Empires of the World

I've just finished reading Nicholas Ostler's monumental Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (Harper Collins, 2005). It's a magisterial introduction to the history of languages and to the history of the world through the prism of language. Unlike previous historical linguists, Ostler does not compare the structure of different languages with a view to reconstructing their past; instead, the compares the career of different languages: their social and political impact and staying power, as well as the reasons for their decline. "It is an approach, previously little explored, to understanding human societies." Much of what Ostler writes about Aramaic was completely new to me. I learned something from every page of this book, including the section on Chinese. In a review of the book, Robert Dessaix writes about the spread of Aramaic:

"Aramaic-speakers, for instance, who were nomads from northern Syria, simply swamped the Assyrian empire, which has been happily speaking Akkadian for 2,000 years, bringing with them a superior technology (always a plus): their alphabet, written on papyrus or leather, much handier than cuneiform on clay tablets.

In the 6th century BC the Persians found it practical to adopt Aramaic as their official language, so that by the time Alexander the Great invaded Egypt, he found the administration there communicating not in Egyptian but Aramaic, and even Ashoka in far-off India had inscriptions in Aramaic on his monuments.

No conquering armies from northern Syria, no settlement of foreign lands, just a bit of 'merger and acquisition' leading to bilingualism in the streets and offices and armies of the Middle East until hey presto! one day anyone who was anyone across half the known world, including eventually Jesus, and millions of nobodies at home as well (that's the important thing) was speaking and writing in an obscure nomadic dialect.

Arabic wiped Aramaic out eventually, of course, though invasion and the imposition of a unitary religion but, interestingly, it wiped out only related languages (as Aramaic, and even Egyptian were). It seems that invasion leaves unrelated languages intact and thriving (Persian, Malay, Turkish and so on in the case of Arabic) unless it's accompanied by massive migration and, ideally, a plague or two."
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s1461705.htm

Here's an interview with Ostler:

http://calitreview.com/2007/04/03/an-interview-with-linguist-nicholas-ostler/

Paul