Read Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Online
Authors: Nicholas Ostler
Tags: #History, #Language, #Linguistics, #Nonfiction, #V5
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (32 page)
This maxim from the Chinese ‘36 Strategems’ refers to a technique whereby an opponent is gradually lulled into a false sense of confidence, thinking the structures he relies on are still sound, although in fact they have been undermined or suborned. Evidently to do this the strategist must be on close terms with the enemy’s organisation, as he may well be, after suffering apparent total defeat and accepting surrender. In the case of the Mongols—who never, incidentally, accepted serious use of the examination system, and so were vulnerable to the growth of local lordships—it proved possible within a century to build up sufficient regional power bases to unseat the central government. With the Manchu, it was more difficult, since they themselves, conscious of their small numbers, made effective use of Chinese institutions such as the examinations to recruit loyal cadres. They also concentrated themselves in the military. Still, making up no more than 2 per cent of the population, it proved impossible for them to live with the Chinese and not be absorbed by them. In vain were they forbidden by law from intermarrying with Chinese or adopting Chinese customs, in vain compulsorily educated in Manchu, a language that continued in government papers until the fall of the dynasty in 1911: nevertheless, within 150 years of their successful conquest of China, all those of Manchu ancestry were speaking Chinese.
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It also leads us to the current Chinese response to the challenge from the Western world. Bizarrely, but revealingly, China is again adopting this traditional strategy.
After its traumatic experiences at the hands of Western powers in the nineteenth century, China abolished the examination system in 1905 and the imperial monarchy itself in 1911. A general air prevailed of bringing the country up to date, European-style. One suggestion considered was even to abolish the Chinese language itself in favour of Esperanto, an artificial but would-be international language fashioned by a Pole out of European roots in the late nineteenth century, and in particular vogue at the time. In the event, during the 1920s and 1930s the official form of Chinese was redefined: in place of
wényán
, which went back to the fifth century BC, came
báihuà
, ‘white speech’, the colloquial form of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. Written in characters, it represents colloquial grammar and lexicon, but is of course neutral on actual pronunciation. This was not too much of a shock, since it had been current, and indeed used in popular literature,
*
since at least the middle of the first millennium AD, but had never previously had the feel of a language for serious business.
†
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.
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This Pinyin romanisation represents a modern Mandarin pronunciation of this text from the fifth century BC. As such it represents the words and the sentence structure, but not the sounds that Confucius would have used.
†
In this book, Chinese is transcribed using the
pīnyīn zìmŭ
‘phonetic alphabet’ system, usually known as Pinyin, officially promoted by the Chinese government since 1958. In it, the accents (
v,v,v,v
) denote tone patterns, not different vowel sounds. Among consonants, c is English ts, j is English j, q English ch, and x English sh. You will also see zh, ch and sh: these are pronounced similarly to j, q and x, but with retroflex tongue, as if there were an r immediately following. Most Chinese outside the north-east area are in fact incapable of making the distinction. Pinyin has the virtue of being compact, accurate and consistent (without the irritating apostrophes of the older Western systems, Wade-Giles and Yale) but it can only claim to represent modern pronunciation. This can be misleading when it is applied to very old words and names.
*
The word
Mandarin
is not Chinese at all, but a deformation of the Sanskrit word
māntrin
, ‘counsellor’, with some influence from the Portuguese verb
mandar
, ‘command’.
Pŭtōnghuá
means ‘common language’, a term with an inclusive feel, which has largely replaced older terms such as
guāNnhuá
, ‘official language’ (the closest to a Chinese equivalent for
Mandarin
), or guòyŭ, ‘national language’, which referred to much the same thing.
Hànyŭ
, ‘Han language’, is another term used.
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The origin of this name seems to be an early Greek attempt to represent late Egyptian
n-irw-aR
, ‘the-rivers-great’, referring to the Nile’s many streams in the Delta area. This is related to
jatruw
, ‘(the) river’, always its name in classical Egyptian (Luft 1992).
†
The original name was
Kiang
alone, an Austro-Asiatic word, related to words for ‘river’ in Vietnamese
song
(once pronounced
’krong’
) and Mon
kruŋ
, showing the kind of language spoken here before Chinese came in from the north (Norman 1988: 18).
§
Compare
san
, ‘brother’, with
sānat
, ‘sister’. Most abstract nouns share this femininity, e.g.
maR ’at
, ‘righteousness’ (always conceived as a goddess). See pp. 35ff. for a longer description of Semitic features.
†
This common word for the king of Egypt was established by its use in the Hebrew Bible. It represents the Egyptian
pr- ’r
(House-Great), and so is like using ‘the Palace’ to refer to the British monarch.
*
The name
Memphis
actually refers to King Pepi’s pyramid there, built some seven hundred years later: ‘stable in beauty’.
Egypt
is inexact as a name for the country. Reflecting the Greek word
Aiguptos
, it is in fact a title of Memphis: a slurring ofəyt kRUW pta
kruw
was the sustenance to the life force
kaR
, given by food and drink, and sacrificial offerings.
*
Based in
Sarw
(Sais) in the Delta area, they are rumoured to have been of Libyan ancestry.
*
Yet, when the hero of the fictional
Tale of Sinuhe
reached Retjenu, in northern Palestine (the tale is set at the end of the twentieth century BC, with Retjenu ranged with Egypt’s enemies), he was told: ‘You will be happy here. You will hear the language of Egypt.’ As Sinuhe recounts, there were already Egyptians with the ruler of Retjenu, who had spoken up for him (verse 30). The ruler’s name was Ammulanasi, recognisably Amorite.
*
Herodotus, ii. 154, recounts that Psamtek put some Egyptian boys into the service of the Ionians and Carians, to be taught Greek, and thereby founded the Egyptian caste of interpreters. There is no reference to any Greeks studying Egyptian.
*
Plutarch,
Antony
, xxvii.4-5. All these languages must have been heard on the streets of Alexandria in Cleopatra’s day. Ethiopian would be the language of Kush, and Syriac is a form of Aramaic. Trogodyte would have been spoken along the Red Sea coast, and is perhaps the ancestor of modern Beja. The
Medjay
, supposed to be the same, had been an eastern desert people employed in Egypt as police in the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries (Gardiner 1957: 183, n. 2). There is no mention here of Libyan—or of Latin, although Plutarch adds that Cleopatra is said to have spoken many other languages besides the ones he does mention. Most likely her amours with Caesar, and later Antony, were conducted in Greek.
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The last inscription was made on the sacred island of Philae, just above the Nile’s first cataract and symbolically the farthest outpost of the land of Egypt. The final desecration of the shrine, the last as well as the farthest in Egypt, was ratified by the Roman emperor Justinian (Johnson 1999: 229).
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Materials for writing changed over the millennia. For the early period our knowledge of what was current is of course reliant on its durability, hence the early prominence of bronze and bone. Later on (from the first millennium) the brush was used to write on strips of bamboo. More flexible materials, distinctive Chinese inventions, came later: rolls of silk from the second century BC, and paper from AD 105. Printing too was a Chinese contribution to world language technology: fixed blocks were cut to print whole pages from the end of the ninth century AD, and movable type was introduced from the eleventh. Naturally this last was harder work with a writing system that has always used several thousand symbols.
†
Mencius (
c.
250 BC according to Brooks 2002), 3.B.6: ‘Suppose some great officer of Chu wanted his son to learn to speak Qi …’ Evidently, the ambitious were already setting themselves to learn Chinese. Qi was approximately modern Shandong, at the mouth of the Huang-he, and so at the centre of the spread of Chinese. Strangely, a text written only a decade or so later seems to pick Chu to contrast with an eastern barbarian language: ‘Let a Chu man grow up among Rong, or a Rong man grow up in Chu, and the Chu man will speak Rong, while the Rong man will speak Chu’ (
Lushi Chunqiu
, 4.E).
*
These moves can be compared with the depopulations ordered by the kings of Assyria and Babylon after major military victories. (See Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 64.) But since the Mesopotamian kings saw the greatest threat in foreigners, they ended up seeding their empire with a foreign language, Aramaic; the Chinese emperor, seeing threat in Chinese feudal lords, disseminated them (and therewith the Chinese language) to the farthest corners of his realm.
§
This is often proposed as the etymology for the name
China
, a name that seems to have reached the West through Persian and Italian. But the Chinese use rather the names of the Han or Tang dynasties as the name of their nation, and the form of the name suggests that it is derived from the Sanskrit name,
Cīna.
This applied mainly to the area of Tibet, though also on occasions included Assam and Burma (Sircar 1971: 104-5). China as a whole was known to the Indians as
Mahācīna
, ‘Great China’: this, for example, is where the Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang told the Indians he was from, when he visited in 629. Si-Yu-Ki, v. 1 (in Beal 1884, part 1: 216).
*
The Altai mountains of central Asia, the source of this name, are themselves named for their gold: cf. Turkish
altin.
*
This looks very much like a Chinese rendition of
Hunnu
, which would allow these people to be identified with those known to the Indians as
Hūna
, and to the Europeans as
Hunni.
But the phonetic resemblance unfortunately remains the only strong evidence. (See Sinor 1990: 177-9.)
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Called in modern Chinese
Tùobá
, using charactersthat at the time would have been pronounced
Tak-B’uat.
The name has become the modern
Chuvash:
it still designates a Turkic-speaking people of whom there are 1.5 million scattered across Russia and Siberia (Clauson 2002 [1962]: 38; Dalby 1998: 134-5).
*
The Statute of Kilkenny was passed in 1366, requiring the English colonists (section III) ‘to use the English language, and be called by an English name, leaving off entirely the manner of naming used by the Irish …’
†
Briefly put, northern Chinese lost all its final consonants; and strings of previously free monosyllables became congealed into longer words. No one knows why, but some explanations for the changes have been proposed. Perhaps the semantic vagueness of Chinese morphemes, after losing so many distinctive consonants, meant that reinforcing one word with another was necessary in order to communicate effectively. Perhaps the sheer phonetic weakness of the new shorter syllables meant that doubling up had to occur to give the language an acceptable speech rhythm (Feng 1998). Perhaps the advent of Buddhism, with chanting in Sanskrit and Pali which introduced longer words, and the complicated expressions that arose when they were translated into Chinese, inured people to polysyllabism. The various trends and possible influences are clearly discussed in Wilkinson (2000:31-40).
*
But this same trend can be seen in all Chinese dialects (and indeed farther south in the Yi and Vietnamese languages).
*
‘Southern Yue’. Mandarin
Nán-Yuèand modern Vietnamese
Vi&
t Nam
are just the same words, pronounced differently and reordered, so the name is still going strong two millennia on, its designation moved 750 kilometres to the south-west.