Synopses & Reviews
The story of the world in the last five thousand years is above all the story of its languages. Some shared language is what binds any community together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it.
Yet the history of the world's great languages has been very little told. Empires of the Word, by the wide-ranging linguist Nicholas Ostler, is the first to bring together the tales in all their glorious variety: the amazing innovations in education, culture, and diplomacy devised by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and the global spread of English.
Besides these epic ahievements, language failures are equally fascinating: Why did German get left behind? Why did Egyptian, which had survived foreign takeovers for three millennia, succumb to Mohammed's Arabic? Why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia, though the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for as long as the British ruled India?
As this book splendidly and authoritatively reveals, the language history of the world shows eloquently the real character of peoples; and, for all the recent tehnical mastery of English, nothing guarantees our language's long-term preeminence. The language future, like the language past, will be full of surprises.
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“[A] wide-ranging history of the worlds languages... [Ostler] brilliantly raises questions and supplies answers or theories.” Washington Post
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“A story of dramatic reversals and puzzling paradoxes. A rich... text with many piercing observations and startling comparisons.” Los Angeles Times Book Review
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“Revolutionary... Executed with a giddying depth of scholarship, yet the detail is never too thick to swamp the general reader.” Boston magazine
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“[A] monumental new book... Ostler furnishes many fresh insights, useful historical anecdotes and charming linguistic oddities.” Chicago Tribune
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“A work of immense erudition.” Christian Science Monitor
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“Covers more rambunctious territory than any other single volume Im aware of...A wonderful ear for the projects poetry.” John Leonard, Harper's Magazine
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“True scholarship. A marvelous book, learned and instructive.” National Review
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“Enlightening . . . Always challenging, always instructive--at times, even startling or revolutionary.” Kirkus Reviews
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“What an extraordinary odyssey the author of this superb work embarked upon.” Literary Review
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“Delicious! Ostlers book shows how certain lucky languages joined humankind in its spread across the world.” John McWhorter
About the Author
Nicholas Ostler's serious interest in languages took him from first-class honors in Classics at Oxford and a docorate in linguistics and Sanskrit at MIT to teaching in Japan and a succession of research projecs from Crete to New Mexico, aimed at introducing languages to computers. He then moved on to the problems of human speakers and made himself an expert on the Chibcha language of ancient South America, which yielded to Spanish in the eighteenth century.
Nicholas Ostler is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (www.ogmios.org), a charity that supports the efforts of small communities worldwide to know and use their languages more. He lives in Bath, England.