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• Published on: 1897
• Binding: Hardcover

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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Good book for those interested in history and languages
By Legal Vampire
This is a good book for those interested in history and languages, which avoids the technicalities of linguistics and philology.In ‘Empires of the Word’ the author Nicholas Oestler tells the story of how different languages have entered the historical record, flourished, spread, declined and disappeared (or survived, at least for now), and why this may be.He includes short passages in many of the languages mentioned, both in the original scripts and in our alphabet, with additional accents to help know how to pronounce them, for those who want an approximate idea of how a Sumerian lullaby, an Ancient Egyptian prayer or a legend in sixteenth century Quechua (language of the Incas) may have sounded.I found the chapters on ancient languages particularly interesting. However, the author takes the story down to modern times and asks why, as former European empires came to an end, some languages of the former rulers continued to flourish in the independent countries that emerged e.g. English, Spanish and French in many countries and Portuguese in Brazil; while others like Russian, and, in some countries, Portuguese (once a lingua franca for trade on the coast of India) and Dutch, were soon largely forgotten.Among many facts I have learned from this book, I did not know that Sumerian men and women spoke different forms of their language, with different sounds and vocabulary, e.g. the god called “Ningal” in men's Sumerian was “Gingale” in women's Sumerian. In their literature conversations switch between the male forms when men or gods speak, and female forms when women or goddesses speak. Every Sumerian would have had to understand both forms to know what members of both sexes were saying.As for Ancient Egyptian, Modern Egyptologists, even when teaching courses on hieroglyphics, generally use conventional modern pronunciations that they know are very inaccurate. Names of Ancient Egyptian kings and gods familiar to us e.g. ‘Tutankhamun’, ‘Osiris’ and ‘Anubis’ are so far from the actual ancient forms that it is unlikely that an Ancient Egyptian would have recognised them.This is partly from custom that preserves well-known but less accurate older transliterations. However, the main reasons are first, that some of the probable sounds of Ancient Egyptian are hard for speakers of modern European languages to pronounce and, second, Ancient Egyptian scribes normally only wrote consonants and left out the vowels, which they assumed their readers would know, but which we do not.As it is hard to pronounce consonants without vowels in between, Egyptologists have long got round these two problems at once by arbitrarily agreeing to pronounce e.g. an arm symbol, that probably represented a sound made in the throat, as though it was an ‘a’, and a sparrow symbol that may have represented a somewhat weak ‘w’- sound either like our ‘w’ or like our ‘u’, whichever makes pronunciation easier in the context.As this is how Egyptologists have long been accustomed to pronounce ancient Egyptian and followed in most books, it has so far been thought too difficult to change, although we now have more accurate information based on how and other ancient peoples, whose own writing systems did include vowels, spelled Egyptian names when referring to Egyptians.The author, unusually, includes a passage from Ancient Egyptian transliterated as near as possible how it might actually have been pronounced. To anyone who has learned some basic hieroglyphics or Egyptology, the difference is striking.‘Empires of the Word’ has more down to Earth detail than abstract theorising. However, taking a comparative view over the course of history, the author identifies reasons, easily overlooked if considering just one country or language, why some languages spread and endured and others did not. These are tendencies, not rigid laws:E.g. –Density of population. The fertile, densely populated river valleys in which Chinese emerged were sometimes conquered by outsiders, such as the Mongols or Manchus, in the end numbers always prevailed and the incomers were mostly absorbed into the vastly more numerous Chinese-speaking population.-Languages introduced by foreign empires may increase their dominance after a province becomes independent, as it may be the only language that can tie the new country together. The independence of Spain’s South American colonies in the early nineteenth century did not lead to any of the myriad native languages being adopted as a main language of government, trade or education because Spanish was the only language understood in every part of the new countries (except Guarani, which has joint status with Spanish as an official language in Paraguay, always a rather different country from the others in the region). [Did similar considerations help make Latin based dialects the national languages of e.g. France and Spain when these countries emerged from the former Roman Empire?]-Similarity of language structure e.g. Greek was the main language of government, trade and the elite in much of the Middle East for a thousand years, from Alexander the Great in the Fourth Century BC until the Byzantine Empire’s Middle Eastern provinces fell to the Arabs in the Seventh Century AD. However, Greek never put down durable roots in the region and after the Arab conquests soon fell out of use. By contrast Arabic was quickly adopted as the main language of the region following the Arab conquests. Why?This was not necessarily because Arab conquest was followed by conversion to Islam, and Arabic was the language of its holy book the Quran. In the previous, Christian, period, Greek was the language of the New Testament, but this was never enough to make Greek the common language.The spread of Arabic through the region from the Seventh Century AD had been paralleled by the similar spread of Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke) through roughly the same area from around 700 BC.The author believes that the key difference was that Arabic and Aramaic, and most previous languages of the region such as Hebrew and Akkadian, were Semitic languages. They shared the three-consonant ‘roots’ of words with complex vowel inflections unique to the Semitic languages, and other basic features e.g. the sentence order Verb-Subject Object (unlike the normal English order Subject-Verb-Object). This made it easier for a speaker of one Semitic language to learn to speak another than it was for them to learn an unrelated Indo-European language like Greek.Indeed, although, following the Arab conquests, most Iranians and Kurds, who spoke Indo-European, not Semitic, languages, converted to Islam, they never adopted Arabic for daily life, and still speak their own Indo-European languages to this day.Similar effects may help to explain why speakers of Celtic, Italic, Ligurian and other quite closely related Indo-European languages in the Continental Western European provinces of the Roman Empire, after a few hundred years, had relatively easily dropped their previous languages and spoke dialects of Latin, which developed into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese etc.It may not be coincidence that the only people in Continental Western Europe whose previous language survived Roman rule were those we call the Basques, probably the same people the Romans called the ‘Vascones’ (probably pronounced ‘Was-koh-nays, reminiscent of their own modern name for their language ‘Euskara’), whose language is notoriously unrelated to any others in the World.(In Britain, the survival of Welsh throughout the period of Roman rule was also a special case. This book discusses reasons why that might be.)The author ends the book with what, at least in translation, is a bland Sanskrit quotation. However, a few pages before he gives us a Latin verse which would have made a better conclusion, by the Roman poet Martial. I shall use part of it to end this review, as, given the subject of the book, it seems right to include a few lines in a language other than English. It is also nice to find a direct use for my ‘O’ Level in Latin from 1981.Martial, the writer, thinks it is time to bring his book to an end, but his book has taken on a life of its own and wants to go on and on, beyond the end of the scroll, until Martial exclaims, to give a slightly more literal translation than the author Oestler does:“Whoa there! Now that’s enough! Whoa there, little book!...Now the reader is being made to complain and is giving up,Now even the bookseller himself says:Whoa there! Now that’s enough! Whoa there, little book!”which in the original is:“ohe! iam satis est! ohe libelle!…iam lector quaeriturque deficitque,iam librarius hoc et ipse dicitohe! Iam satis est! ohe libelle!”

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant and original
By M. F. Cayley
This is a history of languages which have left written works or records - how and why they spread or went into decline, what causes languages to become dominant and so on. A final section looks at factors which may affect the relative importance of different languages in coming decades. The focus is not on linguistic evolution - how vocabulary and grammar of languages have developed - but on the relationship of languages to political, economic, cultural and societal history. As far as I know this approach to language history is original, and for me the book was an eye-opener. Thoroughly recommended.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Totally brilliant!
By Zaid
Awesome! This book is really an adventure if not the greatest adventure of humanity in exploration of languages. As with mathematics that seminal invention of language explores many worlds and imaginations. Literally making the world from ancient to modern. I was thoroughly engrossed reading this book and anyone with knowledge of history can see the parallels when cultures and civilisations emerged and merged. Nicolas Ostler writes in a easy to understand style but this really shows his detailed academic knowledge. A brilliant book with innovative delivery of an eternal subject.

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