Empires Of The Word Part 20

May come refined with accents that are ours?

from Samuel Daniel, Musophilus (1599) DAVID: What newes? haue you heard nothing of the coming of any ship?

ABRAHAM: I heard the thundering of Ordnance, which is a signe of ships coming.

D.: And I heard that a shippe was come from Guiserat.

A.: And what Marchandizes doth she bring?

D.: She is laden with rice, almonds and raysons, she bringeth also many cloathes of all sortes, and very much bombace.

A.: Is this so? surely this news is very much desired.

D.: I heard it so affirmed for a truth.

DAOEDT: Appa ach gabar? tieda ga-barbarou derribarang cappal?

EBRAHIM: Souda beta denga'r boenij bedil, iang itoe alamat derri cappal dagang.

D.: Lagihamba deng'ar catta iang satoe cappal derri Guiserat souda datan.

E.: Appa peruiniaga debaua dia?

D.: Ini ber'isi, ken bras, ken gorma, zebibt; lagi bauadia bania kayin alus derri samoe' aieni: lagicapas bania.

E.: Begitou? itoe gabar bania baick.

D.: Ia beta deng'ar catta sach begitoe.

Augustine Spaulding, Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages, 1614, pp. 1-21

9.

The Second Death of Latin

The discovery by the western Europeans that their ships could cross oceans, and bring them directly to distant lands, whether for trade or outright conquest and exploitation, opens a new era in the global history of language spread. All too often, the language communities at the destinations of European shipping proved unable to mount effective military, or political, resistance to the adventuring invaders. When this happened, the victims were frequently decimated, and always forced to submit to a new elite. The spread of languages through the dominance of the new elites was far more pervasive than anything that had been seen before. The results are evident today in the presence of six colonising languages in the list of the world's top ten languages by population.*

The Romance half of these colonising languages, as we have just seen, owed their very existence to the changes that came over the Roman empire after its western regions were dissolved by the Germanic conquests; the decline in mutual intelligibility, and the redefinition of Latin or grammatica, to be no longer just their written form but a language separate from them, had led to their development as vehicles of a different sort of community. This community was less intellectual, but often as rich culturally as the Church, which continued to rely on Latin, spoken and written.1 Yet before these languages began their accelerated progress round the world, there came an epoch-making development, which emphasised and reinforced the spread of literacy in western Europe. It widened the range of compet.i.tion between Latin and the vernacular languages, including the Romance ones, and ma.s.sively raised the stakes in the contest. The result was the dethronement of Latin as the lingua franca of western Christendom: in effect its death, after two millennia, as a language of any real communication and innovation.

The event was the rise of a ma.s.s market in printed books. Like the information revolution reorganising the world in our own time, it was in essence the economic effect of the spread of a new technology. Johannes Gutenberg published his edition of the Bible in Mainz in 1450. Very soon, publishing houses sprang up all over Europe, and by 1475 most of the cla.s.sic works in Latin were available in print.2 By 1500, 20 million printed volumes had been produced, estimated to correspond to one book for every five people in western Europe.3 Almost at once comes the Reformation, and the rise of Protestant churches opposed to the established Christianity of the Pope in Rome. This, of course, was no coincidence, but a sign that the new book-publishing revolution had broken open the previously well-guarded access to media of communication. Martin Luther's works, starting theatrically with his ninety-five theses nailed to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, were printed and distributed in German translation. His translation of the whole Bible soon followed. The output of German-language publishing houses over the 1520s and 1530s was three times the total of the previous twenty years; Luther's works accounted for 33 per cent of all German-language publications between 1517 and 1525.4 The tide of new, unfiltered, information was too much for some. In France in 1535, King Francois I-briefly, and without effect-declared the printing of any books at all a capital offence. The Vatican, more circ.u.mspectly, set up the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, first so named in 1559. But the flow was not stemmed. The important effect was that the channels of long-distance and high-level discourse were switching from oral diffusion at court and university, mediated through ma.n.u.script messages, to written distribution of ma.s.s-produced texts. Latin had retained its domination as the vehicle of the old-style communications, but under the weight of sheer volume it now yielded to the new. Books might be printed in Latin as well as any other language, and those that were might be expected to enjoy a wider circulation for being written in an international language; but the economics of the book trade remaindered them, clearing its shelves for books in vernacular languages, which would sell in large quant.i.ties nearer to the point of production.5 What was happening was one facet of the growing power of the nation-state in western Europe: the replacement of an international intellectual elite, which provided a common background for different kings' governments, by a much more vocal and influential bourgeoisie, taking control of their local monarchies and making them serve their more worldly purposes. One linguistic effect of this was to replace Latin with national vernaculars, not just for local purposes but even at the level of the latest research.

Latin remained, in theory, a superior vehicle for high-level intellectual discourse: as a language, it had the vocabulary, built up over more than a thousand years of thought and disputation; and as a community, it had the reach, since scholars from all over the west of Europe were accustomed to talking, thinking and writing in it. Each vernacular, by contrast, had to build up equivalent strengths little by little from a much smaller base.

But wherever there was a riot, or a market, the vernaculars had the force of numbers on their side; and the religious controversies and wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed that intellectual issues were as apt to generate sales booms, riots and civil wars as disputations or dynastic conflicts. It was not until the twentieth century that communications media could penetrate deeply enough for an international language to compete effectively with vernaculars on the street. Modern English has found in broadcasting the answer to the threat that book publishing posed for medieval Latin.

Intellectual life conducted in Latin gradually fell away. It took about a century to go. Francis Bacon, publishing his Advancement of Learning in English in 1605, wanted to have it translated into Latin 'to ring a bell to call other wits together ... and have that bell heard as far as can be'. It did not actually come out in Latin until 1623, when he remarked: 'For these modern languages will at one time or another play the bank-rowtes [bankrupts] with books; and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad as G.o.d shall give me leave to recover it with posterity.'

The last major intellectual work in England to be published in Latin was Newton's Principia in 1687. Since then, science has in general had to be conducted less conveniently, in a variety of languages. It is the price the modern world has paid to keep scientists and intellectuals more closely in touch with society at large.*

This second death was more profound than Latin's first. It was not like the vernacular movements of five hundred years before, when Latin had just lost its use as a written disguise for Romance languages. They had moved on from Latin, and apart, in phonetics and structure; trying to access in written form through a Latin overlay was hard work, and increasingly pointless. But even as it made way for vernacular literature, Latin had retained a significant use: it was still the vehicle for the intellectual discourse that went beyond the popular themes being produced (and appreciated) in Romance. Now, Latin was ceasing to be used in any new thinking at all.

It is revealing to compare the final stages in the life of Latin with those of its fellow cla.s.sic languages, Greek, Chinese and Sanskrit. Each of these languages, after all, represented the unitary linguistic ideals of an area large enough to split into a number of popular varieties. But only Latin ended up largely replaced by the set of its daughter languages.

Greek never put down deep roots in the regions to which it spread; and when these regions were conquered by others, so that Greeks ceased to be their governing elite, Greek was essentially lost in them. The result was that Greek ended up confined to a relatively small region, mostly under a single, authoritarian government. When the government was reduced in power and then ceased to exist, after the Latin and especially the Turkish conquests, the cla.s.sical norms that had kept the language united were weakened; but when unitary government was returned, it proved possible, gradually, to move to a new, single, standard for the whole language.

Chinese has retained its role as the high-level focus, political and intellectual, for all the communities that speak related dialects (or daughter languages). Unlike Greek, it has lost linguistic unity, all over its south-eastern provinces; but political unity by and large has held firm. The phonetic inexplicitness of its writing system has, to an extent, allowed it to ignore emergent differences between its standard core and those dialects. This same ambiguity has enabled it, in the last century, to switch its linguistic norm from cla.s.sical wenyan to Beijing baihua without losing the allegiance of the whole set of Chinese-speaking communities. The logographic writing system, then, has enabled Chinese to escape the 'first death', without preventing numbers of its daughter languages from diverging.

Sanskrit, like Latin, has given rise to (or been closely a.s.sociated with) a number of daughter languages; this marks the major common feature of its history and Latin's, namely the breakdown of political unity over its speech area for a long time. As such Sanskrit shared what we have called the 'first death' of Latin. As in the case of Latin, this led to the daughter languages establishing themselves as independent literary languages for popular themes. But it long retained its role as high-level intellectual centre, and hence in some sense linguistic ideal, for these independent languages. Despite the impact of English from overseas, eliminating its high-level secular role, it has never been replaced as the focal religious vehicle for the majority of Indians.

The next tale in this history is the phenomenal spread of Latin's daughter languages; to this we shall very soon pa.s.s. This, after all, is the real, continuing, story of the Latin speech community. And yet, in a way, Latin as a living language did find a new disguise.

In the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, western Europe had been enlightened by a new and more direct knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin, aided by the influx of Byzantine scholars after the fall of Constantinople and its empire. Westerners began for the first time in a thousand years to have a reading knowledge of Greek, and eagerly lapped up the a.s.sociated stylistic doctrines of Atticism (see Chapter 6, 'Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning', p. 254). Perhaps by contact, perhaps because of the nature of self-consciously cla.s.sical studies, many began to develop a corresponding linguistic sn.o.bbery about their Latin, wanting to go back to the most ancient sources. Only Cicero's work would do. Not all humanists caught this bug: in particular Erasmus, a witty Dutch cla.s.sicist writing in the early sixteenth century, wrote a Dialogus Ciceronia.n.u.s to satirise the aspiration, envisioning a character called Nosoponus ('labouring under a disease') exerting himself to work out which inflected forms of each verb were actually found in Cicero's work, and which (more importantly) were not. For such a man, even his dreams were restricted to Cicero ('Nec aliud simulachrum in somnis occurrit praeterquam Ciceronis...'); the naive witness Hypologus comments that he looks more like a ghost than a man ('Larvae similior videtur quam homini').

When this kind of devotion to the details of expression established itself as respectable, it became possible to see the style of expression as far more important than the content, and the knowledge of what had been said as far superior to the ability to innovate and strive for progress. So just as the highest aspiration for Greek scholars in the West was to read the texts (and perhaps write a pastiche-but only in cla.s.sical style), now people came to think they were preserving the value of Latin if they became experts in the language and its extant early literature, for their own sake alone. The primary uses of a language, to think and feel, to express ideas and to communicate them, became purely subordinate to this 'cla.s.sicism'.*

It would have been better if Latinists had accepted the resigned verdict of one of their favourite poets: Soles occidere et redire possunt:

n.o.bis c.u.m semel occidit brevis lux

Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Suns can set and can come back again:

For us when once the short light has set

There is one night perpetual to be slept.

Catullus * See Chapter 13. The six are English, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, German and French. There was a seventh, Dutch, which holds position 21 in the population league. Their imperial careers are reviewed in Chapters 10, 11 and 12.

* Contrast Alcuin, propagating his new standard for Latin in the ninth century, and working in quite the opposite direction: for the important mission then was to put the intellectual world back in touch with itself, and its own ancient traditions.

* This backward-looking spirit is still familiar to me from an education in the cla.s.sical stream of an English public school in the 1960s. It is expressed in a thousand prefaces to school textbooks. Consider this from Ainger and Wintle (1890, 17th impression 1963: iii): 'Latin verse composition ... is the proof and the flower of that scholarship which loves the old writers with an unselfish love, and delights to clothe modern thoughts and modern expressions in the dress of ancient metre and rhythm.' Or Pym and Silver (1952), who state that a chapter 'ill.u.s.trates the continuing vitality of the Latin language in England during the last two hundred years' when all it contains is epitaphs, a couple of parliamentary speeches (in English) which allude to Latin literature, a section of a papal encyclical, a poem (admittedly witty) on the fuel crisis of 1947, and a number of jokey prize compositions from schools and the University of Oxford. The book's very t.i.tle. Alive on Men's Lips, is a highly ironic lie, since it is simply a translation of a phrase from the epitaph of Ennius, 'vivu' per ora virum', dead in the second century BC.

10.

Usurpers of Greatness: Spanish in the New World

Quando bien comigo pienso mui esclarecida Reina: i pongo delate los ojos el antiguedad de todas las cosas: que para nuestra recordacion & memoria quedaron escriptas: una cosa hallo & saco por conclusion mui cierta: que siempre la lengua fue compaera del imperio: & de tal manera lo siguio: que junta mente comencar. crecieron. & florecieron. & despues juta fue la caida de entrambos.

When I consider well, most ill.u.s.trious Queen, and set before my eyes the antiquity of all the things which remain written down for our record and memory, one thing I find and draw as a most certain conclusion, that always language was the companion of empire, and followed it in such a way that jointly they began, grew, flourished; and afterwards joint was the fall of both.

Antonio de Nebrija, opening words of the preface to his Gramatica de la lengua castellana, 1492

Portrait of a conquistador

The beginnings of the global spread of European languages came just as printing presses and publishers were a.s.serting the existence of vernaculars, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, English, Dutch and German, over the body of a Latin that was gradually being drained of life. The languages that spread were those of the successor states of the western Roman empire; and so their educated elites were no strangers to the ideal, and indeed the romance, of vast, multinational empires. They had been brought up on the histories of Rome and Alexander; and they were filling their imaginations with tales of chivalry, conquest and adventure in strange lands, of Amadis de Gaula (hero of a popular romance of the fifteenth century, published in Zaragoza in 1508), his son Esplandian (1510), and many, many others.* History was about to make their dreams come true.

The country that would play the leading role in the conquest and colonisation of the New World already felt itself entering a golden age. A century of uncertain intrigue had been resolved in the peaceful union of Spain's competing kingdoms, Castile in the north and centre, and Aragon in the east: Castile had come to Isabella in 1474, and Aragon to Fernando in 1479; princes already joined in marriage, they were so acceptable to the Pope that they went on to be granted the t.i.tle of 'Reyes Catolicos'. They were to reign together for another twenty-five years, during which they completed the Christian conquest of Spain. The last Moorish kingdom, Granada, fell on the second day of 1492, but the ten-year war had stretched the Spanish treasury to its limit.

Linguistically, Spain was an alliance of three major Romance languages, Galician (gallego) in the west, Castilian (castellano) in the centre, and Catalan (catala) in the east. Catalan is much more similar, as a language, to Occitan or Provencal, as spoken in southern France. It is possible to see part of the origins of the Spanish three in the different Germanic groups who took control of Iberia in the fifth century, the Suevi in the north-west, Visigoths in the centre and south. At any rate, Castile established itself as the most powerful state in the region, having absorbed the western kingdom (ruled from Leon) in 1230. Aragon, in parallel, had come to dominate the west, uniting in a fairly equal partnership with Catalonia in 1140.

The linguistic effect of the union of Castile and Aragon, with Aragon as the junior partner, was to make Castilian the de jure standard for the whole of Spain, just before the flowering of literature in the early seventeenth century. And as Christians went on to replace Moors in the southern reaches of Andalusia, they recolonised the south of Spain with speakers of this Castilian. Henceforth, although Galician and Catalan retained their independence and still have their own literary traditions, Castilian became a synonym for 'the Spanish language', as it is to this day.

The Spanish approach to Christianity emphasised high-level authority as a guarantee of orthodoxy, and led all Christendom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in vigorously prosecuting this belief. The Inquisition had been founded in 1480, and in 1492 the extraordinary measure was taken of expelling all Jews from the kingdom. Then, in 1502, all practice of Islamic faith was abruptly banned, although it had been explicitly guaranteed in the terms of the Muslims' surrender of Granada ten years before. There was a sense in the ruling circles of Spain that the truth was only to be found in inherited tradition; likewise the political ideal was for total unity of purpose between Pope and King, Church and State.

This was to have some strange effects on language policy in the Americas. Free thinking was seen as pernicious and indeed contagious; and a consequence of this was the preference, when Spain became responsible for education in the Americas, that native students should learn Latin, rather than Castilian; vernacular literature could never be guaranteed free of deceptive influences. But in spreading Spanish civilisation among foreign-language speakers, it would also become clear that the linguistic priorities of the secular and the sacred diverged: nothing matched the symbolic power of the Spanish language to signify empire-but it was easier, quicker and more reliable to spread understanding, and hence faith, in one of the native languages.

Faith and righteous government might be one thing: but the getting of wealth was another. Here there was scope for innovation. Indeed, the new departure that Castile authorised was so far reaching in its consequences that it transcended even the wildest fifteenth-century romance. The Portuguese were exploring south and eastward in this period, finding a route round Africa to India and the spice islands; they had rounded the Cape in 1488, and were to reach the fabled orient on follow-up expeditions, India in 1499, Melaka (Malacca) in 1511, Guangzhou (Canton) in 1514. But in that same cardinal year of 1492, the Spanish were offered, by the Genoese adventurer Christopher Columbus, a more speculative path to the same destination, travelling due west. Queen Isabella backed him, and the result was quite different from what had been hoped: not an economic back door to the Orient, but a whole new set of worlds to conquer, ultimately a far richer prize.