Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">10 but in general Aramaic was replaced in official use by Greek. Although the Ptolemies took their role as Greek successors to the pharaohs seriously, and Greek Egypt became an autonomous and prosperous country again, the Egyptian language was henceforth relegated to the extremes of sacred and profane: in the temples, and on the lips of the common people. Alexandria, which replaced Athens as the academic centre of the ancient world, was a Greek-speaking city. Famously, Queen Cleopatra, the last Ptolemy to rule (51–30 BC), was also the first to learn Egyptian—and that apparently only because she had a passion for languages.
There was pleasure in the very sound of her voice. Like a many-stringed instrument, she turned her tongue easily to whatever dialect she would, and few indeed were the foreigners with whom she conversed through an interpreter, since she answered most of them in her own words, whether Ethiopian, Trogodyte, Hebrew, Arab, Syriac, Median or Parthian. The kings before her had not even had the patience to acquire Egyptian, and some had even been lacking in their Macedonian.*
Changes in writing
The Egyptian language went through more radical revolutions in its written form than it did orally. The elegant and exact pictorial symbols familiar from Egyptian monuments were called (by the Greeks) hieroglyphs, ‘sacred carvings’, translating the Egyptian term
They had, from the time of the first non-monumental documents (c.2600 BC) been paralleled by an equivalent but more cursive script, called hieratic—‘priestly’. These two scripts made up what was essentially a single system, which could be rendered either in monumental glyphs or a cursive scrawl, with about 175 signs interpreted as consonants or sequences of consonants, and a few hundred signs used in conjunction with them to specify meanings.
From the seventh century BC, a new style of writing, known as demotic—‘popular’—began to be used: it began as a radically simplified form of hieratic writing, but soon diverged from the traditional system when the link with the original hieroglyphs was forgotten.
After the Greek conquest at the end of the fourth century BC, Greek glosses begin to appear in demotic texts, to clarify a difficult reading here and there. Literacy in Greek was becoming widespread. Despite this, the indigenous system of writing still had a very long way to run. The last dated demotic text is from ad 452, 784 years after the Greek conquest, 482 years after the Ptolemies had been supplanted by Rome, and 310 years after the apostle St Mark is said to have first preached in the then Egyptian capital of Alexandria. Like the last hieroglyphs written fifty-eight years before, it was found on the last outpost of Egypt, the island of Philae.12
Hieroglyph, Hieratic, Demotic, Coptic11
Final paradoxes
As we have seen, Christianity was to put an end to hieroglyphic writing and with it the central stream of ancient Egyptian culture. But despite this it had a last perverse effect, ensuring the long-term survival of the Egyptian language itself. By the third century AD Egyptian had long lost any role in government or elite life, which were now conducted exclusively in Greek. Yet at this very point, the newly rising force of Christians saw the language as the best means to advance the conversion of the Egyptian people. As such, they made it the vehicle of a new sort of literature, in which the Greek alphabet would be used to represent Egyptian. Since the Egyptian language is more complex in its sound system than Greek, six new letters (borrowed from the demotic script) were added: and so the Coptic alphabet was created. The new tradition began with translations of the Bible, then expanded into original compositions, narrating the lives of the Fathers of the Egyptian Desert, St Pachomius and his followers. Coptic became a major channel for the development of the Christian doctrine, with homilies, letters and polemics all widely read in the Egyptian Church.
Egyptian was written in this way for another thousand years. Ironically, it was this late-acquired association with the Christian Church which saved it; by contrast, the lightning spread of Islam and Arabic in the seventh century soon blotted out the language of the previous masters, Greek.
Egyptian, now known as Coptic, had survived the first onslaught; but the threat from Arabic was always more insidious than that from Greek. Islam, after all, was an egalitarian religion; once Arabic was accepted, there were no other bars to social preferment under the new regime. Over the centuries, the fortunes of the Coptic language ebbed with its associated religion. The last great work written in Coptic is the Triadon, a long poem composed shortly after 1300. Even a hundred years later, Christians in Upper Egypt were said to speak little else,13 but it seems that by the end of the sixteenth century Coptic conversation was gone, or almost gone. Its recitation, in the liturgy of the Coptic Church, has lasted to our day.
Language from Huang-he to Yangtze
The Master said:
Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous.
Confucius, Lúnyŭ (Analects), ii. 15
The basic pattern of the history of the Chinese language is very similar to that of Egyptian, the maintenance of unity and linguistic stability despite repeated alien influxes.
Origins
The language’s closest relatives are found in Tibet and Burma, but they are not close: Chinese is generally seen as a separate branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, with no special link to any of the other major languages in it: these include Tibetan, Karen, Burmese, and even such languages of southern China as Yi, Lisu and Jingpo. In their basic structure, all these languages are very similar, as tone languages, with most of the words or word roots monosyllabic, and no inflexion of nouns, adjectives or verbs. But this is not enough to define the family: rather it defines the area, since other unrelated languages in the neighbourhood, such as Thai, Zhuang, Hmong and Mien, are also like this.
The Chinese language first turns up in the valley of the Yellow River or Huang-he. The earliest record is now a matter of controversy. In 2000, Chinese scholars recognised written characters in the markings on some 4800-year-old wine cups, found at Juxian in Shandong (‘Mountain East’)
province, where the river meets the sea. Whether that analysis is correct or not, the next-oldest characters are still a good 3400 years old: they were found written on bronze vessels, and on tortoiseshells and ox shoulder blades (heated until they cracked—a means of telling fortunes), near Anyang in Hebei (‘River North’) province. Although the symbols are by origin pictographic, the system as a whole clearly represents the Chinese language. Visual puns are used to convey words with more abstract meanings (e.g.