Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler

This book rules. I love trying to imagine the most random and obscure moments of history, like what it would be like to eat breakfast in astrakhan during the reign of the golden horde, or falling in love in Afrikaans sometime shortly before the Beor war, the pre-historic janitor who cleaned post-sacrificial aztec thrones, or (leafing through the book as I write trying to outdo my own ability at historical obscurity) to have been an assistant hittite librarian in Ugarit, pick my nose while sitting on a dock listening to hindu traders talking in Pali in suddhammavati, or become a kristang speaking grandparent in ceylon, resentful of my pagan, tamil speaking grandchildren.

Obviously this book beats me, whole empires I never heard of, missionaries, trading outposts, strange historical circumstances, are traced through this language history of the world. I really like how he points out the almost universal phenomenon of linguistic solipsism. So many language communities, I guess as almost a precondition of their immagined community, saw themselves as the eternal standard of thought because of their language. He shows direct quotes from chinese, french, sanskrit, Arabic, and English sources that all show how much they considered themselves masters of the known universe. He tries in the end to sum up his research by calling it "diachronic sociolinguistics" which is a little gay. I mean, maybe he is leaving the empiricism out for the layman, but this book did not seem like a bold leap into a new branch of sociology, just a cool expose of linguistic history.

My favorite passage is how he links a certain historical legacy of linguistic snobbiness. It made me feel like I have aspiring haughty brethren strung out across the constellation of human history.

"all prestige languages give access to a special enjoyment, because they all have extensive literatures, and the first purpose of literature is to give enjoyment to the people who can appreciate it. Usually, knowing that not many others can share the appreciation has been part of the pleasure. This has been a charm of classical languages down the ages, from the Akkadian epics recited in the Hittite tablet-house of the thirteenth century bc to the Persian poetry quoted in seventeeth-century India and the French novels read in nineteenth-century Russia. "