Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World | 
|  | | | Title: | Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World | | Author: | Nicholas Ostler | | Publisher: | Harper Perennial | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 01 July, 2006 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0060935723 / 9780060935726 | | List Price: | $17.95 | | You Save: | $5.74 | | Amazon Price: | $12.21 | |
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Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews:
• Fascinating, But Probably Tough Going For The Average Reader 18 January, 2008
Ostler's survey of how languages spread and change and why some languages take root while others wither and die is really interesting. BUT... I have a B.A. in Linguistics, I study the history of ancient Rome and Greece and of Europe in the Middle Ages for fun, and I found this book tough going. Ostler covers a large time span, going from the beginnings of written words to the present, and a fair chunk of geography (Asia, the Middle East, Eastern and Western Europe, the Americas and North Africa). The history of these regions is presented in a pretty good bit of detail, but is so densely packed that it flies by too fast to get a handle on it unless you already know it. Likewise, unless you have a background in language or languages, you'll probably struggle with the numerous texts in archaic languages, which are written in their original writing system, and then phonetically (but, confusingly, with different representations for similar sounds in different languages, rather than just using the standard system of phonetic symbols), and then in English translation, although you could easily skip everything but the translations and just try to go along with the general idea. Just know that although this book is presented as being written for a general reader, it is still quite academic in tone, something like you would expect for a graduate lecture on the subject. There are multiple footnotes on nearly every page, adding to the sense of an academic paper.
All that said, there is a lot to love about the book if you have the requisite background or at least are interested in the subject matter and willing to kind of just go with the flow. The gist of Ostler's argument is that languages spread in a variety of ways -- conquest, trade, emmigration -- and that whether the native or incoming language dominates, or even survives secondarily, depends on a variety of factors, including population density, inter-marriage, whether a language is the province of the elite or used primarily for religous services or trade, how broad an area the language is used in as a lingua franca, etc. The best section is probably that of how Spanish spread in South and Central America and came to displace the native American languages spoken throughout, and how close it came to dying out at various stages of history. The Chinese languages, Aryan languages, Arabic, Latin, Greek, Russian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, German and English are also looked at in varying degrees of detail, and Ostler examines their spread through military, political, religious and cultural lenses.
The book is a lot of work, but worth the effort to anyone interested in language, cultural influence, or history, or who just wonders whether we'll be seeing an English-only world anytime in the near future. Hint: don't bet on it!
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3H7ADUP07D93H
• Not (really) For Linguists 04 December, 2008
Intended to be, as the author states in the last page, a study in diachronic sociolinguistics (that is a study of the varying social ranks and uses of several world languages through time) this ponderous essay will probably bear interest for the non specialists because it is well researched and nearly everywhere clear.
Quite often I found myself thinking about a well written article for a quality magazine aimed at educated readers.
Mr Ostler does not include every language, just those that at some time during their history acquired, for a variety of reasons, the status of world languages (that is languages spoken in many different nations), beginning with Sumerian and concluding with English.
He tries, and nearly always succeeds, to avoid the odious self-congratulary attitude of most western language historians who try to demonstrate that English (or French or whatever) was inevitably bound to acquire its dominating position among the languages of the world due to a vaguely explained superiority in both structure and "spirit".
Proof of this is the sheer number of pages dedicated to exotic languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic, often and unjustly neglected in their role of beacon of a civilisation far more advanced than what we usually think.
Only a rather cursory depiction of Sub-saharian and Turkic languages, possibly the least known to him, spoils this sensible approach.
As an amateur linguist myself I was mildly interested in the chapters about the non Indo-European languages because I lack a comprehensive information about them.
Yet, at the end of each chapter I found myself disappointed: the information provided is seldom more than superficial. Had he been more thorough the book would probably have topped the 1000 pages and probably lost the interest of the general educated reader but this is how I felt.
The chapters about Indo-European languages and, curiously enough, that about modern English were of no use at all to me but I suppose could interest those without previous knowledge of the subject.
Waiting for a second augmented edition that might never come out, this book is better left unread by linguists who will be able to do little more than commend the erudition of its author. The book could also represent a useful tool for undergraduate students of literature, linguistics and history.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1DA6E4FNRSAWN
• Slow And Plodding 29 May, 2007
Well, so it seems I am going to be in the minority in stating my general dissatisfaction of this book. It is hard for me to pin down exactly why I didn't like it.
Perhaps it was the fact that for the first hundred pages, it was hard to track the authors point. I've know enough to know that if you don't track the text early on, just give it a little while, read some more, and you'll usually get in gear. But that just did not happen here.
I found the style of narrative confusing, as the author has a way of jumping back and forth, and making it hard to tie everything in.
The author also tends to skim over some important issues, or at least, what I would consider important. But after all, isn't that what a review is, but a subjection opinion? I think in all, this is more of a social commentary than a linguistic discourse. More time is spent on examining the social impact of language spread rather than discussing technical details, which I was hoping for.
No solid details on how the early alphabets were heavily modified until we reach our current alphabets. Even tho there are plenty of books on the matter, I still enjoy reading it.
At about one-third into the book, I found myself skipping large sections of text, until I eventually just shut the cover and shelved it.
- Reviewed by customer ID: ALR819EYYWX06
• An Excellent Linguistic Survey Covering Major Languages 12 May, 2007
I could not put this book down until, disappointed, I ran out of pages to read. Dr. Ostler's book perfectly combined my greatest interests--history and linguistics. I do wish there had been a bit more depth in his treatment of Arabic, the "single hyperlanguage community" and something about its influence on Latin-origin Spanish (comparable to the influence of Norman French on Germanic English). My only quibbles (I'm an editor and can't help it) is that Dr. Ostler didn't comment, on page 378, the strong influence that Spanish has had on both surnames and given names in the Philippines, even though the spoken language has almost completely died out there. Also Italian is not included in his "top 20" list on page 526 yet is mentioned as included on that list on page 528. That said, I have been fervently recommending this book to everyone (as my son had recommended it to me).
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2ZBA4TD7EI1LH
• One Piece Missing 04 December, 2008
Great book but missing one key element. Had Ostler started this book with his discussion of communications technologies, now on p. 511-512, and added a clear theory of information costs over time, the book would have hung together much better. We'd now be calling him the Adam Smith of his business.
As the great economic historian Harold Innis demonstrated in "Empire and Communications" (University of Toronto Press, Introduction by Marshall McLuhan), language is part of the technological fabric of a civilization, central to what holds it together.
Languages are like any other human endeavor, those that drive information costs down relative to others win. Those that drive up the relative cost of information lose. Latin stayed ahead of the information cost curve for a millenium after the fall of Rome. It took that long for the vernacular to replace it. Languages like French latinized, delatinized, and relatinized several times over 500 years until the vernacular finally overtook Latin. When it did so the change was remarkably fast.
I work with Japanese companies (see my books on this site) for which being forced to look "back" to thousand year old Chinese ideograms makes it impossible to describe (or translate as I describe) modern business phenomenon. "Demand management" can only be translated into two kanji meaning "financial control", or accounting, which is nothing like the always evolving business of managing global customer demand. It recently took me a year and four board level presentations of about two hours each for management of one company figure out that this simple distinction had cut them out of huge swathes of the global market for their products. The language, by looking back millenia to an ancient imagery of long gone things, had locked this company (and much of the rest of the country) out of modern business practices.
Information costs are destiny.
Great to see my great great grandfather Sir Monier Monier-Williams cited.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A10QMR1FOD3ZG8
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