Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  † The only known case where early Greeks took a less ethnocentric view of their language was in Egypt: there is a graffito from 591 BC, written by a Greek mercenary on the leg of a statue at Abu Simbel. He refers to the Greeks among his party as alloglōssous, ‘of another language’, i.e. than the Egyptians. And Herodotus too uses this term of Greeks in Egypt (2.154). Contrast the more typical attitude of Strabo (vi.1.2), viewing Romans in Italy as still barbarians by contrast with the Greeks there.

  * He would have hated the irony that he is generally known by this Latinised Greek version of his name. He was Judah the Hammer, yūdāh maqqābā.

  † Visitors from Parthia, Media, Elam, Mesopotamia, Judaea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia Minor, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, and Libya around Cyrene, together with Romans, foreign Jews, Cretans and Arabs, are explicitly distinguished (Acts ii.9-10).

  § Known as Philádelphos, ‘Lover of His Sister’: indeed he married her, in an amazing Greek adoption of Egyptian pharaonic tradition.

  * The authors are in fact extremely few, and are still recognisable as the core of a traditional, classical education in western Europe. The dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes; the historian Thucydides; the philosopher Plato; and a handful of orators culminating in Demosthenes, who inveighed against the threat of Philip of Macedon. Greek traditional attitudes dating back to the Roman empire effectively still defined the British school syllabus that I studied in the 1960s.

  * Another feature of the writings besides their style was innovative. Christians were important in popularising the new format for books, the ‘codex’, with separate two-sided pages attached to a spine, as against the traditional scroll. This set the format for at least the next two thousand years. The conjecture is that this made books much easier to access when bookmarking, and quoting, important passages (Harris 1989: 296).

  † Both Greek homilía and Latin sermō originally meant an informal conversation, a chat.

  * His host, Artavazdes, the king of Armenia, was also a Greek scholar, apparently, to the extent of having written his own plays in the language (Plutarch, Crassus, fin.).

  † Over the three years AD 114-17, the whole area was taken and lost again by the emperor Trajan. But the north-western portion, Osroëne, was incorporated for two centuries after a Roman campaign in 164.

  * Mango (1980: ch. 1) puts the population of the eastern Mediterranean provinces in the mid-sixth century at 30 million, with 8 million in Egypt, 9 million in Syria-Palestine-Mesopotamia, 10 million in Anatolia and 3-4 million in the Balkans. Note also how Anatolia had twice the population of Greece and the European provinces.

  * The writing was on the wall for the Byzantines in that year of 1071: news also arrived that the Normans had taken Bari, ending 535 years of their empire in Italy.

  * The Greek Orthodox patriarchate indeed gained from the Turkish conquest, since the Sultan Mehmet rationalised his Orthodox subjects after taking Constantinople, incorporating the Bulgarian and Serbian patriarchates under the authority of Constantinople. Linguistically, of course, they remained separate.

  * e.g. zingiberi, ‘ginger’, sakkharon, ‘sugar’ (see Chapter 5, “The character of Sanskrit’, p. 192).

  * Close to the full list seems to be spíti, ‘house’ (from Latin hospitium, ‘inn’), skamnío, ‘bench’ (scamnum), pórta, ‘door’, kámara, ‘room’, vérga, ‘rod’, and possibly áspros, ‘white’ (from Latin asper, ‘rough’). Compare the vastly longer list of borrowings by Welsh (which was in close contact with Latin for half the time). (See Chapter 7, ‘Consilium: The rationale of Roman imperium’, p. 303.)

  † It has been suggested that the favourite choice of the Christian word for ‘love’, agápē, is influenced by Hebrew ’āhēb, ‘love’ (which happens to have much stronger sexual overtones than the Greek), and Greek skébar;nē, ‘tent’, by Hebrew &scar;eken, ‘dwelling’ (Moule 1959: 186).

  7

  Contesting Europe: Celt, Roman, German and Slav

  [The Gauls are] in their conversation terse and enigmatic, often speaking in allusive riddles.

  iodorus Siculus, v.31

  Trí húaithaid ata ferr sochaidi: úathad dagbríathar, úathad bó hi feór, úathad carat im chuirm.

  Three scarcities that are better than plenty: a scarcity of fine words, a scarcity of cows in a meadow, a scarcity of friends at beer.

  The Triads of Ireland, ed. Kuno Meyer, 93

  nor was it fitting for the government of the Romans…given that they were possessed more than anyone by a hatred of the very nature and name of absolute power (’tyranny’).

  Arrian, Alexander’s Campaign, vii.15.6

  hoc vero regnum est, et ferri nullo pacto potest.

  But this is kingship, and can in no wise be tolerated.

  Cicero, Letter to Atticus, ii.12.1

  …et ingrata genti quies et facilius inter ancipitia clarescunt magnumque comitatum non nisi vi belloque tueare.

  Peace is disliked by the [German] nation; they distinguish themselves more easily in a crisis and you will not see them in large numbers except in wartime.

  Tacitus, Germania, 14.2

  Want her dô ar arme wuntane baugš, cheisuhngu gitšn, sô imo se der chuning gap,

  Huneô truhtîn: ‘dat ih dir it nŭ bi huldî gibu.’ Hadubrant gimahalta Hiltibrandes sunu

  ’Mit gěru seal man geba infšhan, ort widar orte.’

  He took from his arm twisted tores worked with specie gold, given him by the king, lord of the Huns: ‘This I now give you in friendship.’ Rejoined Hadubrand, son of Hildebrand:

  ’With spears are gifts to be taken, point against point.’

  Hildebrandslied, 33-8

  Reversals of fortune

  The history of Europe, over the three thousand years for which we have evidence, is dominated by the changing fortunes of four closely related families of languages: Celtic, Italic, Germanic and Slavonic. In every age, their advances across the continent have been warlike: there is a depressing brutality about the heroics in which they all gloried. But like the languages themselves, the cultures they fostered characterise different peoples, each with rather different values.

  This chapter focuses on the crucial part of that history, which witnessed a major shift in ambient language, all over western Europe, from Celtic to Latin. This linguistic shift was unambiguously due to military conquest, and the sheer clarity of it lives on to this day in Europe’s everyday conception of what changes languages: control, backed by military and economic strength. And yet, as if to provide an object lesson in the inadequacy of that simple view, this conquest was itself overwhelmed. After half a millennium of stability, the military balance was overturned in a wide-ranging military catastrophe from which there was no recovery: indeed, it set the pattern of political and national boundaries that has lasted to the present day. Yet while the linguistic effect of all this in most of the West was nil, in Britain, and in the Balkans, it proved decisive.

  Looked at as a whole, the history of these crucial thousand years, approximately from 500 BC to AD 500, has a certain symmetry. It begins and ends with the triumph of mobile military societies organised round kinship relations, the Celts at the outset, the Germans and Slavs at the close. In between, we see the triumph of a civic society, which unified Europe, organised its defences and provided good communications throughout, through well-kept roads and well-patrolled sea routes.

  For the first 250 years, Gaulish raiders (backed by the best weapons technology available, in iron) dominate the continent, then settle down. They may have participated then in large-scale trade up and down the Atlantic coast, which also spread their language. Then, over a period of 250 years, they are gradually but systematically overwhelmed, by a better-organised and strategically self-conscious foe, the Romans. Ironically, it is only when the raiders begin to unify and organise themselves jointly for defence (under Vercingetorix) that they can be undone with finality. Four hundred years of stability ensue, while the Roman empire effectivel
y resists continuing pressure for immigration from Germany. Under greater stress (originating in north and east Asia), the resistance fails, first sporadically, then totally; and the last hundred years are spent watching the effects of allowing new sets of raiders to pass as they will through the old imperial domains.

  All in all, the major changes of language in this period, the spread of Latin across Italy, and into Gaul and Iberia, the spread of English in Britain, and the spread of Slavic in the Balkans, are the best markers of serious cultural change. The cases where serious language change failed to follow on from conquests expose the hollowness of much military glory—the conquests in western Europe by Franks, Vandals and Visigoths, even the conquests in Britain by Romans and Normans.

  We now turn to look at this tale in more detail. It costs some effort to forget the well-known recent centuries, and see these languages as they appeared at the beginning. Perhaps the best way to begin is to consider how they appeared to those ever curious, but in this case uninvolved, bystanders, the Greeks.

  The contenders: Greek and Roman views

  The Celts

  At the start the Greeks simply saw the Celts as one of the framing nations of their world: Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, says that they lived where the river Istros (Danube) came from, farthest west of all European nations, but for the Cynetes.1 He places them beyond the Pillars of Hercules, effectively on the Atlantic coast where Portugal is today, just as the historian Ephorus2 does a century later, Celts in the west, Scythians in the north. There was something of conventional legend in this story, reminiscent of the Chinese world image which saw the familiar, civilised, world surrounded on all sides by unknown barbarians (see Chapter 4, ‘Foreign relations’, p. 158). But if so, the cliché had been a lucky guess. On modern evidence there were at the time Celtic speakers all the way across from the source of the Danube to the north of Iberia.

  Their first real appearance is in the tale of the young prince Alexander’s reception of Celtic ambassadors from the coast of the Adriatic in 335 BC. It was apparently reported by his friend Ptolemy, who as it happened went on to be king of Egypt.3 They were big men, he says, in stature and in opinion of themselves, and demonstrated this with a famous remark. They offered their friendship to Alexander—his empire-building had then yet to begin—but when challenged by him to say whether they were frightened, they declared that there was only one thing which filled them with dread, and that was the thought that the sky might one day crash down on them. This remained a byword for Celtic grandiloquence, but it seems to have been a misunderstanding of a Celtic oath formula. A thousand years later, Irishmen were still binding themselves ‘unless the firmament with its showers of stars fall upon the earth, or unless the blue-bordered fish-abounding sea come over the face of the world, or unless the earth quake… ‘4

  Subsequently the Celts (also known as Gauls: Galatai in Greek, Galli in Latin—Caesar comments that Celtae is the Gauls’ own word5) did gain a certain reputation. It is set out at length by the historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the late first century BC, and probably following the personal researches of the Greek polymath Posidonius.6 Physically, they were supposed to be tall, lithe and fair, often with their hair artificially bleached with lime, the nobles sporting moustaches that covered their mouths and served as de facto wine-strainers. (This particular joke is over two thousand years old.) Their language sounded deep and altogether harsh. They were not without flair or subtlety, but did lack fixity of purpose, delighting to talk tersely in aphorisms and riddles. Nevertheless, they grew wordy when the time came to build themselves up, or belittle an opponent, in the lead-up to a fight. They dressed in bright colours, with cloaks often in check patterns, and—distinctively in the ancient world—the men wore trousers, called bracae*

  The Germans

  As for the Germans, the Greeks tended to confuse them with the Celts: after all, they all lived somewhere to the north-west, and no one had yet thought to look for significant differences among such impenetrably barbarous tongues.† For the ancients, clear distinguishing features could only be cultural; linguistically, the best that could be done was to note that one tribe had difficulty understanding another.

  Even writing in the first century AD, after Caesar had subdued Gaul up to the Rhine, the Greek Strabo could not give much of a description of the Germans.7 Living to the east of the Rhine, they were wilder, bigger and fairer than the Celts, but otherwise very similar. In fact, so quintessentially similar did they appear to Strabo that he etymologised their name Germani, as the Latin for ‘out and out [Celts]’. Caesar seems to have been responsible for setting the Rhine as a divider, but there is precious little evidence, archaeological or inscriptional, to back up his distinction, and he probably took the river as a convenient natural boundary to his conquests. Nevertheless, this did soon become the permanent boundary of the Roman empire, which meant that henceforth Gauls and Germans would be politically, if not ethnically, divided along this line.

  Caesar’s view was that German society was simpler than that of the Gauls, without agriculture but more polarised around military prowess, and less capable of forming large-scale communities. In this he may have uncovered the secret of the Germans’ long-term success in fending off Roman conquest.

  A century and a half later, the basic separation between Gaul and German at the Rhine was reiterated by Tacitus in his treatise Germania, although he noted that there were a few German tribes who had crossed over. He also provided the classic treatment of the character of German society, as Posidonius and Caesar had done for Gaul. He saw them as a society of small isolated families, feeling crowded if they could see their neighbours’ chimney smoke even in the distance, and coming together only for the ennobling purpose of glory in war. He rather admired their egalitarian upbringing, physical fitness in harsh conditions, and simple morality.

  * In fact, this word is borrowed from Germanic. Besides breeks or britches, it underlies the Celtic word for footwear, brogues.

  † Such differences would in fact not be sought until 1599, when Joseph Justus Scaliger classified Latin, Greek, Germanic and Slavonic languages through their different words for God.

  We now know, on the basis of contemporary Gaulish inscriptions, and the subsequent development of the languages into the distinct families of Celtic and Germanic, that there were substantive linguistic divisions between Celt and German. There are monumental inscriptions in discernibly Celtic languages (in Iberian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman scripts) from the first centuries BC and AD from all over northern Iberia, Gaul, northern Italy and even (though only of Celtic names) in southern Germany, at Manching on the Danube. Likewise, discernibly Germanic inscriptions (written in the runic alphabet) have been found on small portable items such as weapons and safety pins (fibulae), from Slovenia in the first century BC to Denmark two hundred years later. From the extremely sketchy evidence we have, it seems that Caesar’s Gallic/Germanic distinction was real, but that there was a major overlap of the languages’ spheres in the area that today comprises western Germany and Austria.

  The Romans

  More interesting than the Greeks’ failure to distinguish the essence of the Gaul and the German was their evolving attitude to the Romans, the third contender for linguistic spread over western Europe.

  There is nothing to pre-figure the destiny of Rome in classical Greek literature. The first surviving mention of the city is from the fourth century BC, in a fragment of Aristotle.8 He also mentions their neighbours the Oscans (’Opikoí, also called Aúsones’) in a global discussion of the origins of communal dining, quoting chroniclers of the Greek colonists. But he does not mention the radically new constitution that the Romans had adopted in the past century, abolishing kings and instituting a republic under the balanced equality of two elected consuls.

  Evidently, the first Greeks to encounter Latin speakers would have been colonists: they probably saw them as a bit of local colour among the Etruscans who controlled the landward sid
e of the Greek settlements at Pithecusae (Ischia) and Kyme (Cumae). It would have been Greek colonists then who, over five hundred years, witnessed the gradual emergence of Rome, chief city of the region of Latium, from domination by Etruscans to independence and then commanding influence among the indigenous nations of Italy. There is a story9 that in 323 BC the Romans sent one of the many deputations that went to Babylon to congratulate Alexander, the new master of the Persian empire. If true, it probably shows that they had heard rumours that he next planned to turn his conquering attentions to the west. This was 150 years before the Romans had any serious interests in the eastern Mediterranean.

  Greeks were fascinated by Rome’s winning ways in global politics, and characteristically began to theorise some sort of explanation. Polybius had made the best of his deportation from Greece to Italy in 167 BC (his father had been a prominent Achaean politician) by getting to know the Roman elite: he then devoted much of his life to writing an account of ‘how and by what kind of government almost the whole inhabited world was brought under Roman rule …’10 In the event, although he knew many of the Roman protagonists or their children and grandchildren, and reconstructed a meticulous narrative of events and motives since 220 BC, he offers no simple answer to his question. But he does stress the moral impression made by the Romans: ‘Italians in general have a natural advantage over Phoenicians and Africans both in physical strength and personal courage, but at the same time their institutions contribute very powerfully towards fostering a spirit of bravery in their young men.’11 He also cites the Roman fear of divine retribution after death, superstition though it may be, as fostering honesty: ‘At any rate, the result is that among the Greeks, apart from anything else, men who hold public office cannot be trusted with the safekeeping of so much as a single talent, even if they have ten accountants and as many seals and twice as many witnesses, whereas among the Romans their magistrates handle large sums of money and scrupulously perform their duty because they have given their word on oath.’12 Less cultivated the Romans might be; but there was something about them that impressed the Greeks.