Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, Nicholas Oster

The dis-oriented author author is a sucker for language books. I had recently read Goodbye Descartes by Keith Devlin about linguistics, artificial intelligence and language understanding and I saw a review of Empires of the Word on National Review Online. I knew that I had to read this book.

In this book, Oster details the careers of several major world languages. I was especially interested in the authors discussion of how in Egypt, over a short century, Arabic replaced 3,000years of the Egyptian language. Until I  had never really considered issues like the linguistic side effects of the Norman Conquest.

This book took me much longer to read than I expected. I found that my knowledge of linguistics and people groups was not quite up to the task.

Even though this book was difficult to read — I could hardly put it down.

Before I read Empires of the Word I thought I knew how languages spread. It seemed like a no-brainer, Conquered peoples speak the language of their conquerors. Whether the conquest be religious, economic or military — conquest just the same.

I was wrong.  As Oster points out conquerors do not always spread their languages. For example, as a student of the Bible, I should probably have known something about the linguistic state of Rome at the height of her power. In fact, with networks of  roads, aqueducts, provincial governments and her legendary legions, Rome did manage to spread a single lingua franca across the known world. The problem is that the language wasn't Latin — it was Greek. Defying the common wisdom, the language of empire was Greek. In cities like Jerusalem, speakers of many native languages communicated in Greek. The writers of the New Testament, all Jews who spoke Hebrew, chose to write the majority of the text in Greek rather than their native language.

The only problem with Oster's book is that for lay readers it could have been told at a simpler level. For me the book would have lost very little had it skipped some of the details.

Empires of the Word gets 4 of 5 dis-oriented smileys

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