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The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch. By Raffaella Cribiore. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-691-12824-5. Pp 360. $69.95 (hardcover).
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Friday, December 11, 2009
Nathan Oglesby on Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word
Nicholas Ostler. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. HarperCollins, 2005. ISBN-10: 0066210860. Pp. 640.
Perhaps there is no more effective and agreeable way to inculcate a vast and varied subject, one whose import is universal but whose informational minutiae are necessary to a conception of the whole, than to conceive of it in the most vivid possible terms. It is apparently in this spirit that Nicholas Ostler presents an overwhelming history of major world languages from the beginning of recorded history to the present, in a book that straddles the roles of linguistic first-string roll-call and epic treatment of an ongoing drama whose personae are the languages with the most star-power across history. That is to say, one with some humble degree of familiarity with linguistic science, or with a great degree of interest, may read Empires of the Word as an encyclopedic narrative with a great deal of personality; one less preoccupied with scientific specificity may instead occupy themselves with an overarching vision of the rise and fall of the empires of history through the lens of these’ empires’ spectrous concomitants, their dubiously immortal household gods, their languages. What distinguishes this work from the average heady gamut of historical linguistics is its balance of immense quantities of historical information presented systematically, and veritable storytelling—for among the reader’s principal impressions is the surprise that so great a concentration of dates, places and Romanized foreign phonetics could be presented as a coherent and memorable story, or that the history of world languages could make such a good story without reducing or generalizing that actual history.
Ostler conceives of language histories possessing both an outward aspect, in the form of variously recorded “careers…as diverse as the worlds that each language has created for its speakers” (11), and an inward, a language community being “not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language…[but] an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition” (13). Thus Ostler complicates the familiar conception of a language’s being a reflection of its speaking community’s imperial activity, its success, its spread and longevity, being proportional results of that activity—for Ostler, language history is not only a matter of who invaded whom forcing them directly or indirectly to henceforth speak, read and write what, but as much a simultaneous inquiry into the personality of a language, as that has an equal hand in constituting its “propensity to attract new users” (19).
The saga opens on the generations of Semitic languages, focusing centrally on the successions of Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic, the fraternal chronology of linguae francae spanning Middle Eastern history—these being by turns “the only stability this society has enjoyed[:] the substance of its ruling language” (35). Akkadian rose to prominence by virtue of the exigency of its written form, Aramaic followed it on the tongues of nomads; both are the close relatives of contemporary Arabic, which spread by conquest and perpetuated itself by virtue of religious authority. The ascendancies of these “desert blooms” are characterized by differing means of spread, but their end identity is an infusion of all three, the present flower among which is contemporary Arabic. We are told also of certain familiars in their midst—as here, among other places, Ostler presents the story of the sister languages Phoenician and Hebrew in terms of a parable of two literal sisters, “Elissa” the pretty socialite doomed to unforeseen anonymity, and “Judith” the “obscure and perhaps disreputable youth” with an unlooked-for destiny of venerability and prestige. “The world,” says Ostler, “reversed the fortunes of these two sisters” (69). Here and elsewhere the immense catalogue of linguistic succession is embossed with a memorably dramatic image, as against expectation Empires continuously offers itself to be read as a story.
Act Two opens on the Far East, where Chinese begins its spectacular career of 4000 years (and counting). This language distinguishes itself remarkably from other world languages by remaining virtually steadfast over four millennia. This feat is attributed to its pictographic writing system, which has been able to embrace and stabilize a multiplicity of dialects over a vast geography, and as much to the centralizing tendency of Chinese culture, gathering and refining the language against disunity over time.
Meanwhile Sanskrit has spread from Northern India on the shoulders of Hinduism, then through South-East Asia and into the Far East as the conduit of Buddhism, providing an example of another of the distinctions Ostler makes about linguistic personality: the double-barrel of “language prestige” and “language charm.” He offers us “the persistent image of Sanskrit as a creeping plant, luxuriant and full blossomed” (174). Sanskrit, it is explained, has preserved itself by knowing itself.—The rigor of its religious tradition, endowing it with a grammatical and artistic self-consciousness, established and lastingly secured its identity as a “medium of learned communication and sacred expression” within and without the continent, even after the decline of its popular use.
At the center of the story, though, are the kindred courses of Greek and Latin, who in their turn “so united the known (Western) world, especially its educated members, over all those centuries” (234). Both, stubborn in their precedence, survived the civilizations that gave them life—Greek entwining itself round the broad occupation of Roman imperium in spite of Greece's curtailed political independence, Latin dying into the prodigious birth of its modern Romance progeny. While Greek persists as a living language albeit in isolation, the death rattle of Latin is its enduring resonance in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French and English. “O death,” Ostler intones on its behalf, “where is thy sting?”
The travels (quite literally) of these offspring culminate in the overseas expansion of European nations and their languages beginning in the early 16th century. Portuguese leads off, spreading language with empire in the dubious charity of “civilizing” new worlds—ironically, and somewhat inexplicably, it takes no significant lasting root as a global language, being replaced by succeeding colonial activity.
From among its kindred successors enters the final character, whose adventure conducts us from its youth in the 5th century AD to the present day, English. This last act is divided into two subsections: English’s “formation, from the fifth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, during which the language took shape, growing up in the island of Britain, and one of propagation, from the seventeenth century to the present, in which it took ship, spreading to every continent of the world” (457). After being told the story (“often,” he says, “retold to its own speakers”) of the formation of English, we are reacquainted with the present situation, wherein English flourishes in its familiar ubiquity. It is a new kind of prestige, whose attraction for non-native speakers is no mere posture of erudition or exercise of class, but a symbolic opportunity for inclusion in a world of business, technology, and the swiftly globalizing medium of popular culture. And here Ostler, not knowing the end of its story any better than we do, speculates about the fate of this lingua franca—not so much to offer us his own forecast, but to chasten the extreme perspectives of those who respectively hope and fear English’s total absorption of the speaking world. “[W]e should not be too overwhelmed by forecasts of impending unity…the languages whose histories this book has reviewed have been spreading in increasing circles for twice that period of time” (558). It would indeed be problematic to prophecy the indefinite dominance of a major world language directly after having narrated the sometime ascensions and subsequent dissolutions of its principal predecessors. Rather, here in the closing section “Vaster than empires”, he puts even our audacious “in” language safely back in its place, emphasizing the “paradox [of] this book, which has told the stories of languages that have so vastly extended their reach, often at the expense of others, is above all a tale of diversity.”
The marvelous thing about this document of diversity is, again, its capacity for being grasped as a vastly proportioned narrative, in which all speaking people across history play a part, represented by the collective metonymy of their myriad tongues, which seize the stage one-by-one in Empires. But in being so compelling, its tone is consistently frank and scientific; and in holding forth its treasure house of detailed data, it is yet simple, direct, conceivable and memorable. One ought to read this book, then, if one wishes to possess a picture of the lives of the world languages unhindered by the selective lens of one’s own language experience; or as much, if one is emerging from or amidst a formal education, perhaps in some language or some area touching linguistics, and yet finds oneself without a divining rod by which to order and seal the disconnected objects of this education into a coherent picture of linguistic history.—For the latter boon is what I have gotten from it: a fair and vibrant timeline of the history of language, where previously I had but vague pictures of particular languages’ triumphs and defeats in episodic isolation. But now, “[i]f this book has shown one thing, it is that world languages are not exclusively the creatures of world powers. A language does not grow through the assertion of power, but through the creation of a larger human community” (556). Ostler’s distinction, and the distinction of his book, is that any single model for understanding a language’s history falls short of representing the whole—the only means to a total vision of the life of a language is to see it as having or having had a life as complex as the lives of those who generate it and have given it permanence.
Perhaps there is no more effective and agreeable way to inculcate a vast and varied subject, one whose import is universal but whose informational minutiae are necessary to a conception of the whole, than to conceive of it in the most vivid possible terms. It is apparently in this spirit that Nicholas Ostler presents an overwhelming history of major world languages from the beginning of recorded history to the present, in a book that straddles the roles of linguistic first-string roll-call and epic treatment of an ongoing drama whose personae are the languages with the most star-power across history. That is to say, one with some humble degree of familiarity with linguistic science, or with a great degree of interest, may read Empires of the Word as an encyclopedic narrative with a great deal of personality; one less preoccupied with scientific specificity may instead occupy themselves with an overarching vision of the rise and fall of the empires of history through the lens of these’ empires’ spectrous concomitants, their dubiously immortal household gods, their languages. What distinguishes this work from the average heady gamut of historical linguistics is its balance of immense quantities of historical information presented systematically, and veritable storytelling—for among the reader’s principal impressions is the surprise that so great a concentration of dates, places and Romanized foreign phonetics could be presented as a coherent and memorable story, or that the history of world languages could make such a good story without reducing or generalizing that actual history.
Ostler conceives of language histories possessing both an outward aspect, in the form of variously recorded “careers…as diverse as the worlds that each language has created for its speakers” (11), and an inward, a language community being “not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language…[but] an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition” (13). Thus Ostler complicates the familiar conception of a language’s being a reflection of its speaking community’s imperial activity, its success, its spread and longevity, being proportional results of that activity—for Ostler, language history is not only a matter of who invaded whom forcing them directly or indirectly to henceforth speak, read and write what, but as much a simultaneous inquiry into the personality of a language, as that has an equal hand in constituting its “propensity to attract new users” (19).
The saga opens on the generations of Semitic languages, focusing centrally on the successions of Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic, the fraternal chronology of linguae francae spanning Middle Eastern history—these being by turns “the only stability this society has enjoyed[:] the substance of its ruling language” (35). Akkadian rose to prominence by virtue of the exigency of its written form, Aramaic followed it on the tongues of nomads; both are the close relatives of contemporary Arabic, which spread by conquest and perpetuated itself by virtue of religious authority. The ascendancies of these “desert blooms” are characterized by differing means of spread, but their end identity is an infusion of all three, the present flower among which is contemporary Arabic. We are told also of certain familiars in their midst—as here, among other places, Ostler presents the story of the sister languages Phoenician and Hebrew in terms of a parable of two literal sisters, “Elissa” the pretty socialite doomed to unforeseen anonymity, and “Judith” the “obscure and perhaps disreputable youth” with an unlooked-for destiny of venerability and prestige. “The world,” says Ostler, “reversed the fortunes of these two sisters” (69). Here and elsewhere the immense catalogue of linguistic succession is embossed with a memorably dramatic image, as against expectation Empires continuously offers itself to be read as a story.
Act Two opens on the Far East, where Chinese begins its spectacular career of 4000 years (and counting). This language distinguishes itself remarkably from other world languages by remaining virtually steadfast over four millennia. This feat is attributed to its pictographic writing system, which has been able to embrace and stabilize a multiplicity of dialects over a vast geography, and as much to the centralizing tendency of Chinese culture, gathering and refining the language against disunity over time.
Meanwhile Sanskrit has spread from Northern India on the shoulders of Hinduism, then through South-East Asia and into the Far East as the conduit of Buddhism, providing an example of another of the distinctions Ostler makes about linguistic personality: the double-barrel of “language prestige” and “language charm.” He offers us “the persistent image of Sanskrit as a creeping plant, luxuriant and full blossomed” (174). Sanskrit, it is explained, has preserved itself by knowing itself.—The rigor of its religious tradition, endowing it with a grammatical and artistic self-consciousness, established and lastingly secured its identity as a “medium of learned communication and sacred expression” within and without the continent, even after the decline of its popular use.
At the center of the story, though, are the kindred courses of Greek and Latin, who in their turn “so united the known (Western) world, especially its educated members, over all those centuries” (234). Both, stubborn in their precedence, survived the civilizations that gave them life—Greek entwining itself round the broad occupation of Roman imperium in spite of Greece's curtailed political independence, Latin dying into the prodigious birth of its modern Romance progeny. While Greek persists as a living language albeit in isolation, the death rattle of Latin is its enduring resonance in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French and English. “O death,” Ostler intones on its behalf, “where is thy sting?”
The travels (quite literally) of these offspring culminate in the overseas expansion of European nations and their languages beginning in the early 16th century. Portuguese leads off, spreading language with empire in the dubious charity of “civilizing” new worlds—ironically, and somewhat inexplicably, it takes no significant lasting root as a global language, being replaced by succeeding colonial activity.
From among its kindred successors enters the final character, whose adventure conducts us from its youth in the 5th century AD to the present day, English. This last act is divided into two subsections: English’s “formation, from the fifth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, during which the language took shape, growing up in the island of Britain, and one of propagation, from the seventeenth century to the present, in which it took ship, spreading to every continent of the world” (457). After being told the story (“often,” he says, “retold to its own speakers”) of the formation of English, we are reacquainted with the present situation, wherein English flourishes in its familiar ubiquity. It is a new kind of prestige, whose attraction for non-native speakers is no mere posture of erudition or exercise of class, but a symbolic opportunity for inclusion in a world of business, technology, and the swiftly globalizing medium of popular culture. And here Ostler, not knowing the end of its story any better than we do, speculates about the fate of this lingua franca—not so much to offer us his own forecast, but to chasten the extreme perspectives of those who respectively hope and fear English’s total absorption of the speaking world. “[W]e should not be too overwhelmed by forecasts of impending unity…the languages whose histories this book has reviewed have been spreading in increasing circles for twice that period of time” (558). It would indeed be problematic to prophecy the indefinite dominance of a major world language directly after having narrated the sometime ascensions and subsequent dissolutions of its principal predecessors. Rather, here in the closing section “Vaster than empires”, he puts even our audacious “in” language safely back in its place, emphasizing the “paradox [of] this book, which has told the stories of languages that have so vastly extended their reach, often at the expense of others, is above all a tale of diversity.”
The marvelous thing about this document of diversity is, again, its capacity for being grasped as a vastly proportioned narrative, in which all speaking people across history play a part, represented by the collective metonymy of their myriad tongues, which seize the stage one-by-one in Empires. But in being so compelling, its tone is consistently frank and scientific; and in holding forth its treasure house of detailed data, it is yet simple, direct, conceivable and memorable. One ought to read this book, then, if one wishes to possess a picture of the lives of the world languages unhindered by the selective lens of one’s own language experience; or as much, if one is emerging from or amidst a formal education, perhaps in some language or some area touching linguistics, and yet finds oneself without a divining rod by which to order and seal the disconnected objects of this education into a coherent picture of linguistic history.—For the latter boon is what I have gotten from it: a fair and vibrant timeline of the history of language, where previously I had but vague pictures of particular languages’ triumphs and defeats in episodic isolation. But now, “[i]f this book has shown one thing, it is that world languages are not exclusively the creatures of world powers. A language does not grow through the assertion of power, but through the creation of a larger human community” (556). Ostler’s distinction, and the distinction of his book, is that any single model for understanding a language’s history falls short of representing the whole—the only means to a total vision of the life of a language is to see it as having or having had a life as complex as the lives of those who generate it and have given it permanence.
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