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Literary Review
Language
Who needs Phoenician?
MARK ABLEY
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"I can't think of a volume that has better interpreted the linguistic history of Eurasia, from Sumerian onwards, or of the entire world in the post-Columbian era."
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Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, Nicholas Ostler, HarperCollins, p.615, £30. 0 00 711870 8
LANGUAGES are normally the object not just of scrutiny but of sentences: "I speak English"; "Europe has forgotten its Latin". The central metaphor, or conceit, or daring insight of Nicholas Ostler's study is that languages deserve to be treated as subjects, agents, in their own right. Arabic, he declares with typical brio, "has exploited its confessional associations mercilessly, not simply to survive but to expand". Since 1992, Russian "has shown how few friends it made in all those centuries of stable advance". This is a history book where the narrative energy comes not from human beings but from powerful, long-lived, disembodied characters whose only life has been as puffs of air, inkblots on pages or incisions on clay.
Knowing Ostler to be the chairman and driving force of the Foundation for Endangered Languages — and the editor of its invaluable newsletter, Ogmios — I was initially surprised to find him concentrating in this book on big, successful languages. He has much to say about Chinese, very little about Tibetan, and absolutely nothing about Horpa or Kang. But, of course, no history of the world's languages could mention more than a small minority of the 6,000 that survive and the untold thousands that have already died out. It is a pity that Ostler gives short shrift to Africa. But, I can't think of a volume that has better interpreted the linguistic history of Eurasia, from Sumerian onwards, or of the entire world in the post-Columbian era.
The sheer sweep of analysis is breathtaking. Here is a typical Ostler remark: "Combining the dramatis personae of the Ugaritic epics with the phraseology of the Old Testament, and the narratives of Philo's Phoenician History of Sanchuniathon, we may be able to reconstruct something of the verbal culture of Byblos, Tyre and their sister cities". He goes on to do it, too. One of Ostler's key gifts is a readiness to ask large and awkward questions that are often passed over in silence. If Germanic invaders of the collapsing Roman Empire failed to implant their languages in what are now France, Spain and Italy, why did the Saxons and Frisians succeed so dramatically in England? Why, for that matter, do so few inscriptions survive in "British", or Brythonic, when the Celtic language known as Gaulish was being written down in much of continental Europe? Why, once Islam had established itself as the religion of Persia, did Arabic not live on as its daily language? Why did Phoenician vanish without trace? And so on. Ostler may not have all the right answers — but his intellectual courage in posing such questions and venturing solutions is admirable.
He also has a habit of relegating some of his best observations to his footnotes. Most writers, on discovering that Attila means "Dad" in Gothic, or that Judas Maccabaeus should really be remembered as "Juda the Hammer", would want to highlight the news. Not Ostler. The fish he means to fry are far bigger. Yet sometimes his erudite notes bury statements that have extraordinary implications. Two footnotes, far removed in the book, declare that at least 20 Asian alphabets, including Tibetan, Balinese, Thai and Khmer, are derived from Indian originals, and that the most important of those originals, the Brahmi script, is in turn derived from Aramaic writing. That sort of information surely belonged in the main text.
A book such as this could have been written only by someone with considerable audacity as well as erudition. The difficulty, on occasion, is that the author comes across as presumptuous. He tells us that in eastern India, "a popular local hymn, vande utkala janani, `I salute, O mother Orissa', is in fact expressed in Sanskrit, although those who sing it barely notice". But how can Ostler know what the singers notice? Sometimes, too, he lets intriguing comparisons run away with him. His warning that "The writing may already be on the wall for the language now spoken by one fifth of mankind" is based entirely on an extended analogy that does not hold up to detailed scrutiny.
Nor is Ostler a natural writer. He makes heavy weather of certain episodes, notably the early history of Celtic, and commits a variety of small errors that will no doubt be corrected in the paperback edition, from locating Breton in north-eastern France and misidentifying Rupert's Land as "Robert's Land", to suggesting that Sanskrit is "technically extinct" (there's at least one village in Karnataka where it remains the everyday language).
Moreover, his final chapter on the future leads him into dangerous territory. The broad patterns that Ostler discerns in language history may not hold true in the coming decades, let alone centuries, because so much is now changing so fast — not just in the realm of languages, but also in technology, demographics, public health, the environment and so on. Ostler's prediction that the peoples of the closely related Turkic languages "will begin to consider themselves a unit" makes good linguistic sense but is politically far-fetched. How many residents of Ankara or Instanbul want to be linked more intimately to Kyrgyzstan than to Germany? But it is far more important to emphasise that Empires of the Word sparkles with arcane knowledge, shrewd perceptions and fresh ideas. Ostler is persuasive that the position of educated Greeks under Roman rule was similar to that of English teachers in many developing countries today; and that "modern English has found in broadcasting the answer to the threat that book publishing posed for medieval Latin". He shows how Sanskrit influenced the writing system of Japanese, and that the Scythian language of ancient times survives today as Ossetic. And he explains why the Chinese alphabet, such an apparent obstacle to understanding, continues to flourish. All this, and a thousand other points, large and small, is a cause for gratitude — and more than a little awe.
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