Speaking of peoples and languages, Nimrod and islands, in *Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World* (2005), in the final section which is titled Vaster than empires, Nicholas Ostler writes this: ... world languages are not exclusively the creatures of world powers. A language does not grow through the assertion of power, but through the creation of a larger human community. Clearly, military or economic might can act as strong inducements to community growth ... [b]ut failures of naked conquest or commercial development to cause linguistic spread have been too frequent to ignore... ... There are more ways, and indeed more effective ways, than violence by which to enlarge a community. A common language is what enables ever more members to participate in it. As Anderson puts it: Much the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities. After all, imperial languages are still vernaculars, and thus particular vernaculars among many. Each community is differentiated with its own particular approach. Each is given its character by traditions of its past, and many or most of them are conveyed by narratives and rituals shared in its own language. Contrary to the assumption of most twentieth-century Western philosophy, a language is never simply language. [Benedict Anderson (1991), Imagined Communities, p.133-4] ... It is a paradox that this book, which has told the stories of languages that have so vastly extended their reach, often at the expense of others, is above all a tale of diversity. ... It is worth asking whether the diversity of consciousness and identity that each language represents can or should survive in the modern world. Past industrial and scientific revolutions argue that there is a single, unified path to valid knowledge and industrial organisation, and boast a display of seemingly magical achievements to prove it. Nevertheless, at least until the mid-nineteenth century it was the interplay of research in half a dozen different languages which kept up the pace of intellectual advance. And even today, a penetrating observer of the role of English in the modern world can remark: in 500 years time... if [English] is by then the only language left... it will have been the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known. [David Crystal (2003), English as a Global Language, p.191] But we should not be too overwhelmed by forcasts of impending unity. Half a dozen spiritual revelations have offered themselves as universal truths in the past 2500 years, and most of them are still in contention. ... ... But despite the myth of the Tower of Babel, and its vulgar interpretation as a cautionary tale, language diversity is not a liability for the human race. Most people in the world are multilingual, and everyone should be; no one is rigorously excluded from anothers language community except through lack of time or effort. Different languages protect and nourish the growth of different cultures, where different pathways of human knowledge can be discovered. They certainly make life richer for those who know more than one of them. [Here he discusses how his book marks out the territory for a field of study and how the work he has done is limited by concentrating only on the languages of empires] ... But ultimately language dynamics must encompass the history of human language in all its diversity. [epigraphic quote in Sanskrit. Translation:] here the lineage born of the Sun, and here my weakly endowed mind: would I in folly corss the impassable ocean in my canoe? ~ Kalidasa, The Line of Raghu, i.2
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 09:09:57 +0000