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Squandered worlds

By Nicholas Ostler - posted Friday, 23 May 2008


Still, their ecumenical regime of Greek-speaking in the Levant had to yield to the next instant world empire - that of the Arabs, who were like all the rest in their immoderate presumption for their language: for them, Indians, Persians, Turks, Greeks, Romans -whoever - were all “ajami”, their languages not worth distinguishing in contrast with Arabic, eternal medium of the Koran.

Traditionally, it has been the underlings - though often quite powerful underlings - who see value in their betters’ or predecessors’ languages, and hence in getting to know them. So after Arab conquest the Persians, besides Persian, respected Arabic (and outclassed its speakers by writing the best grammar of it); and after the Turks muscled into the Islamic world in the 10th century, they respected - besides their own Turkic language, Chagatay - Persian and Arabic. Yet the great Central Asian poet Nava’i, examining the respective the merits of languages in the late 15th century (Muhakamat al-Lughatayn), interestingly thought it counted against Persian that more people knew it than Chagatay. There is such a thing as a classy, boutique language, it appears.

So the memory of Persian and Turkish culture from before their encounters with Islam and Arabic has survived: for example, we know the exploits of their quintessential heroes Rustem, who unknowingly slew his son Sohrab, and Alpamysh, who had twice to win his wife from traitors.

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Languages and cultures which have gone down before Latin’s linguistic steamroller have not been so lucky. Consider Gaulish: we can see, from an artefact like the Gundestrup cauldon that the horned god Cernunnos had a complicated myth - but its details, involving stags, snakes, wolves, gryphons and dolphin riding, like all the vast extent of Druid learning, are gone beyond recall, along with the Gaulish language. No one recorded them, much less pursued a struggle to keep them alive.

Or consider Etruscan: Niccolò Machiavelli himself points out (in his Discorsi, II chapter 5) that since Latin replaced this language without a trace, the deeds of its once pre-eminent civilisation have largely been forgotten. (He conjectures that the Roman Empire would have similarly been erased if the Catholic Church had not needed to keep Latin!)

I have travelled far from the pressing need for our education systems to reinforce, rather than replace, the languages which our children bring to school. But the points that I have recalled from a distant past suggest the bleaker, poorer world that results when languages are allowed to wither. Everywhere languages are vulnerable if their speakers are moved into a new setting without community support. Our lives, and our children’s lives, will be the poorer in every sense, if we do not treasure them. To discard them knowingly diminishes all of us.

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About the Author

Nicholas Ostler is the Chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages www.ogmios.org. He is the author of Ad Infinitum, a biography of Latin and Empires of the Word, a language history of the world. He lives in Bath, England.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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