Nicholas Ostler > Quotes

“Our language places us in a cultural continuum, linking us to the past, and showing our meanings also to future fellow-speakers.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements and inspirations.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous. Confucius, Lúnyŭ (Analects), ii. 15”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“The language history of the world shows more of the true impacts of past movements and changes of people, beyond the heraldic claims of their largely self-appointed leaders. They reveal a subtle interweave of cultural relations with power politics and economic expediency.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements and inspirations. In some sense, then, when one language replaces another, a people’s view of the world must also be changing.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Within twenty-five years of the prophet Muhammad's death in 632, they had conquered all of the Fertile Crescent and Persia, and thrust into Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their lightning advance was even more penetrating towards the west: Egypt fell in 641 and the rest of North Africa as far as Tunisia in the next decade. Two generations later, by 712, the Arabic language had become the medium of worship and government in a continuous band of conquered territories from Toledo and Tangier in the west to Samarkand and Sind in the east. No one has ever explained clearly how or why the Arabs could do this.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“As well as being the banners and ensigns of human groups, languages guard our memories too. Even when they are unwritten, languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“But the importance of language in Islam went far beyond the production of a telling slogan. Eloquence, the sheer power of the word, as dictated by God and declaimed to all who would listen, played the first role in winning converts for Islam, leaving hearers no explanation for the beauty of Muhammad's words but divine inspiration. The classic example is 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, a contemporary of Muhammad and acknowledged authority on oral poetry, determined to oppose, perhaps even to assasinate, him. Exposed directly to the prophet's words, he could only cry out: 'How fine and noble this speech!' And he was converted.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Languages make possible both the living of a common history, and also the telling of it.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Culture, of course, is an extremely vague word, covering everything from the shaping of hand-axes to corporate mission statements, as well as the finer appreciation of the sonnets of Shakespeare and the paintings of Hokusai;”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Akkadian, the language spoken by Sargon I, the first Assyrian king in 2300 BC, is a close relative of the Arabic spoken by his successor in this same land, Saddam Hussein, in AD 2000; another close relative, the Middle East’s old lingua franca, Aramaic, bridges the gap between the decline of Akkadian around 600 BC and the onset of Arabic with the Muslims around AD 600. They are all sister languages within the very close Semitic family.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“From the language point of view, the present population of the world is not six billion, but something over six thousand.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“If we compare English to the other languages that have achieved world status, the most similar—as languages—are Chinese and Malay. Of course, we need to discount the main sources of its vocabulary: English has been in close touch all its short life with French and Latin; and since 1500 the education of very many of its elite speakers has involved Greek too. As a result these three languages have provided the vast majority of the words that have come into the language, whether borrowed or invented. But when the origins of its words—and hence their written look on the page—is set to one side, the amazing fact emerges that the closest parallels to English come not from Europe but from the far east of Asia.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“The mid-sixth century (close to 550) was the time when bubonic plague entered Britain, along trade routes from the Mediterranean. Significantly, it would have been Britain (the west and centre of the island) which it hit, rather than England (the south-east), because only Britain maintained trade links with the empire. And it would be less likely to spread to the Saxons since they did not consort with Britons and, living outside the established Roman towns and cities, may have lived at a lower density. It would have been virtually simultaneous with the mortālitās magna that hit Ireland, according to the Annals of Ulster, devastating the aristocracy (and no doubt every other class). Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd in Wales, also died of plague in 547 or 549, according to the Annales Cambriae. A folk memory of this dreadful disease, and the depopulation it caused, would remain in the Arthurian legend of the Waste Land, combining famine with military defeat, and a mysterious wound (to the king) in the groin area—one of the characteristics of bubonic plague. There is even a little genetic evidence that strikingly bears this out. Comparing the pattern of Y-chromosome DNA from samples in a line across from Anglesey to Friesland, a recent study found that the Welshmen were to this day clearly distinct from those in central England, but that the English and Frisian samples were so similar that they pointed to a common origin of 50–100 per cent of the (male) population; this could have resulted from a mass migration from Friesland.50 On the usual assumption that the Roman-period population of the island had reached 3 to 4 million, it seems hardly possible that anything other than an epidemic could have so eliminated the Britons from the ancestry of central England. So English supervened.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Achaeans largely took over the south-eastern coast of Italy. This country is popularly supposed to have been given its name by the Greeks: Italia would be the land of (w)italoí, ‘yearling cattle’, a dialectal variant of etaloí, later borrowed in fact into Latin as vituli, and still with us in the word veal.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“In fact, in the Rig Veda there is one hymn that is an invocation of Vāc, speech itself. Here are two of its verses:”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“On the American side, the shock of incomprehension was registered more brutally, by a devastating loss of population. It is impossible to estimate safely the numbers living in the Americas before European contact. Estimates vary between 13 million and 180 million. But everywhere there is evidence of a massive fall in the early years after the Europeans arrived. First of all, the Spaniards complained of depopulation in the first islands they colonised, Cuba and Hispaniola, and the figures bear them out: a census of Hispaniola in 1496 gave a figure of 1.1 million, but just eighteen years later the repartimiento of 1514 listed 22,000. Mexico witnessed a series of epidemics, beginning with the Spanish visit to their capital Tenochtitlán, which carried off most of the native population, and spread southward into Guatemala. Of the whole Caribbean, Joseph de Acosta was writing in the 1580s: ‘the habitation of which coasts is…so wasted and condemned that of thirty parts of the people that inhabit it there wants twenty-nine; and it is likely that the rest of the Indians will in short time decay’.3 Hernando de Soto led an expedition through Florida and the North American south-east in the mid-sixteenth century, finding a thick population of Indians, clustered in small cities, on the Mississippi river near modern Memphis. In 1682, when the area was next visited by white men (this time French), it was deserted. The diseases travelled faster than the spearheads of Spanish conquest: smallpox arrived in Peru in 1525, Francisco Pizarro in 1532. It had already killed Huayna Capac, the Inca, and many of his relations, and precipitated the dynastic struggle that the Spaniards were to turn to their own advantage. Thereafter, as everywhere, further epidemics, of typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles as well as more smallpox, ravaged the population. The Spanish were not notably humane conquerors, but they had no interest in genocide.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“But phonology, vocabulary and grammar are just the beginning of what makes languages differ. Just as each person has a distinctive manner of speaking, quite apart from a recognisable voice, there is a characteristic style of expression which goes with each language. This difference may be minimised when languages are in close proximity, and very often translated one into another, as tends to be the case, say, among the languages of western Europe. But it is always there implicitly, and stands out very clearly in the encounter of Nahuatl with Spanish.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Latin could make no headway with the sophisticates of the eastern Mediterranean, who spoke Greek and Aramaic, but it was quickly embraced by the illiterate peoples of Gaul and Spain.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Recall is an act of disciplined reimagination, and the remote past may be beyond anyone's ken.

All this is resolved through the miracle of writing. Writing traditions usually begin in some kind of process of accounting records-at least tallies and tokens are often the earliest clear predecessors of written documents to survive-the intent being to provide objective proof of the quantities involved in some transaction. But with practice it often became clear that the symbols were in principle capable of recording any message, and as facility in handling the symbols grew they became usable as a direct aide-memoire even for fluent speech.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“The language of trade is, after all, perforce that of the customer, rather than of the merchant.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Faith in an afterlife was important to Egyptians: they deliberately made their tombs the most permanent part of their built environment, and we find them in their literature very much concerned with what they could know about life after death, judgement and individual survival. Certainly they preserved their religion for most of the lifespan of their language, and they no more actively preached it abroad than they attempted to spread their language when they enlarged the boundaries of their power. But aspects of their faith did spread without the language none the less: their mother-goddess Isis became one of the most widely revered deities in the Roman empire, and has been seen as a root of the Christian cult of Mary as Mother of God.”
― Nicholas Ostler

“Languages change, as they pass from the lips of one generation to the next, but there is nothing about this process of transmission which makes for decay or extinction. Like life itself, each new generation can receive the gift of its language afresh. And so it is that languages, unlike any of the people who speak them, need never grow infirm, or die. Every language has a chance of immortality, but this is not to say that it will survive for ever.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“thos anthrpōi daímōn Character for man is fate. Heraclitus”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Recall is an act of disciplined reimagination, and the remote past may be beyond anyone’s ken.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Celts appear to have been literate only where they had neighbours who could teach them.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“with the exception of Chinese, even the languages that originated writing, and so made the earliest use of it, have dropped their original system, and borrowed another,”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“This book attempts to convey something of the characteristic viewpoint on the world of each language whose story it tells. Evidently, living in a particular language does not define a total philosophy of life: but some metaphors will come to mind more readily than others; and some states of mind, or attitudes to others, are easier to assume in one language than another. It cannot be a matter of indifference which language we speak, or which languages our ancestors spoke. Languages frame, analyse and colour our views of the world. 'I have three hearts,' claimed Ennius, an early master poet in Latin, on the strength of his fluency in Latin, Greek, and Oscan.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Bracelets do not embellish man, nor necklaces bright as the moon; bathing, cosmetics, garland, head-dress, none can add a whit. Man’s one true embellishment is language kept perfected: finery must perish, but eternal the refinement of fine language. Bharthari, ii.17–20”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“for all we know the origin may have been due to a genius like that of Sequoya, the illiterate Cherokee who in the nineteenth century AD took the fact of English literacy as a proof of concept, and proceeded then to develop a syllabary for his own language from first principles.”
― Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World