Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian. Basic Books. 2008. Pp. 672. ISBN 978-0465024971.
By Nathan Oglesby
Robin Lane Fox begins the preface to The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian with the admission of something self-evident, that presenting nine-hundred years of ancient history in a single volume is a fraught enterprise; and yet in five and half hundred pages he appears to have been manifestly successful. This reviewer had come to the book with at least a haphazard and general account of such history in his head, but had never encountered a volume of such simultaneous scope and concentration, framed at once for the novice and the initiated, and most importantly presented almost throughout as a narrative, rather than “discuss[ing] a topic…across a thousand years in a single chapter” (xv). This concerted “narrative” is told in frank and swift language, and with what appears to be great discernment of emphasis. Laced throughout the narrative framework are temporal flash-forwards to the Roman Emperor Hadrian, with whose reign Fox’s history terminates, on his grand tour of his dominions, so that we might see one of the classical cast members classicizing what is to him already the distant past at every major point in the journey of our own readership. This device complicates the work beneficially, and buoys the dense catalogue of bygone personae and events with an essential impression of the classical world examining itself and its own ‘classicism.’ While it asks, rightfully, to be read as a tale, intercalary chapters are dispersed throughout, which magnify certain personalities, or generalize sociological trends, the only points at which Fox remotely favors the textbook to the chronicle.
The Classical World is divided into two huge stages (Greece, then Rome) of three parts each, which respectively cover ‘The Archaic Greek World’, from Homer’s Greece through the Persian wars, ‘The Classical Greek World’, Athens’ ascendancy through Philip’s advances, ‘Hellenistic Worlds’, Alexander’s conquests and the decline of Greek freedom through the dawn of Rome; then ‘The Roman Republic’, from its early evolution through its effective dissolution by Julius Caesar, ‘From Republic to Empire’, detailing the struggle of Antony and Octavian and the character of the victorious latter’s subsequent political overhauls, and finally ‘An Imperial World’, charting Rome’s frenetic succession of principes from the Julio-Claudians up to the now-familiar congenial globetrotter himself, Hadrian.
The thematic pillars of this ‘epic’ are the buzz-words ‘freedom’, ‘justice’ and ‘luxury’, to which Fox makes constant recourse as alternating lenses through which to examine the long course of political modulations which are presented as themselves a cyclic recurrence of these ideas and their reactions. As Fox has it, the call for political ‘freedom’ was as frequent an object of rhetorical ‘spin’ as it is today, the very conduit for the violent usurpations and repossessions of the power of dispensing ‘justice’ over against the tide of ‘luxury’, the spectrous heritage of that power. In this connection he makes a good deal of reference to Polybius, a Greek historian of Roman activity, in whom he identifies a similarly systematic view of history. “According to Polybius’ theory, such change [toward the adoption of ‘luxury’] would inevitably occur, linked to changes in the citzens’ ‘customs’ and behavior: oligarchy would change to democracy, democracy to degenerate mob-rule and then back to monarchy, the starting point” (329). The appropriateness of these themes is manifest, so much so that the insistent emphasis placed on them becomes somewhat tiresome—there are junctures where the operation of these rallying cries (for ‘freedom’, for ‘justice’; against ‘luxury’) is sufficiently self-evident that the work is a little burdened by Fox’s effort to make them transparent. In addition to this, the narrative is laden by a certain categorical repetition of the phrase ‘in my view’, apparently the author’s means of emphasizing the separation of his inferences from fact—but this distinction is likewise too self-evident to necessitate this phrase surfacing nearly ten times a chapter, and therefore several hundreds of times altogether. But as Fox’s frankness appears to make no pretensions to stylistic achievement, excepting the structural impressiveness of the whole, let these be dismissed as petty detractions. And in despite of them, Fox’s voice is not without humor and charm, assuring us that the dubious art objects left in the ruins of Pompeii, whatever the unknown nature of their decorative role had been, “are simply sexy.” But of course, “Pompeii did not collapse in a final torrent of orgies” (537-40).
Diverse chapter headings, almost all from ancient texts, whether literary or clerical, situate the narrative very effectively, and at times are juxtaposed to great effect. One such chapter, which treats the inception of the Flavian dynasty, pits some verses of Statius which appear on a bronze statue of the emperor Domitian (“This staute…will stand while earth and sky endure…” (520)), against the younger Pliny’s Panegyric which lauds the destruction of one of the same such statues. Here and elsewhere, The Classical World is at its most affecting when Fox lets his wisely selected material speak powerfully for itself.
He is at his most effective as a story-teller in the dizzying political drama of the fourth and fifth parts at the heart of the book, during which Hadrian’s trans-temporal field trip is abandoned awhile for the companionship of Cicero, the precedent reductions of whose character he amends, whilst following the manifold civil strife of late-Republican Rome from his beleaguered perspective. Fox cuts through what he identifies as the inherent ‘spin’ (he seems to find this contemporary term very helpful) of ancient sources on the subject, and presents as intricate a record as is possible to follow of these intrigues and their participants, who appear by turns, in this bright objective light, brutal and beautiful, and unfailingly ingenious.
In its totality, The Classical World manages to offer a sustained vision of nearly an entire millennium, of which most would otherwise pass their lives with only the vaguest impressions. It will well furnish for the interested reader copious contextual material with which to approach ancient sources themselves, as well as pull together the accumulated miscellany and ambiguity of such studies into an integrated narrative whole.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language
Joel M. Hoffman. In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi. and 263. 4 illustration. ISBN 0-8147-3690-4. Softcover. $17.95.
By Sean A. Guynes
For those interested in Near East history, Scriptural studies, or linguistics – specifically of the Hebrew language – In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language stands as an accessible and practical achievement of Hebrew Union College’s Joel M. Hoffman, professor of ancient Hebrew at the Jewish Institute of Religion and translator for Jewish Lights Publishing. In the Beginning details the adventure of the life of Hebrew, its effects on the world’s alphabetical systems, the importance of the language’s successes, and how ancient, or biblical, Hebrew might have actually sounded. Though approaching such a significant work of scholarship appears intimidating, Hoffman’s book is organized in a manner that even those without prior knowledge of Hebrew, linguistics, or Scripture will find it straightforwardly instructive. The comprehensive nature of the book’s organization leaves no questions unanswered and provides appendices for further investigation of more broadly related topics. Brilliant and easy to read, In the Beginning portrays Hebrew as a language instrumental to the creation or widespread literacy and a predecessor to modern alphabets as a result of Hebrew being the first known language to record vowels. Further, an introduction to historical and linguistic theories and to various forms of non- and alphabetic writing is given. From the attempted recreation of ancient Hebrew pronunciation by the Masoretes and the Greeks, to the Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical dialects, and advances of Modern Hebrew by Ben-Yehuda, In the Beginning presents the grand picture of the Hebrew language’s over-3,000-year journey and its world-changing implementations as the language of Scripture and ancestor to the Western and Near Eastern worlds’ modern alphabets.
Anyone who wishes to delve into the wonders and mysteries of the creation of the Hebrew language should find no issues with Hoffman’s work, which is filled with scholarly insights and organized so that one with no experience may learn in the first few chapters all that is needed to understand the latter commentary, while someone with knowledge of historical and linguistic theories and the Hebrew alphabet may simply skip to the next chapters. In the Beginning is divided into four Parts and a fifth section, the Appendices. Part I, “Getting Started” is a brief, ten-page introduction, beginning with the three theories of history: Dumb-Luck Theory, God Theory, and Science Theory – knowing all of which is essentially to study not only history itself, but the way in which others and other culture have interpreted history and thus how history may have been interpretively passed down. The latter pages explore the two linguistic theories – prescriptive and descriptive linguistics – and the way in which Hebrew, and to a lesser extent, Greek and Russian, transliteration works. “Antiquity,” Part II, provides the in-depth introduction to non- and alphabetical writing systems, primarily those pre-Hebraic ones of the Near East, and details the groundbreaking importance of the Hebrews’ invention of vowels, even positing that the Hebrew alphabet might have been the first complete alphabet, following the tradition of Linear A and B and other Canaanite scripts. Hoffman next introduces the Masoretes, a group of Jewish linguists and scribes working out of Tiberias, Babylon, and Israel circa the 7th century C.E. who envisioned the pronunciation of ancient Hebrew who created various vowel systems, the most famous of which, Tiberian, is still employed to some extent today. To display the difficulty and in order to investigate the Masoretes’ accuracy Hoffman examines methods of comparing and concluding the pronunciation of ancient languages – specifically, of course, Tiberian Hebrew – by comparing Modern and Semitic ancestor languages and Greek, largely by way of the Septuagint (LXX) and the Origen Hexapla. Part III, “Moving On” explores the famous Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), how they came to be and how came into scholars’ hands, and how the Hebrew and content of the DSS compares to earlier Toraic texts; also, various biblical dialects – the way in which different dialects effected writing, pronunciation, and grammar of the Torah – to further the exploration of Hebrew on a Scriptural level. Following the DSS, a section on post-biblical Hebrew introduces the effects of Greek and Aramaic on Hebrew, and vice versa, and the nature of Rabbinic Hebrew, which as a seemingly natural linguistic continuation of Biblical Hebrew confirms all that is believed about the dialects, grammar, and, to a lesser extent, the pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew. Finally, “Now”, Part IV, elucidates the courageous reassertion at the hands of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda of Hebrew as a modern, colloquially spoken language for the Jews, which developed along with the Zionist movement and come to fruition with the creation of the Mandate of Palestine in 1917 and, at last, with the establishment of the State of Israel. Those interesting in exploring more about historical and linguistic theories, writing systems, the Masoretes, DSS, and stages of Hebrew development and dialect, may consult the to Appendices, which itself bequeaths a wealth of information to the budding scholar or interested reader.
As a piece of scholarship, Joel Hoffman’s In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language stands out as a crowning achievement of Hebrew language research and Scriptural history. This work champions the great triumph of Hebrew in creating an effective alphabetic writing system, replete with vowels, which promoted widespread literacy among the Hebrews, and which formed the basis for the Arabic, Cyrillic, Farsi, Greek, Roman, and Sanskrit alphabets. A Medieval Studies and Linguistics student with interest in Hebrew, and a Jew, I found Hoffman’s book within my interest, especially in terms of the historical development of Hebrew given in the latter Parts. Further, understanding the effects of Hebrew and its own genesis is a practically necessity for any student of the language or of theology. In the Beginning binds the rarely merged subjects of linguistics, history, and religion in one effective, intelligible, and outstanding piece of literature, a book that I feel will be indulged by the world of academia, students and professors alike, and likewise by anyone with a basic interest in the subjects it covers, for years to come.
Sean A. Guynes studies Medieval History, Hebrew, and Linguistics at Western Washington University.
By Sean A. Guynes
For those interested in Near East history, Scriptural studies, or linguistics – specifically of the Hebrew language – In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language stands as an accessible and practical achievement of Hebrew Union College’s Joel M. Hoffman, professor of ancient Hebrew at the Jewish Institute of Religion and translator for Jewish Lights Publishing. In the Beginning details the adventure of the life of Hebrew, its effects on the world’s alphabetical systems, the importance of the language’s successes, and how ancient, or biblical, Hebrew might have actually sounded. Though approaching such a significant work of scholarship appears intimidating, Hoffman’s book is organized in a manner that even those without prior knowledge of Hebrew, linguistics, or Scripture will find it straightforwardly instructive. The comprehensive nature of the book’s organization leaves no questions unanswered and provides appendices for further investigation of more broadly related topics. Brilliant and easy to read, In the Beginning portrays Hebrew as a language instrumental to the creation or widespread literacy and a predecessor to modern alphabets as a result of Hebrew being the first known language to record vowels. Further, an introduction to historical and linguistic theories and to various forms of non- and alphabetic writing is given. From the attempted recreation of ancient Hebrew pronunciation by the Masoretes and the Greeks, to the Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical dialects, and advances of Modern Hebrew by Ben-Yehuda, In the Beginning presents the grand picture of the Hebrew language’s over-3,000-year journey and its world-changing implementations as the language of Scripture and ancestor to the Western and Near Eastern worlds’ modern alphabets.
Anyone who wishes to delve into the wonders and mysteries of the creation of the Hebrew language should find no issues with Hoffman’s work, which is filled with scholarly insights and organized so that one with no experience may learn in the first few chapters all that is needed to understand the latter commentary, while someone with knowledge of historical and linguistic theories and the Hebrew alphabet may simply skip to the next chapters. In the Beginning is divided into four Parts and a fifth section, the Appendices. Part I, “Getting Started” is a brief, ten-page introduction, beginning with the three theories of history: Dumb-Luck Theory, God Theory, and Science Theory – knowing all of which is essentially to study not only history itself, but the way in which others and other culture have interpreted history and thus how history may have been interpretively passed down. The latter pages explore the two linguistic theories – prescriptive and descriptive linguistics – and the way in which Hebrew, and to a lesser extent, Greek and Russian, transliteration works. “Antiquity,” Part II, provides the in-depth introduction to non- and alphabetical writing systems, primarily those pre-Hebraic ones of the Near East, and details the groundbreaking importance of the Hebrews’ invention of vowels, even positing that the Hebrew alphabet might have been the first complete alphabet, following the tradition of Linear A and B and other Canaanite scripts. Hoffman next introduces the Masoretes, a group of Jewish linguists and scribes working out of Tiberias, Babylon, and Israel circa the 7th century C.E. who envisioned the pronunciation of ancient Hebrew who created various vowel systems, the most famous of which, Tiberian, is still employed to some extent today. To display the difficulty and in order to investigate the Masoretes’ accuracy Hoffman examines methods of comparing and concluding the pronunciation of ancient languages – specifically, of course, Tiberian Hebrew – by comparing Modern and Semitic ancestor languages and Greek, largely by way of the Septuagint (LXX) and the Origen Hexapla. Part III, “Moving On” explores the famous Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), how they came to be and how came into scholars’ hands, and how the Hebrew and content of the DSS compares to earlier Toraic texts; also, various biblical dialects – the way in which different dialects effected writing, pronunciation, and grammar of the Torah – to further the exploration of Hebrew on a Scriptural level. Following the DSS, a section on post-biblical Hebrew introduces the effects of Greek and Aramaic on Hebrew, and vice versa, and the nature of Rabbinic Hebrew, which as a seemingly natural linguistic continuation of Biblical Hebrew confirms all that is believed about the dialects, grammar, and, to a lesser extent, the pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew. Finally, “Now”, Part IV, elucidates the courageous reassertion at the hands of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda of Hebrew as a modern, colloquially spoken language for the Jews, which developed along with the Zionist movement and come to fruition with the creation of the Mandate of Palestine in 1917 and, at last, with the establishment of the State of Israel. Those interesting in exploring more about historical and linguistic theories, writing systems, the Masoretes, DSS, and stages of Hebrew development and dialect, may consult the to Appendices, which itself bequeaths a wealth of information to the budding scholar or interested reader.
As a piece of scholarship, Joel Hoffman’s In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language stands out as a crowning achievement of Hebrew language research and Scriptural history. This work champions the great triumph of Hebrew in creating an effective alphabetic writing system, replete with vowels, which promoted widespread literacy among the Hebrews, and which formed the basis for the Arabic, Cyrillic, Farsi, Greek, Roman, and Sanskrit alphabets. A Medieval Studies and Linguistics student with interest in Hebrew, and a Jew, I found Hoffman’s book within my interest, especially in terms of the historical development of Hebrew given in the latter Parts. Further, understanding the effects of Hebrew and its own genesis is a practically necessity for any student of the language or of theology. In the Beginning binds the rarely merged subjects of linguistics, history, and religion in one effective, intelligible, and outstanding piece of literature, a book that I feel will be indulged by the world of academia, students and professors alike, and likewise by anyone with a basic interest in the subjects it covers, for years to come.
Sean A. Guynes studies Medieval History, Hebrew, and Linguistics at Western Washington University.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Solomon and Marcolf
Ziolkowski, Jan M. Solomon and Marcolf. Harvard University Press: Cambridege, MA and London. 2008. ISBN 978-0-674-02842-5. (Softback)
By Hannah Hahn
The text Salomon et Marcolfus is written in Medieval Latin and has two parts. The first contains a dialogue between King Solomon, of Biblical fame, and a peasant called Marcolfus, who answers Solomon proverb for proverb until the king gives up. The second part is a narrative that is not completely synched with the previous dialogue in terms of personal details, giving rise to the theory that the two parts came down separately and eventually were put together. The narrative covers the first meeting of Solomon and Marcolf in Marcolf’s family cottage, at which time Solomon ‘invites’ Marcolf to court, where the subsequent episodes take place. Their following interactions mostly consist of Marcolf outsmarting Solomon, the so-called wise and just ruler.
Solomon and Marcolf by Jan M. Ziolkowski is an intriguing and comprehensive look at the Medieval Latin text. The Latin text replicated within is taken from another translation by one Benary, who doesn’t appear in the Bibliography. The Latin is presented side by side with the English translation, which appears to be fairly accurate, followed by the author’s commentary. The commentary follows the text line by line and explains translation choices and sources as well as choice entertaining bits of trivia. The commentary is extremely well researched, using sources from at least four different languages. It also provides context, both linguistically and culturally, which helps the reader to understand more of what the text is saying.
As I am a student of Classical Latin, there are some differences in the text that I noticed. For the most part, I could follow the Medieval Latin of the text; however, there were parts that threw me. For example, mihi had changed to michi and nihil to nichil. Sepe replaced saepe and in yma apparently meant ‘to the bottom’.
There were certain passages, especially in Part One, which I found to be particularly entertaining. For example, 1.26 reads “Solomon: ‘Between good and wicked people the house is filled.’ Marcolf: ‘Between ass-wipes and shit the privy is filled’” The philosophical takes on this response are staggering. If taken in order, good people are ass-wipes and wicked people are shit. The privy refers to the house, which refers to the world. This seems to indicate a pessimistic view of the world that agrees with other places in the text where Marcolf lends his point of view.
Line 1.101a, “He who answers before he hears will be proven a fool” reminds me of all those game show contestants who hit the buzzer before the host finishes the question and end up completely screwing up their answers.
Included in the commentary are references to several texts which sound intriguing. One of them, the anonymous text De Coniuge Non Ducenda, edited by A.G. Rigg (1986), provides a couplet:
A drip, the smoke, a wife – these three
Compel a man his house to flee.
Another, ‘Curious Word Origins: Sayings and Expressions from White Elephants to a Song and Dance’ by Charles Earle Funk (1993), is one that I’ll have to find because I am a word geek. Finally, the author references his own book, ‘Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies’ (2007) which also sounds right up my alley.
Over all, this book was long and repetitive, but provided some interesting reading. It offers in addition bonus features in the appendices, including a translation from Welsh, an alternate beginning and several alternate endings.
Hannah Hahn is working on a double major in Classics and Linguistics at Western Washington University.
By Hannah Hahn
The text Salomon et Marcolfus is written in Medieval Latin and has two parts. The first contains a dialogue between King Solomon, of Biblical fame, and a peasant called Marcolfus, who answers Solomon proverb for proverb until the king gives up. The second part is a narrative that is not completely synched with the previous dialogue in terms of personal details, giving rise to the theory that the two parts came down separately and eventually were put together. The narrative covers the first meeting of Solomon and Marcolf in Marcolf’s family cottage, at which time Solomon ‘invites’ Marcolf to court, where the subsequent episodes take place. Their following interactions mostly consist of Marcolf outsmarting Solomon, the so-called wise and just ruler.
Solomon and Marcolf by Jan M. Ziolkowski is an intriguing and comprehensive look at the Medieval Latin text. The Latin text replicated within is taken from another translation by one Benary, who doesn’t appear in the Bibliography. The Latin is presented side by side with the English translation, which appears to be fairly accurate, followed by the author’s commentary. The commentary follows the text line by line and explains translation choices and sources as well as choice entertaining bits of trivia. The commentary is extremely well researched, using sources from at least four different languages. It also provides context, both linguistically and culturally, which helps the reader to understand more of what the text is saying.
As I am a student of Classical Latin, there are some differences in the text that I noticed. For the most part, I could follow the Medieval Latin of the text; however, there were parts that threw me. For example, mihi had changed to michi and nihil to nichil. Sepe replaced saepe and in yma apparently meant ‘to the bottom’.
There were certain passages, especially in Part One, which I found to be particularly entertaining. For example, 1.26 reads “Solomon: ‘Between good and wicked people the house is filled.’ Marcolf: ‘Between ass-wipes and shit the privy is filled’” The philosophical takes on this response are staggering. If taken in order, good people are ass-wipes and wicked people are shit. The privy refers to the house, which refers to the world. This seems to indicate a pessimistic view of the world that agrees with other places in the text where Marcolf lends his point of view.
Line 1.101a, “He who answers before he hears will be proven a fool” reminds me of all those game show contestants who hit the buzzer before the host finishes the question and end up completely screwing up their answers.
Included in the commentary are references to several texts which sound intriguing. One of them, the anonymous text De Coniuge Non Ducenda, edited by A.G. Rigg (1986), provides a couplet:
A drip, the smoke, a wife – these three
Compel a man his house to flee.
Another, ‘Curious Word Origins: Sayings and Expressions from White Elephants to a Song and Dance’ by Charles Earle Funk (1993), is one that I’ll have to find because I am a word geek. Finally, the author references his own book, ‘Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies’ (2007) which also sounds right up my alley.
Over all, this book was long and repetitive, but provided some interesting reading. It offers in addition bonus features in the appendices, including a translation from Welsh, an alternate beginning and several alternate endings.
Hannah Hahn is working on a double major in Classics and Linguistics at Western Washington University.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Nathan Oglesby on Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word
Nicholas Ostler. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. HarperCollins, 2005. ISBN-10: 0066210860. Pp. 640.
Perhaps there is no more effective and agreeable way to inculcate a vast and varied subject, one whose import is universal but whose informational minutiae are necessary to a conception of the whole, than to conceive of it in the most vivid possible terms. It is apparently in this spirit that Nicholas Ostler presents an overwhelming history of major world languages from the beginning of recorded history to the present, in a book that straddles the roles of linguistic first-string roll-call and epic treatment of an ongoing drama whose personae are the languages with the most star-power across history. That is to say, one with some humble degree of familiarity with linguistic science, or with a great degree of interest, may read Empires of the Word as an encyclopedic narrative with a great deal of personality; one less preoccupied with scientific specificity may instead occupy themselves with an overarching vision of the rise and fall of the empires of history through the lens of these’ empires’ spectrous concomitants, their dubiously immortal household gods, their languages. What distinguishes this work from the average heady gamut of historical linguistics is its balance of immense quantities of historical information presented systematically, and veritable storytelling—for among the reader’s principal impressions is the surprise that so great a concentration of dates, places and Romanized foreign phonetics could be presented as a coherent and memorable story, or that the history of world languages could make such a good story without reducing or generalizing that actual history.
Ostler conceives of language histories possessing both an outward aspect, in the form of variously recorded “careers…as diverse as the worlds that each language has created for its speakers” (11), and an inward, a language community being “not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language…[but] an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition” (13). Thus Ostler complicates the familiar conception of a language’s being a reflection of its speaking community’s imperial activity, its success, its spread and longevity, being proportional results of that activity—for Ostler, language history is not only a matter of who invaded whom forcing them directly or indirectly to henceforth speak, read and write what, but as much a simultaneous inquiry into the personality of a language, as that has an equal hand in constituting its “propensity to attract new users” (19).
The saga opens on the generations of Semitic languages, focusing centrally on the successions of Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic, the fraternal chronology of linguae francae spanning Middle Eastern history—these being by turns “the only stability this society has enjoyed[:] the substance of its ruling language” (35). Akkadian rose to prominence by virtue of the exigency of its written form, Aramaic followed it on the tongues of nomads; both are the close relatives of contemporary Arabic, which spread by conquest and perpetuated itself by virtue of religious authority. The ascendancies of these “desert blooms” are characterized by differing means of spread, but their end identity is an infusion of all three, the present flower among which is contemporary Arabic. We are told also of certain familiars in their midst—as here, among other places, Ostler presents the story of the sister languages Phoenician and Hebrew in terms of a parable of two literal sisters, “Elissa” the pretty socialite doomed to unforeseen anonymity, and “Judith” the “obscure and perhaps disreputable youth” with an unlooked-for destiny of venerability and prestige. “The world,” says Ostler, “reversed the fortunes of these two sisters” (69). Here and elsewhere the immense catalogue of linguistic succession is embossed with a memorably dramatic image, as against expectation Empires continuously offers itself to be read as a story.
Act Two opens on the Far East, where Chinese begins its spectacular career of 4000 years (and counting). This language distinguishes itself remarkably from other world languages by remaining virtually steadfast over four millennia. This feat is attributed to its pictographic writing system, which has been able to embrace and stabilize a multiplicity of dialects over a vast geography, and as much to the centralizing tendency of Chinese culture, gathering and refining the language against disunity over time.
Meanwhile Sanskrit has spread from Northern India on the shoulders of Hinduism, then through South-East Asia and into the Far East as the conduit of Buddhism, providing an example of another of the distinctions Ostler makes about linguistic personality: the double-barrel of “language prestige” and “language charm.” He offers us “the persistent image of Sanskrit as a creeping plant, luxuriant and full blossomed” (174). Sanskrit, it is explained, has preserved itself by knowing itself.—The rigor of its religious tradition, endowing it with a grammatical and artistic self-consciousness, established and lastingly secured its identity as a “medium of learned communication and sacred expression” within and without the continent, even after the decline of its popular use.
At the center of the story, though, are the kindred courses of Greek and Latin, who in their turn “so united the known (Western) world, especially its educated members, over all those centuries” (234). Both, stubborn in their precedence, survived the civilizations that gave them life—Greek entwining itself round the broad occupation of Roman imperium in spite of Greece's curtailed political independence, Latin dying into the prodigious birth of its modern Romance progeny. While Greek persists as a living language albeit in isolation, the death rattle of Latin is its enduring resonance in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French and English. “O death,” Ostler intones on its behalf, “where is thy sting?”
The travels (quite literally) of these offspring culminate in the overseas expansion of European nations and their languages beginning in the early 16th century. Portuguese leads off, spreading language with empire in the dubious charity of “civilizing” new worlds—ironically, and somewhat inexplicably, it takes no significant lasting root as a global language, being replaced by succeeding colonial activity.
From among its kindred successors enters the final character, whose adventure conducts us from its youth in the 5th century AD to the present day, English. This last act is divided into two subsections: English’s “formation, from the fifth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, during which the language took shape, growing up in the island of Britain, and one of propagation, from the seventeenth century to the present, in which it took ship, spreading to every continent of the world” (457). After being told the story (“often,” he says, “retold to its own speakers”) of the formation of English, we are reacquainted with the present situation, wherein English flourishes in its familiar ubiquity. It is a new kind of prestige, whose attraction for non-native speakers is no mere posture of erudition or exercise of class, but a symbolic opportunity for inclusion in a world of business, technology, and the swiftly globalizing medium of popular culture. And here Ostler, not knowing the end of its story any better than we do, speculates about the fate of this lingua franca—not so much to offer us his own forecast, but to chasten the extreme perspectives of those who respectively hope and fear English’s total absorption of the speaking world. “[W]e should not be too overwhelmed by forecasts of impending unity…the languages whose histories this book has reviewed have been spreading in increasing circles for twice that period of time” (558). It would indeed be problematic to prophecy the indefinite dominance of a major world language directly after having narrated the sometime ascensions and subsequent dissolutions of its principal predecessors. Rather, here in the closing section “Vaster than empires”, he puts even our audacious “in” language safely back in its place, emphasizing the “paradox [of] 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.”
The marvelous thing about this document of diversity is, again, its capacity for being grasped as a vastly proportioned narrative, in which all speaking people across history play a part, represented by the collective metonymy of their myriad tongues, which seize the stage one-by-one in Empires. But in being so compelling, its tone is consistently frank and scientific; and in holding forth its treasure house of detailed data, it is yet simple, direct, conceivable and memorable. One ought to read this book, then, if one wishes to possess a picture of the lives of the world languages unhindered by the selective lens of one’s own language experience; or as much, if one is emerging from or amidst a formal education, perhaps in some language or some area touching linguistics, and yet finds oneself without a divining rod by which to order and seal the disconnected objects of this education into a coherent picture of linguistic history.—For the latter boon is what I have gotten from it: a fair and vibrant timeline of the history of language, where previously I had but vague pictures of particular languages’ triumphs and defeats in episodic isolation. But now, “[i]f this book has shown one thing, it is that 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” (556). Ostler’s distinction, and the distinction of his book, is that any single model for understanding a language’s history falls short of representing the whole—the only means to a total vision of the life of a language is to see it as having or having had a life as complex as the lives of those who generate it and have given it permanence.
Perhaps there is no more effective and agreeable way to inculcate a vast and varied subject, one whose import is universal but whose informational minutiae are necessary to a conception of the whole, than to conceive of it in the most vivid possible terms. It is apparently in this spirit that Nicholas Ostler presents an overwhelming history of major world languages from the beginning of recorded history to the present, in a book that straddles the roles of linguistic first-string roll-call and epic treatment of an ongoing drama whose personae are the languages with the most star-power across history. That is to say, one with some humble degree of familiarity with linguistic science, or with a great degree of interest, may read Empires of the Word as an encyclopedic narrative with a great deal of personality; one less preoccupied with scientific specificity may instead occupy themselves with an overarching vision of the rise and fall of the empires of history through the lens of these’ empires’ spectrous concomitants, their dubiously immortal household gods, their languages. What distinguishes this work from the average heady gamut of historical linguistics is its balance of immense quantities of historical information presented systematically, and veritable storytelling—for among the reader’s principal impressions is the surprise that so great a concentration of dates, places and Romanized foreign phonetics could be presented as a coherent and memorable story, or that the history of world languages could make such a good story without reducing or generalizing that actual history.
Ostler conceives of language histories possessing both an outward aspect, in the form of variously recorded “careers…as diverse as the worlds that each language has created for its speakers” (11), and an inward, a language community being “not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language…[but] an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition” (13). Thus Ostler complicates the familiar conception of a language’s being a reflection of its speaking community’s imperial activity, its success, its spread and longevity, being proportional results of that activity—for Ostler, language history is not only a matter of who invaded whom forcing them directly or indirectly to henceforth speak, read and write what, but as much a simultaneous inquiry into the personality of a language, as that has an equal hand in constituting its “propensity to attract new users” (19).
The saga opens on the generations of Semitic languages, focusing centrally on the successions of Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic, the fraternal chronology of linguae francae spanning Middle Eastern history—these being by turns “the only stability this society has enjoyed[:] the substance of its ruling language” (35). Akkadian rose to prominence by virtue of the exigency of its written form, Aramaic followed it on the tongues of nomads; both are the close relatives of contemporary Arabic, which spread by conquest and perpetuated itself by virtue of religious authority. The ascendancies of these “desert blooms” are characterized by differing means of spread, but their end identity is an infusion of all three, the present flower among which is contemporary Arabic. We are told also of certain familiars in their midst—as here, among other places, Ostler presents the story of the sister languages Phoenician and Hebrew in terms of a parable of two literal sisters, “Elissa” the pretty socialite doomed to unforeseen anonymity, and “Judith” the “obscure and perhaps disreputable youth” with an unlooked-for destiny of venerability and prestige. “The world,” says Ostler, “reversed the fortunes of these two sisters” (69). Here and elsewhere the immense catalogue of linguistic succession is embossed with a memorably dramatic image, as against expectation Empires continuously offers itself to be read as a story.
Act Two opens on the Far East, where Chinese begins its spectacular career of 4000 years (and counting). This language distinguishes itself remarkably from other world languages by remaining virtually steadfast over four millennia. This feat is attributed to its pictographic writing system, which has been able to embrace and stabilize a multiplicity of dialects over a vast geography, and as much to the centralizing tendency of Chinese culture, gathering and refining the language against disunity over time.
Meanwhile Sanskrit has spread from Northern India on the shoulders of Hinduism, then through South-East Asia and into the Far East as the conduit of Buddhism, providing an example of another of the distinctions Ostler makes about linguistic personality: the double-barrel of “language prestige” and “language charm.” He offers us “the persistent image of Sanskrit as a creeping plant, luxuriant and full blossomed” (174). Sanskrit, it is explained, has preserved itself by knowing itself.—The rigor of its religious tradition, endowing it with a grammatical and artistic self-consciousness, established and lastingly secured its identity as a “medium of learned communication and sacred expression” within and without the continent, even after the decline of its popular use.
At the center of the story, though, are the kindred courses of Greek and Latin, who in their turn “so united the known (Western) world, especially its educated members, over all those centuries” (234). Both, stubborn in their precedence, survived the civilizations that gave them life—Greek entwining itself round the broad occupation of Roman imperium in spite of Greece's curtailed political independence, Latin dying into the prodigious birth of its modern Romance progeny. While Greek persists as a living language albeit in isolation, the death rattle of Latin is its enduring resonance in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French and English. “O death,” Ostler intones on its behalf, “where is thy sting?”
The travels (quite literally) of these offspring culminate in the overseas expansion of European nations and their languages beginning in the early 16th century. Portuguese leads off, spreading language with empire in the dubious charity of “civilizing” new worlds—ironically, and somewhat inexplicably, it takes no significant lasting root as a global language, being replaced by succeeding colonial activity.
From among its kindred successors enters the final character, whose adventure conducts us from its youth in the 5th century AD to the present day, English. This last act is divided into two subsections: English’s “formation, from the fifth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, during which the language took shape, growing up in the island of Britain, and one of propagation, from the seventeenth century to the present, in which it took ship, spreading to every continent of the world” (457). After being told the story (“often,” he says, “retold to its own speakers”) of the formation of English, we are reacquainted with the present situation, wherein English flourishes in its familiar ubiquity. It is a new kind of prestige, whose attraction for non-native speakers is no mere posture of erudition or exercise of class, but a symbolic opportunity for inclusion in a world of business, technology, and the swiftly globalizing medium of popular culture. And here Ostler, not knowing the end of its story any better than we do, speculates about the fate of this lingua franca—not so much to offer us his own forecast, but to chasten the extreme perspectives of those who respectively hope and fear English’s total absorption of the speaking world. “[W]e should not be too overwhelmed by forecasts of impending unity…the languages whose histories this book has reviewed have been spreading in increasing circles for twice that period of time” (558). It would indeed be problematic to prophecy the indefinite dominance of a major world language directly after having narrated the sometime ascensions and subsequent dissolutions of its principal predecessors. Rather, here in the closing section “Vaster than empires”, he puts even our audacious “in” language safely back in its place, emphasizing the “paradox [of] 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.”
The marvelous thing about this document of diversity is, again, its capacity for being grasped as a vastly proportioned narrative, in which all speaking people across history play a part, represented by the collective metonymy of their myriad tongues, which seize the stage one-by-one in Empires. But in being so compelling, its tone is consistently frank and scientific; and in holding forth its treasure house of detailed data, it is yet simple, direct, conceivable and memorable. One ought to read this book, then, if one wishes to possess a picture of the lives of the world languages unhindered by the selective lens of one’s own language experience; or as much, if one is emerging from or amidst a formal education, perhaps in some language or some area touching linguistics, and yet finds oneself without a divining rod by which to order and seal the disconnected objects of this education into a coherent picture of linguistic history.—For the latter boon is what I have gotten from it: a fair and vibrant timeline of the history of language, where previously I had but vague pictures of particular languages’ triumphs and defeats in episodic isolation. But now, “[i]f this book has shown one thing, it is that 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” (556). Ostler’s distinction, and the distinction of his book, is that any single model for understanding a language’s history falls short of representing the whole—the only means to a total vision of the life of a language is to see it as having or having had a life as complex as the lives of those who generate it and have given it permanence.
Guidelines for submitting book reviews
Guidelines for Humanistica et Classica Book Reviews
Thanks for your interest in writing a book review for Humanistica et Classica Book Reviews. This site is devoted to book reviews on subjects of interest to humanists and classicists. Our reviews are intended for both the general and the scholarly reader. Our review authors are all undergraduates interested in Classical languages and Classical studies.
Those interested in reviewing a book should contact the head blogger, Diane Johnson, at diane.johnson@wwu.edu. State the title and author of the book you are interested in reviewing, and explain why you feel this book deserves attention on our site. If Diane agrees with you, you will be sent a copy of the book (yours to keep); when your review is submitted, you will be presented with a home-baked pie or cake (specify your preference), and your review will be vetted by the Classics Section of the Modern and Classical Languages Department at Western Washington University. Then the review will be put on the Humanistica site. We welcome participation by students at other institutions: please be aware however that it may be impossible to mail you a pie or a cake, and so cookies or fudge may have to be substituted.
Here are some points that you will want to keep in mind:
1. Your review should take into consideration each of the following:
a. What is the book about? Give a synopsis of the author's argument Is there an index? an appendix? illustrations?
b. Does it seem to you that the author has argued convincingly?
Why or why not?
c. Who would benefit from this book, and why?
d. Are there other studies on this topic with which you are familiar?
2. Please double-space your text.
3. Your review doesn't need a title. Instead, begin by stating the title of the book under review, using this format:
The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch. By Raffaella Cribiore. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-691-12824-5. Pp 360. $69.95 (hardcover).
4. At the end of your review, skip a line and then provide your name and email address (if you are willing to be contacted by email; if you would prefer to have all discussion of the review limited to the blogsite, do not include your email address).
5. Please submit your review to Diane by email attachment.
6. It is absolutely essential that your words be your own; please be sure that when you are quoting other people's work you acknowledge them in your review. Document your quotations of the reviewed text by providing a page number in parentheses; other quoted material should be cited fully in parentheses.
Thanks for your interest in writing a book review for Humanistica et Classica Book Reviews. This site is devoted to book reviews on subjects of interest to humanists and classicists. Our reviews are intended for both the general and the scholarly reader. Our review authors are all undergraduates interested in Classical languages and Classical studies.
Those interested in reviewing a book should contact the head blogger, Diane Johnson, at diane.johnson@wwu.edu. State the title and author of the book you are interested in reviewing, and explain why you feel this book deserves attention on our site. If Diane agrees with you, you will be sent a copy of the book (yours to keep); when your review is submitted, you will be presented with a home-baked pie or cake (specify your preference), and your review will be vetted by the Classics Section of the Modern and Classical Languages Department at Western Washington University. Then the review will be put on the Humanistica site. We welcome participation by students at other institutions: please be aware however that it may be impossible to mail you a pie or a cake, and so cookies or fudge may have to be substituted.
Here are some points that you will want to keep in mind:
1. Your review should take into consideration each of the following:
a. What is the book about? Give a synopsis of the author's argument Is there an index? an appendix? illustrations?
b. Does it seem to you that the author has argued convincingly?
Why or why not?
c. Who would benefit from this book, and why?
d. Are there other studies on this topic with which you are familiar?
2. Please double-space your text.
3. Your review doesn't need a title. Instead, begin by stating the title of the book under review, using this format:
The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch. By Raffaella Cribiore. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-691-12824-5. Pp 360. $69.95 (hardcover).
4. At the end of your review, skip a line and then provide your name and email address (if you are willing to be contacted by email; if you would prefer to have all discussion of the review limited to the blogsite, do not include your email address).
5. Please submit your review to Diane by email attachment.
6. It is absolutely essential that your words be your own; please be sure that when you are quoting other people's work you acknowledge them in your review. Document your quotations of the reviewed text by providing a page number in parentheses; other quoted material should be cited fully in parentheses.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)