Nicholas Ostler
Author of Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
About the Author
Nicholas Ostler is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages.
Image credit: © Susan Greenhill
Works by Nicholas Ostler
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Ostler, Nicholas
- Legal name
- Ostler, Nicholas David MacLachlan
- Birthdate
- 1952-05-20
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Balliol College, University of Oxford (BA|MA|1975)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D|1979) - Occupations
- linguist
scholar
author - Organizations
- Foundation for Endangered Languages
- Agent
- Natasha Fairweather
Linda Shaughnessy (A.P. Watt; translation rights) - Relationships
- Dunn, Jane (wife)
- Short biography
- Nicholas Ostler's serious interest in languages took him from first-class honors in Classics at Oxford at Oxford and a doctorate in linguistics and Sanskrit at MIT to teaching in Japan and a succession of research projects from Crete to New Mexico, aimed at introducing languages to computers. He then moved on to the problems of human speakers and made himself an expert on the Chibcha language of ancient South America, which yielded to the Spanish in the eighteenth century.
Nicholas Ostler is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, a charity that supports the efforts of small communities worldwide to know and use their languages more. He lives in Bath, England. [Empires of Words, eBook, 2015] - Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Bath, Somerset, England, UK
Sevenoaks, Kent, England, UK
Tonbridge, Kent, England, UK
Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK - Associated Place (for map)
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2778599.html
This fascinating book looks at the history of those languages which have become dominant for a while in areas far from their origins - Sumerian, Akkadian, Phoenician, Aramaic, Arabic, Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Nahuatl, Quechua, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Russian, and English (plus a few others of course) - and asks how this process happens, and also how such languages get displaced by their successors.
He starts with the Middle East, show more and I probably learned more from this section than from any other. I would have found it difficult to distinguish between the Akkadians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians; now I appreciate the lovely continuity between Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic, all fairly closely related and the lingua franca of Mesopotamia and far beyond for centuries. The Greek chapter also pulls apart the roles of the different Greek dialects in both literature and politics; again, information that I had been vaguely aware of but packaged here comprehensibly. And it had not occurred to me that Ancient Egyptian survived as Coptic until a few centuries ago.
I particularly appreciated was the account of the linguistic shifts of the Chinese languages. I've found it very difficult to get to grips with Chinese history in the past - the names mean nothing to me and I don't have a good sense of the geography; and I've sensed some writers steering away from the question of internal cultural or ethnic differences in China. Of course, if you approach it through the lens of language, it is impossible to ignore the cultural and ethnic aspects, and equipped with those tools I suddenly found a lot of what I had previous read fitting together much better in my mind. And it's important for understanding how our world will work in the future - Mandarin has about the same number of speakers as the second, third and fourth languages in the world combined (Spanish, English and Hindi/Urdu), and the other Chinese languages are level pegging with major European languages like French and Italian.
The linguistic approach also offers a somewhat different perspective on imperialism and colonisation. It's actually rather rare in historical terms for a language to jump tracks and become a widely spoken mother tongue in places far from its origin. Most of the ancient languages discussed were languages of commerce, religion and/or administration which took a very long time to percolate into the population as a whole; apart from settler colonies, the same is true in more modern times - Dutch is not spoken in Indonesia (and barely in the Caribbean); English may be the national language of India but it is spoken by only 10% of the population. It is relatively unusual for the colonisers' language to completely displace the previous incumbents. English has been lucky twice: when Germanic tribes conquered the Western Roman Empire, Britain was the only province where their language stuck, everywhere else either retaining Latin (or Basque, which had been around for even longer) or switching from Aramaic to Arabic when the time came. Surviving a narrow brush with Norman French, it then became the core language of European settlement in North America. In both cases, depopulation of the indigenous population by plague, helped by ethnic cleansing, appears to have been a crucial factor, as with Spanish in Latin America. (Simple conquest is not enough; cf German and Japanese.) Similarly, Portuguese has Brazil, but none of the other ex-colonies is really lusophone in the same way; as for French, there is no country apart from France where it has a majority of native speakers - not Belgium (38%), not even Monaco (45%).
But Ostler is very far from being an anglophone triumphalist, and takes his last chapter to look ahead at the eventual fall of English as a world language, and to speculate about what might replace it. One would have to bet on Chinese, already an official language or an unofficial language of commerce all round the South China Sea. He makes the point that Chinese, English and Malay/Indonesian have all been helped in their success by rather simple internal structures which make them relatively easier to learn to speak. Chinese, however, is hampered by its writing system which is much more difficult to grasp. I must say I can see English clinging on for centuries to come, as a lingua franca for humanity, even with a relatively decreasing share of native speakers.
Anyway, very much worth reading, full of detail and connections which I had not thought of before. show less
This fascinating book looks at the history of those languages which have become dominant for a while in areas far from their origins - Sumerian, Akkadian, Phoenician, Aramaic, Arabic, Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Nahuatl, Quechua, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Russian, and English (plus a few others of course) - and asks how this process happens, and also how such languages get displaced by their successors.
He starts with the Middle East, show more and I probably learned more from this section than from any other. I would have found it difficult to distinguish between the Akkadians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians; now I appreciate the lovely continuity between Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic, all fairly closely related and the lingua franca of Mesopotamia and far beyond for centuries. The Greek chapter also pulls apart the roles of the different Greek dialects in both literature and politics; again, information that I had been vaguely aware of but packaged here comprehensibly. And it had not occurred to me that Ancient Egyptian survived as Coptic until a few centuries ago.
I particularly appreciated was the account of the linguistic shifts of the Chinese languages. I've found it very difficult to get to grips with Chinese history in the past - the names mean nothing to me and I don't have a good sense of the geography; and I've sensed some writers steering away from the question of internal cultural or ethnic differences in China. Of course, if you approach it through the lens of language, it is impossible to ignore the cultural and ethnic aspects, and equipped with those tools I suddenly found a lot of what I had previous read fitting together much better in my mind. And it's important for understanding how our world will work in the future - Mandarin has about the same number of speakers as the second, third and fourth languages in the world combined (Spanish, English and Hindi/Urdu), and the other Chinese languages are level pegging with major European languages like French and Italian.
The linguistic approach also offers a somewhat different perspective on imperialism and colonisation. It's actually rather rare in historical terms for a language to jump tracks and become a widely spoken mother tongue in places far from its origin. Most of the ancient languages discussed were languages of commerce, religion and/or administration which took a very long time to percolate into the population as a whole; apart from settler colonies, the same is true in more modern times - Dutch is not spoken in Indonesia (and barely in the Caribbean); English may be the national language of India but it is spoken by only 10% of the population. It is relatively unusual for the colonisers' language to completely displace the previous incumbents. English has been lucky twice: when Germanic tribes conquered the Western Roman Empire, Britain was the only province where their language stuck, everywhere else either retaining Latin (or Basque, which had been around for even longer) or switching from Aramaic to Arabic when the time came. Surviving a narrow brush with Norman French, it then became the core language of European settlement in North America. In both cases, depopulation of the indigenous population by plague, helped by ethnic cleansing, appears to have been a crucial factor, as with Spanish in Latin America. (Simple conquest is not enough; cf German and Japanese.) Similarly, Portuguese has Brazil, but none of the other ex-colonies is really lusophone in the same way; as for French, there is no country apart from France where it has a majority of native speakers - not Belgium (38%), not even Monaco (45%).
But Ostler is very far from being an anglophone triumphalist, and takes his last chapter to look ahead at the eventual fall of English as a world language, and to speculate about what might replace it. One would have to bet on Chinese, already an official language or an unofficial language of commerce all round the South China Sea. He makes the point that Chinese, English and Malay/Indonesian have all been helped in their success by rather simple internal structures which make them relatively easier to learn to speak. Chinese, however, is hampered by its writing system which is much more difficult to grasp. I must say I can see English clinging on for centuries to come, as a lingua franca for humanity, even with a relatively decreasing share of native speakers.
Anyway, very much worth reading, full of detail and connections which I had not thought of before. show less
Easily one of the most intensely researched popular science books I've ever read (it's right up there with Jared Diamond's works in terms of endless footnotes and works cited), this is an impressively sweeping overview of the history of a dozen of the world's major languages and language families that manages to be interesting even when he's talking about stuff like the developmental similarities between Chinese and ancient Egyptian, or how people decided to use ancient languages like show more Akkadian and Sanskrit as lingua francas, or why Dutch didn't catch on as a colonial language. I personally find language history and usage fascinating (nerd alert), so maybe not everyone will find this book as cool as I did, but this was one of those books where I learned something new on basically every page and enjoyed doing it. Ostler's ability to synthesize vast amounts of research is awe-inspiring, and his obvious love for certain languages (he has a real crush on Sanskrit, in particular) carries over to the subject material in ways that only the best authors manage. He has some really interesting insights on all sorts of things, like why Germanic tribes managed to conquer half the Roman Empire but didn't impose their languages anywhere whereas the Arab conquests only a few hundred years later led to permanent linguistic change across almost all of their territories, and his ending discussion of the evolution and future of English is probably worth the price of the book right there. show less
Tour de force! Not a perfect book, no, but only in the sense that nothing is perfect in this imperfectest of all worlds. He drops in and out of giving those all-important pronunciation guides, which start out making the book seem so immaculate. And the whole project of "world language history" is so macro that the later chapters, on French and Russian and English especially, have a bit of a survey-of-familiar-ground-with-tidbits feel. But these are small, not to say churlish, objections. show more This book is huge, with amazing sweep. It provides a theoretical framework that is fresh and of utility to the scholar as well as the armchair historian and/or pedant. It gives you the joy of getting new sounds and strange civilizations into your head, helps you understand the contingencies and the might-have-beens, and delivers up worlds beyond your imagination. And hell, I like the linguistic essentialism of "Arabic’s austere grandeur and egalitarianism; Chinese and Egyptian’s unshakeable self-regard; Sanskrit’s luxuriating classifications and hierarchies; Greek’s self-confident innovation leading to self-obsession and pedantry; Latin’s civic sense; Spanish rigidity, cupidity, and fidelity; French admiration for rationality; and English admiration for business acumen," and if that makes me a shameless modernist, well, (it doesn't, but) so be it. This book makes me feel very good about an MA in English language, and I learned a lot more along with the affirmation than I would have from Paolo Coelho or "Tuesdays with Morrie." show less
a world history through the major languages. Just my kind of tome: learned but written in a worn-lightly way. The languages come across almost like living people. The section on Greek is especially fascinating. Witty ironies here and there about what makes languages, cultures, powers survive or fade. Think Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee if they'd tried to do standup at the Ed Fringe.
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