ostler is an entertaining writer with a broad knowledge of languages, but sometimes his historical facts lack accuracy (for example his assertion that Constantine made Christianity the state religion in 312). This does not take anything away from the achievement of this book however. For a more detailed discussion of the rise and fall of Latin in particular, also read Ostler's  Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin , and another book covering similar ground but focussing on lingua francas rather than political empires as such, take a look at Ostler's  The Last Lingua Franca: The Rise and Fall of World Languages . Ad Infinitum: A Biography of LatinThe Last Lingua Franca: The Rise and Fall of World Languages

Nicholas Ostler has used his knowledge of dozens of languages and their historical and cultural circumstances to build a unique macrolinguistic account of humanity. He treats language as the expression of how we think, feel and relate to one another, how we visualise and describe our social and living environments, what we believe about our souls and spirit worlds, and how we remember the past experiences of our peoples. Used like this, language becomes a tool for understanding the very stuff of humanity, with descriptive, analytical and predictive powers akin to those of mythology, but using the elements of language rather than symbols, images and stories to reveal the content of our collective dreams.In pioneering and explaining this approach, Ostler has shown how tiny fragments of linguistic knowledge relate seamlessly to the biggest and most meaningful patterns. Thus languages evolve and cross-pollinate down the centuries, interacting with other historical and cultural phenomena in both orderly and serendipitous ways. In his earlier book ‘Empires of the Word’ we were treated to the big picture of the world’s languages and how it came to be painted through trade, conquest, infiltration, religious conversion, chance and necessity. Then he did the same, but more detailedly so, for Latin in ‘Ad Infinitum’, and for English and other major languages in ‘The Last Lingua Franca’. All these books plunge the reader into the depths of our chattering selves, making us see the patterns that emerge from fascinating detail.In his latest book, ‘Passwords to Paradise’, Ostler explores the subtle territory of religious conversion: how spiritual visions are communicated convincingly between different cultures through the medium of language. Or perhaps better, how people find a way to persuade themselves that what some foreigner has said about the nature of reality is really just a better way of putting what they already knew, so that they become suddenly willing to adopt a raft of new ways and ideas. Here are the stories of how Christianity entered the indigenous cultures of the Americas, the Slavic and Nordic worlds, and the Roman Empire, how different visions of Christianity re-entered each other, how Buddhism swirled around the Himalayas and redefined itself and other cultures across Asia, and how Islam impacted and transformed societies and worldviews. One suspects that understanding where we are now is simply impossible without having access to the insights on language history that Nicholas Ostler has so helpfully assembled.

Awesome! This book is really an adventure if not the greatest adventure of humanity in exploration of languages. As with mathematics that seminal invention of language explores many worlds and imaginations. Literally making the world from ancient to modern. I was thoroughly engrossed reading this book and anyone with knowledge of history can see the parallels when cultures and civilisations emerged and merged. Nicolas Ostler writes in a easy to understand style but this really shows his detailed academic knowledge. A brilliant book with innovative delivery of an eternal subject.

I could hardly put it down. Helped me get to sleep every time. Not from boredom, but intense fascination.Well worth the buy.