Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Paperback – Illustrated, 27 Jun. 2006

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.

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.

As a kind of linguist - I qualified as an English teacher and later as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language - I've had a fascination and a semi-professional interest (it's many years since I actually taught) with languages for many years, often frustrated at my limited ability in foreign languages. In recent years I've had a little more time to address that frustration, and things are a little better, so then I also started to wonder how things all fit together. When I happened upon it, Empires Of The Word looked exactly what I needed to scratch the itch.Upon opening it I was hooked. Starting off with the early languages of the Middle East and proceeding into those of two great empires, those of Egypt and China, the author discusses the patterns and paradoxes of language development and dispersal, and sometimes demise. Some languages spread by association with the powerful, some decline despite that association. Conversely, there are languages whose speakers find themselves constantly overrun by imperial powers but survive, and even thrive. Some languages, such as Egyptian, become the language of scholars or clerics and become the preserve of niches, as Egyptian is now preserved as Coptic, the territory of a minority of clerics in a minority population.There are copious examples from early texts, in the original languages, rendered in both the original ideographs and, where necessary, phonetically. In amongst these you'll find some interesting gems, as in the translation of a biblical verse which includes a couple of profanities. Don't remember being told that in Sunday School!With Mandarin Chinese we begin to straddle ancient and modern, and to compare the fates of modern imperial languages - French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and English - and analyse the reasons behind the adoption of some in their spheres of colonisation whilst others, most notably Russian, have been as if coated in Teflon. In places it feels like Ostler is missing a trick, for example in understating, if not totally overlooking, the fact that catholic missionaries in the Americas were able to wield great power by learning local languages and not teaching Spanish, surely one of the reasons the Spanish monarchy felt threatened by them, expelled them, and insisted on all teaching being in Spanish, so they could be sure they were sending and receiving the right messages. This is a point better made by Nadeau and Barlow in The Story Of Spanish. But mostly Ostler's coverage seems sufficiently comprehensive, and often the facts are overwhelming, almost too much to take in.Only towards the end do things become a little unnecessary, especially in the long ramble through the possible fate of English. There are many things about which I could get sentimental, but a natural withering away of a language isn't one of them. I'd be much more outraged if someone was trying to actively eradicate English, but the history of that kind of thing has a chequered history, as the Basques, Catalans, Canadian and Cajun French (the latter mysteriously glossed over by Ostler) and numerous language groups in South Africa can attest.A few tics. First, why is a book like this is so hooked on the BC/AD convention? BCE/CE may not be perfect, but at least avoids reference to a "Lord" many of us consider "Ours" as much as is Baal (the lord, as Ostler helpfully tells us). Second, a puzzling inability to employ possessives, in the irritating and inexplicable habit of ending any word ending in an s with just an apostrophe, not apostrophe s. It's particularly annoying and illogical when applied to words like "Descartes". If you don't know why, how have you even managed to read this far? Third, in a book in many parts of which I found myself pre-knowledge free, we come across two references to a place called "El Andalus", a name never used for Moorish Spain (google it and you'll find El Andalus is a restaurant in Brum). Such things are a kind of checksum, alerting you to the possibility that there are other errors, and it reduces the credibility of whatever else you read just a little. Fifth, the footnotes. Too many; too long. Sixth, there really is no need, when referring to another part of the book, to give chapter number, chapter title and page; page on its own is quicker and won't make the book fifty pages longer than it needs to be. And just to be really captious, he uses that bane of the supermarket queue, "less than 800,000" when it should be "fewer", and the word "quote" as a noun. It's a verb; the noun is "quotation".