Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  The Xiōngnú* were the principal steppe nomads of Mongolia and Turkestan in the third century BC. Despite their major role in Chinese history it is extremely difficult to find evidence of what their language was like. There is, however, a single quotation of ten Chinese characters, giving some advice of the Buddhist monk Fotudeng to a Xiongnu king. The characters would have been read in the fourth century AD as

  syog tieg t’iei liəd kāng b’uok kuk g’iw t’uk tāng.

  If we follow Louis Bazin in reading this as

  süg tägti idqang, boqughigh tutqang

  your army send-out, warlord hold

  we can infer that their language was Turkic, rather than Mongol or Tungus.15

  Three Chinese kingdoms of the north, the Qin, the Zhao and the Yan, had each built sections of wall to keep the Xiongnu out. The walls were unified and lengthened when the Qin emperor incorporated all the kingdoms into his realm. The Chinese also learnt how to oppose the Xiongnu with their own cavalry tactics. Hostilities continued for five hundred years, and for all this time the Chinese were successful in keeping the barbarians out of China, and in maintaining a forward policy that kept control throughout the western regions now known as Gansu and Qinghai; in this way, the Silk Road was secured, as well as access to the far-away horse-breeding grounds of Ferghana by the Pamirs, vital for the Chinese defence. However, their defence also depended on maintaining an active frontier garrison, and it was a costly exercise to keep the guards supplied. When the centralised government of China broke down at the end of the Han dynasty, this failed, and it became possible for the Xiongnu to penetrate the wall.

  Retreat to the south

  A confused and increasingly bloody period ensued, leading in the fourth century AD to open competition among a number of Turkic and Mongol hordes for control of the north, and exposing the total impotence there of the traditional government. The effect was to displace southward the centre of Chinese. In 317 a new dynasty was founded in Nánjīng, ‘Southern Capital’, while different Turkic and Mongol hordes contested the north. Ultimately, the two centuries to 557 were dominated in the north by the Tabgach,* who at least proved effective in defending what they had won. These new lords were speakers of a Turkic language, but they soon endeavoured to take up local forms, adopting the Chinese name Wèi. This policy appears to have needed some enforcement, or at least encouragement: six generations later, in 500, their ruler, Xiaowen, outlawed by decree the Turkic language, costume and customs.

  It was rather similar, politically and linguistically, to what was going on in the old Roman empire at the same time, with Germans taking over its heartland in western Europe, changing but not supplanting its language as they attempted to adopt it, and the successors of the old Roman power retrenching into what had historically been non-Roman lands in the eastern territories, the Balkans, Greece and Anatolia. Yet the Chinese language faced no competition from a potential equal, as Latin faced Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. The land, in all its parts, was dominated by Chinese, even if increasingly spoken by people with some very strange accents.

  Down in the south a unified Chinese dynasty continued; there large numbers of well-to-do Chinese immigrants were gradually spreading the range of Chinese. They had moved partly to escape the invaders, but also to occupy the more fertile land drained by the Yangtze. The languages of the native population there, whether of the Tai, Sino-Tibetan or Hmong-Mien families, were all of a type quite similar, though often unrelated, to Chinese. The result was a relatively smooth take-up of Chinese by learners in the south: some of the new Chinese dialects that arose, especially the southernmost (called Yue, or Cantonese), sound very much like the original.

  Middle Chinese of the seventh century AD had syllables that could end in m, n, ng, p, t, k or a vowel, and so does Modern Cantonese, just like the (unrelated but neighbouring) southern language Zhuang; in Mandarin final m has become n, and final p, t and k have all been dropped. Again Middle Chinese is inferred to have had three tone contours, and a separate, so-called ‘entering’, pattern for words ending in p, t or k. These later split to eight tones, with a high and a low onset, depending on whether they started with a voiced or voiceless consonant (b-d-g-z-j versus p-t-k-s-c). This is the basis of the system in modern Cantonese, and also in Zhuang; Mandarin has taken a different route, splitting only one of the original tones, but when it dropped final p, t and k it assigned all the words affected to one of the other tones. It has ended up with four tones, while Cantonese (and Zhuang) have eight.16

  In 589 it proved possible to reunite the country. A new Chinese golden age, of prosperity if not always peace, began under the Sui and then the Tang dynasties. Throughout this period, Chinese continued to spread southward.

  The Tang dynasty lasted until the end of the ninth century, when it degenerated into a power struggle among regional warlords. Many foreign missions reached China in this period, including Buddhists from India, Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians and Manichaeans, and Muslims. This would have spread the sounds of the Sanskrit, Aramaic, Persian and Arabic languages to the major centres, where they would have been used in worship; but the numbers actually speaking them must have remained tiny. In any case, by the end of the Tang all except the Buddhists and Muslims had been purged out of existence. During the eighth and ninth centuries there was an increasing threat of incursions from Tibet in the west, and stout resistance from the Nanzhao natives in Yúnnán (’South of the Clouds’, in the south-west) but no long-term loss of territory. This period (from 847) also saw another Turkic-speaking group, the Uighurs, settle in the northerly province of Gansu, and set up an independent kingdom, friendly to the Chinese, in the far west (modern Xinjiang).

  The breakdown of central government was repaired after half a century (960) by the Song dynasty, but not before the extreme north, Manchuria and the lands north of the Great Wall, had been taken by the Khitan, a Mongolian tribe; Gansu too, in the north-west, was lost, invaded by the Tangut, who spoke a language related to Tibetan. The Tangut held on to this area; but the Khitan were in 1115 overwhelmed by another group from farther north—the Jurchen, a Tungus-speaking people, whom the Chinese, ill-advisedly, assisted. Although the Jurchen adopted the Chinese name and style of Jīn (, ‘golden’), they almost immediately turned on their allies and, after invading much of the south as well as the north, were left in control of the entire valley of the Huang-he, the traditional Chinese heartland. This they held (like the Tangut) until displaced by one greater, Genghis Khan himself, who led a Mongolian invasion in 1211.

  As so often, it proved much easier for the invaders to overrun the north than the south. For two generations the Song dynasty maintained a defence of the southern empire, based on Hangzhou, until in 1279 the Mongols were able to take them in the rear, having first conquered Yunnan (and indeed the north of Vietnam) in the south-west.

  For the first time, a non-Chinese speaking dynasty (Mongols, now known as the Yuán, , ‘Original’) controlled the full extent of China. Since the Mongols by this time also controlled most of the rest of Asia, it could be thought lucky for China that the Mongol Kublai Khan decided to move his capital from Kara Korum in Mongolia to Běijīng (, ‘Northern Capital’), since otherwise it might have suffered the fate of all colonies, to be disregarded by its ruler; but in any case, the unity of the Mongol empire was lost by 1295. The newly converted Muslim Khans of the west refused to accept the sovereignty of Kublai Khan’s successor at Beijing, since he was a Buddhist.

  Mongol control of China did not last much longer. Although Kublai was famous for his civility, his successors were less distinguished. It is worth mentioning the last of the dynasty, Togan Timur (1333-1369), since among much anti-Chinese legislation he passed laws forbidding Chinese to read or write Mongolian. It is evident that a strict racial policy was being followed. One would have expected, by comparison with the Manchu who were to follow much later—or the contemporary, but of course quite unknown, example of the English in Ireland*—that the elite would be
passing laws to prevent their own members from taking up the language of the conquered people.

  In 1369 Togan Timur and his Mongols ended up chased out by a popular Chinese warlord turned national hero, who established himself as the first Ming emperor. There was then for three centuries no interference by outsiders in the government of China.

  Northern influences

  Then the Tungus-speaking Jurchen people, now to be known as the Manchus, gained a second chance to dominate China. This invasion was the last permanent penetration of China by speakers of a foreign language.

  In the early seventeenth century, the Manchus had been reorganised, under two able leaders, and advanced into the northern marches of Chinese territory to establish a capital at Mukden. Then, in 1644, they had the luck to be invited into Beijing as a tactical move in a struggle between two generals contending to replace the Ming. The Manchus took the opportunity to install themselves, styling their new dynasty with the name Qīng (, ‘Pure’), and by 1651 had put down all resistance in the rest of China. Although they came speaking their own language, and it remained an official written language of the Chinese state until the end of the dynasty in 1911, it had died out in speech even at court by the eighteenth century. The language did not survive even in Manchuria itself, a curious victim of its people’s successful takeover of China and its way of life. Today it is only spoken, under the name of Xibo, by the descendants of a detachment of troops dispatched from the Manchurian capital Mukden to Xinjiang in 1764—a north-eastern language now spoken only in the Chinese north-west.

  It was into the north that the invaders came, and the Chinese spoken in the north went on to become the standard language for the country. But although the northern dialect underwent significant changes, they can only partly be put down to the particular difficulties that Xiongnu, Tabgach, Jurchen, Mongol or Manchu would have encountered as they tried to get by in Chinese.* There is the interesting fact that Mandarin Chinese can distinguish wômen, ‘we (excluding you)’, from zšnmen, ‘we (including you)’, just as Mongol and Manchu do; this is an innovation since Middle Chinese. And perhaps one can point to the absence of consonant clusters in modern Chinese, some of which were allowed in Middle Chinese. For example, sniwər, ‘appease’, and t’nwšr, ‘secure’, have become sūi and tŭo. Altaic languages cannot abide more than one consonant at the beginning of a syllable.†

  There are in fact a few written relics of the kind of Chinese that was spoken in one of the intermediate periods before the invaders were absorbed. The thirteenth-century Chinese translation of The Secret History of the Mongols is full of Altaic patterns such as postpositions instead of prepositions, verbs following the object, and existential verbs at the end of the sentence, all weird in Chinese, whose basic word order is much more like English:

  Da-fan nyu-hai-er sheng liao lao zai jia-li de

  Generally daughter born past always stay home-at particle

  li wu

  reason is-not

  There is no reason why a daughter, born to you, should always stay at home.

  And there is copious evidence for mixtures of Manchu and Mandarin in the zî-dì-shū, ‘Son’s Books’, which are a written record of the narrative entertainment the Manchu enjoyed in their early days in Beijing (1736-96), though they are written more with Chinese word order scattered with Manchu vocabulary.

  In northern dialects there is still a tendency for direct objects to occur rather often before the verb, and for than-phrases to occur before comparative adjectives, features that might be attributed to Altaic influence. But in general this mixed style of Chinese did not establish itself.17 Later generations of invader families picked up Chinese naturally from their Chinese mothers, nurses and schoolmasters; probably the Altaic patterns were just too far opposed to Chinese for any compromise to develop. This is typical enough of Chinese linguistic relations: in general, there are not many loan words in Chinese borrowed from other languages in any direction, and certainly no structural influences; dú, ‘calf, does seem to have come from Altaic, characteristically enough since its peoples lived by stockbreeding (cf. Mongol tuγul, Manchu tukšan, Evenki tukučən, all meaning ‘calf), but the many Mongol words that are found in the drama of the Yuan dynasty have since been lost again.18

  Beyond the southern sea

  Although Chinese has spent its three and a half millennia almost wholly confined to East Asia, it did put out some feelers across the sea to its south. In the last thousand years, this led to some permanent residence of Chinese abroad; in the last two hundred, partly as a reaction to—or exploitation of—European settlement, serious overseas communities have grown up, which may be significant in the future spread of the language.

  The earliest inklings of Chinese in Nán-yáng, ‘the Southern Ocean’, as the Chinese called the shores of the South China Sea, are visits of merchants to Tongking (northern Vietnam) in the third century BC.19 They were followed up in 111 BC by troops, and China annexed Tongking, along with Nan-yue* (modern Guangxi and Guangdong). China was to hold Tongking for over a thousand years, in fact until AD 938, despite sporadic and increasing resistance. China attempted to assimilate it culturally, with Chinese classics for the local elite, competitive examinations for administrators, and official use of wényán. There was Chinese immigration, and some married into Vietnam’s princely families, providing many later leaders. Mahayana Buddhism, introduced under the Tang dynasty, became the majority religion.20 Despite all this, the Chinese language did not spread permanently to this part of the world.

  Somewhat later than the advance into Tongking, Chinese proceeded farther south, though apparently with instincts more scholarly than materialist. In the third century AD, two Chinese envoys, Kang Tai and Ju Ying, wrote a report on the foundation of Funan (in modern Cambodia).21 There is little more to be said of it, or what the Chinese were doing there; but the route via Śri Vijaya (in Sumatra) to India became quite well travelled by China’s Buddhist scholars a little later, in the fifth to eighth centuries. (See Chapter 5, ‘Outsiders’ views’, p. 192.)

  After the eighth century, trade comes to the fore as a motive, but the links seem to have been maintained by foreign merchants, Arabs, Persians and Indians, and it is only in the eleventh century that we find the first reports of capital-raising by Chinese merchants to finance their own expeditions. This was under the Song dynasty, which actively backed the traders. Thereafter government support for overseas expansion wavered, the Mongol Yuan staunchly in favour, even making a failed endeavour to invade Java in 1293, the Ming who succeeded in 1368 preferring isolation: private trade was banned, and all contacts had to be made through diplomatic channels. There was a brief resurgence during the famous global voyages of Admiral Zheng-He (in the period 1405-33); but after that episode resident Chinese merchants had, for a time, to go underground.

  Most of the Chinese who had taken to this life came from Fujian, with a smaller contingent from Guangdong, a fact which is explicitly recorded in a fifteenth-century report, Yíngyái Shènglšn: The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores, by Ma Huan, one of the sailors with Zheng-He. Ma writes, of two states in Java, ‘Many people from Guangdong and Zhangzhou are staying there,’ and he mentions many other exiles from Fujian elsewhere in the island.22 The truth of this stands out very clearly in the predominance of Min, Hakka and Yue, south-eastern dialects, in the speech of overseas Chinese to this day.*

  Dealing with foreign devils

  From the sixteenth century until the present day, the Chinese government has increasingly come into contact with Japan and a series of European powers, culminating in the first approaches of the USA; these resulted in wars, and the planting of foreign communities in trading colonies. For overseas Chinese communities, the effects were complex: they sometimes suffered from China’s measures aimed at impoverishing and disarming foreigners; but they also profited from opportunities that were provided by the foreigners’ enterprising new developments, especially those of Britain.

  In the ear
ly sixteenth century, Japanese pirates were a persistent problem. China imposed an embargo on Japan. For good measure, in 1522 it also banned all commercial voyages to the Nan-yang, converting all overseas Chinese into smugglers or pirates. Meanwhile, European explorers were increasingly nosing about China’s seas, looking for trading concessions. In 1557 the Portuguese were granted an enclave on the coast at Macao; this turned out to be sufficient to fob off their intrusions in the long term. But it added a further burden to the overseas Chinese, who seemed now to be at a disadvantage even as against the dastardly European folangji;* the ban on Chinese voyages to the Nan-yang was finally lifted in 1566.

  Although the advent of the Spanish and Dutch, following the Portuguese, provided capacious new markets for the now long-resident Chinese traders of the East Indies, lack of clear support from China meant that Chinese traders were always at a disadvantage. In Luzon, in their newly Spanish colony of the Philippines, the Chinese population was massacred in 1602 and again in 1639, with utter impunity. Nevertheless, the trader community was beginning to be seen as a useful force: when the Ming dynasty was toppled by the Manchus in 1644, the last loyalist strongholds were found in the maritime communities of Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong, and later, until 1682, offshore in Vietnam and the Philippines. They suffered for their loyalty, of course, with the Manchus literally ‘clearing the coasts’ of all their inhabitants, moving them miles inland to prevent any support to mariners. Perhaps also—since the Manchu invaders through victory became the legitimate authority, the Qing dynasty—they laid the basis for a certain distrust felt ever since by China’s central government towards its overseas community. This was the seed time for the Chinese Triads, and secret societies.