 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world's great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that binds communities together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. From the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions to the engaging self-regard of Greek and to the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe, these epic achievements and more are brilliantly explored, as are the fascinating failures of once "universal" languages. A splendid, authoritative, and remarkable work, it demonstrates how the language history of the world eloquently reveals the real character of our planet's diverse peoples and prepares us for a linguistic future full of surprises. |
Average Customer Rating:   Boring! this book is really boring I bought it for a class and I totally hate reading it. I'm half way through and I'm only on ch.5! The chapters are soooooooooo!!!! long! its riddiculous! this is a pretty thick book and it has really small writting! The author just talks over and over again about the same thing! Don't recommend it to read just for fun but if it is for a class then goodluck! Unreadable This book is very advanced and I feel I should caution anyone purchasing this book at an undergraduate level. The author goes straight into advanced material without providing any background information. The names of ancient cities, languages and peoples are spewed out one after another and the way the text is written seems to assume the reader has an extensive knowledge of geography (ever heard of Ugarit, Karkemish or Qatna?). New places and topics are introduced randomly within the same paragraph, and even the same sentence!
Sample of text: "The Hittites, flourishing from the sixteenth to the thirteenth century BC, created a massively literate civilization, and the royal library at Hattusas, discovered in modern Bogaz Koy, 150 kilometres west of Ankara, contains materials not only in Hittite and Akkadian, but also in Hurrian, Luwian, and Palaic, interspersed here and there with phrases in Hattic, Sumerian and the Indo-Aryan language of Mitannian aristocracy" (41). Magisterial but fresh view of human history Ostler has created a history of all of humanity, in so much as such a thing can be achieved in a single volume, on a basis unlike any other I have encountered. His Empires are those of the mind, and I would hazard that they reveal more about us than the more superficial customary treatments of kings and armies. Language is the tie that binds us and forms our minds and societies, and by viewing the ebb and flow of its empires we glimpse the flow not merely of peoples and levers of power but of the very bedrock of our powers of expression. We see the flow of conceptual frameworks and the means of expressing and constraining them.
There are 6,000-odd languages in the world, grouped into a hierarchy of families, with possibly half in danger of extinction within a generation or two. Apart from the loss of potentially valuable diversity and the lessons about the human mind that will be lost with these languages and their associated conceptual frameworks, this highlights that a handful of languages have expanded or persisted across continents and millennia. These languages have built empires. Ostler's quest is to understand how a language comes to be an empire-builder rather than a linguistic eddy in a tributary. What languages have survived millennia or have spread across continents, and why? The answers seem to have less to do with the unique qualities of the language than you might think, and less to do with military or commercial dominance.
Literacy has proved a potent cultural weapon, of course. The very fact of being able to write enables a culture to take on a sense of itself across time and space. A culture which can write can send orders for spices across oceans and orders to march across continents. A culture which can write can remember more than can be taught to a single mind, and can still remember it when the mind dies. A culture that can write becomes both more unified and potentially more organised in many ways. This enables it to overrun others. The potential to overrun others is not the benison to a language that one might think, though. Invaders such as the Germanic tribes have dominated swathes of a continent, such as historic Gaul, and then left hardly a trace of their tongue across much of the area. Cultures can write and thereby teach their neighbours ... to write. An alphabet can leap cultural boundaries and leave a language dying in its wake, taking on a life of its own. An ideographic system can offer nearly insurmountable obstacles to learning and yet, like Chinese, its very abstraction from the phonetic nature of the language can enable it to serve and persist as the medium of transmission for mutually unintelligible dialects. The secret of why English, Latin, Egyptian or Chinese can become an empire, or why it can then fade, is no facile single-factor recipe.
The odd piece of entertainment surprises the alert mind now and again. Akkadian and Sumerian, the earliest scripts spoken in Babylon and the fertile Crescent, were Semitic languages written in a script called cuneiform, which was pressed into clay tablets. These tablets were sometimes fired, but for economic reasons large volumes of text, such as records of state, were simply dried and stacked in libraries. When the administrators were overturned and the cities sacked in the fall of this civilisation, these libraries acquired the distinction of being the only ones in history to have been preserved by arson!
Ostler deals with English towards the end, and gives reasons, which deserve thought, as to why it may not be a thousand-year empire. While successful now through its prestige in the former British Empire and its strong linkage with science and technology, it is increasingly becoming primarily a second language while first-language speakers gradually become less of a majority in their own countries. English achieved what some other European colonial languages did not in that it became a symbol of achievement in the colonies for educated natives. Elsewhere it simply replaced native languages as the natives were driven to or near to extinction. In the Americas and Australasia the native populations were devastated and English-speakers took over the land. Indeed, the willingness to stay and farm rather than merely seek treasure is partly what distinguishes English as an empire-builder. Elsewhere the climate, less condign, discouraged European farmers with their temperate crops and lack of malaria-resistance. In these places, English tended to become an elite language, and it remains a language of aspiration to this day. It may not always remain so. The status of second language is precarious.
This is a wonderful book. Accessible and largely non-technical, it is illustrated by the swirls and curlicues of the languages with which it treats, but does not require of the reader to master the scripts or the grammar. A highly readable and thoroughly entertaining piece of education awaits the reader. Following the roads out of Babel This is a heavy book, with about 600 dense pages, that give a thorough background into the history of the languages we speak. It examines why we speak what we do, where our current languages come from and the factors that determine when/if a language is passed on....or passes on.
Language, as it existed at any point in the past or even just defining what it is right now can be quite nebulous. So, there are limits to what can be achieved, and the author probably does make some assumptions that are too grand. Some points seem clear - for example, women settlers being a bigger factor passing on languages to future generations (since they traditionally reared the children, etc) than men. Broader assumptions the author makes often fit nicely into the puzzle, but aren't truly conclusive. I wouldn't have it any other way though....if you want to avoid opinion entirely, you are left reading yesterdays weather and the sports scores. You enter a topic like this knowing full well the limits of people's knowledge.
Ostler didn't set out to make a book for academics -- myself, and most readers, will be thankful. As stated, this is a dense book in every way, but it's also approachable. I found something fascinating about every language covered and even though each major chapter (beyond the introduction) examines a different language, spanning and re-spanning millennium, the book has a clear arc from beginning to end that makes for an interesting read.
Language is the medium of thought, so examining how language itself is entwined with history is deeply compelling whether you are into the study of linguistics or history. If you are into history or linguistics, and especially if you are into both, then you can't go wrong checking this one out. A unique perspective on language A great book looking at languages from a very unique perspective: who spoke them and how did they travel throughout the world? Nicholas Ostler writes very well and kept me engaged throughout. With books as good as this, I am always left wanting more and more when I read the last page . |  |
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