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muckefuckA day after cracking the cover of Ostler and he's already succeeded in annoying me. In one of his introductory chapters, he tells us, "Bizarrely, linguists almost universally assume that the basic properties of languages which they study...are irrelevant to the language's prospects of survival." He trumpets as one of the "innovations of this book" that he dissents from this orthodoxy.
So what's his counterargument? He directs the reader to the section of Chapter 14 titled "What makes a language learnable". His first grand example is the spread of Arabic, which "settled permanently only in areas that had previously spoken an Afro-Asiatic language", e.g. the Aramaic-speaking Middle East, but not Iran or Anatolia; Berber- and Egyptian-speaking North Africa, but not Romance-speaking al-Andalus, etc.
Anyone see any problems with this? Let's start in the Maghreb. You know, the part of the world with around 25 million Berber-speakers, including one-third the population of Morocco? If linguistic affiliations are so important, why are there any of them left at all? As for Spain, who knows what the prospects of Arabic would've been there if not for that little bout of mediaeval ethnic cleansing known as the Reconquista? And what about Malta? From what I can tell, this island was thoroughly Latinised before the Arabic conquest, yet the Arabic implanted there has survived nearly a millennium of Frankish rule.
But there's a much bigger fly in the ointment, and its name is Persia. On page 554, it's proof of his thesis: Thirteen-and-a-half centuries of Islamic rule have not made Afro-Asiatic-speakers out of Aryans. But on page 555, where he contrasts the successful implantation of Greek in (Phrygian-speaking) Asia Minor to its failure to catch on in Asia Major, we find this frank admission:
That's my problem with his thesis: It doesn't seem to account for anything for which an equally good or better explanation cannot be found. Worse, it seems to have no predictive power at all. So, for instance, he concludes his paragraph on the spread of Arabic by bringing in the Turks, who "did not pick up Arabic, although they did accept, and even spread into Europe, the religion of Islam. The Turks' language is even less similar structurally to Arabic than Indo-European is." Ostler seems to have missed that, according to the transitive property, this also makes Turkic less similar structurally to Indo-European than Arabic is yet it was implanted in Indo-European-speaking areas with resounding success. Whatever the number of nomadic Seljuqs who came to Asia Minor in the eleventh century, they were vastly outnumbered by urbanised Greeks. Yet by 1914, Greeks and Armenians combined were less than twenty percent of the population.
Perhaps I'm being unfair to Ostler. After all, I've only tasted excerpts, not read his carefully constructed arguments from cover to cover. Maybe I'll revisit this entry several weeks from now my opinion entirely changed. But don't count on it.
So what's his counterargument? He directs the reader to the section of Chapter 14 titled "What makes a language learnable". His first grand example is the spread of Arabic, which "settled permanently only in areas that had previously spoken an Afro-Asiatic language", e.g. the Aramaic-speaking Middle East, but not Iran or Anatolia; Berber- and Egyptian-speaking North Africa, but not Romance-speaking al-Andalus, etc.
Anyone see any problems with this? Let's start in the Maghreb. You know, the part of the world with around 25 million Berber-speakers, including one-third the population of Morocco? If linguistic affiliations are so important, why are there any of them left at all? As for Spain, who knows what the prospects of Arabic would've been there if not for that little bout of mediaeval ethnic cleansing known as the Reconquista? And what about Malta? From what I can tell, this island was thoroughly Latinised before the Arabic conquest, yet the Arabic implanted there has survived nearly a millennium of Frankish rule.
But there's a much bigger fly in the ointment, and its name is Persia. On page 554, it's proof of his thesis: Thirteen-and-a-half centuries of Islamic rule have not made Afro-Asiatic-speakers out of Aryans. But on page 555, where he contrasts the successful implantation of Greek in (Phrygian-speaking) Asia Minor to its failure to catch on in Asia Major, we find this frank admission:
It is most surprising structurally that Greek did not take root in Persia, since Persian is a fairly similar Indo-European language (and was famously learnt in a year by the aging Greek Themistocles...); but perhaps there are non-linguistic reasons why an alien language should be particularly resented and resisted in the heartland of what had been an independent and mighty empire for over two centuries.Ya think? Doesn't this also make a more compelling explanation for the Persians failure to adopt Arabic than simply a distaste for nonconcatenative morphology? Greek's failure to implant is only "surprising" if you start from a dubious assumption of its prospects.
That's my problem with his thesis: It doesn't seem to account for anything for which an equally good or better explanation cannot be found. Worse, it seems to have no predictive power at all. So, for instance, he concludes his paragraph on the spread of Arabic by bringing in the Turks, who "did not pick up Arabic, although they did accept, and even spread into Europe, the religion of Islam. The Turks' language is even less similar structurally to Arabic than Indo-European is." Ostler seems to have missed that, according to the transitive property, this also makes Turkic less similar structurally to Indo-European than Arabic is yet it was implanted in Indo-European-speaking areas with resounding success. Whatever the number of nomadic Seljuqs who came to Asia Minor in the eleventh century, they were vastly outnumbered by urbanised Greeks. Yet by 1914, Greeks and Armenians combined were less than twenty percent of the population.
Perhaps I'm being unfair to Ostler. After all, I've only tasted excerpts, not read his carefully constructed arguments from cover to cover. Maybe I'll revisit this entry several weeks from now my opinion entirely changed. But don't count on it.
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Just curious (I don't know much about non-European languages) - is he using Arabic as an example of a language that has learnability working in its evolutionary favor?
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So the only varieties we have any positive evidence for at the time of Islamic Conquest are Basque and Iberian Latin (which at this time hadn't yet differentiated into Galician, Leonese, Asturian, Navarrese, et al.). There's no evidence for anything remotely connected to Afro-Asiatic (the parent family of Arabic and other Semitic languages).
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Must get a book. Got a few to recommend?
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I'm not aware of a lot of work on the topic of Arab/north African cultural or linguistic influence on the "heartlands" of Europe - most writers prefer to talk about the "cultural encounter between Islam and the West," and once you start to say "but Islam's already in the West and vice versa" you lose a lot of your post 9/11 sales.
Probably Martin Bernal's Black Athena would be of interest: it's about Afro-Asiatic* influence on classical Greece. It predictably caused a massive storm among classicists, but I think many of them object more to how Bernal has subsequently been taught than they object to Bernal himself.
There's a number of works on north-south trade around the Mediterranean, but they don't usually get much into how far mutual cultural influence extended. I can save you some time by saying that although wonderful in itself, Braudel's Mediterranean sadly rather neglects the southern half, and Horden and Purcell's The Corrupting Sea is more of an agro-economic analysis than a cultural history.
Marshall Hodgson's The Venture of Islam (1) is one of the classic studies of the first rise and spread of the Arab Empire, but it's big and ponderous. You might be interested in Carole Hillenbrand's more concise work or her stuff on the crusades, which is what she's really famous for, or for an up close and personal look, Olivia Constable's Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain. I haven't read the latter few titles myself, but they're regulars on syllabi.
* apologies to muckefuck: I must really have been sleepy when I wrote that comment about the term.
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(And if you're not sure if you're one of the Lords, then you're not one of the Lords. Of course, your input is appreciated all the same.)
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Incidentally, do you know about Graham Robb's The Discovery of France? I haven't read it yet, but it's gotten very strong reviews from people I trust.
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The Discovery of France sounds very interesting. Presumably the France we know of today- one of rigid codification- is partly the result.
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The Turkish/Arabic/Persian triad seems like it presents particular challenges - my own instinct (never trustworthy, I admit) would be to look for the relative status of the speakers of various languages and see if there are any correlations to be found there. In this case the three languages were associated with specific aspects of elite society - the military, religious and administrative groups, respectively, in Baghdad both before and after the Seljuk invasion; a man of ambition in the Islamic heartland 1100 would have wanted to be fluent in all three. Perhaps Persian never disappeared because it was always spoken by the government.
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And of course, princeofcairo wrote what I was hinting at, more elegantly than I could manage. There is some interesting work on the slow, gradual spread of Islam through the lands conquered by the Arabs (can seek linkage on demand) that suggests (a) the Arabs weren't all that keen on proselytizing and sharing the wealth in the first 5 centuries, and (b) that they were largely content to act as foreign colonialist/imperialists in Persia, leaving the administration of the empire to Persian-speaking experts.
I'm always puzzled by claims that Firdawsi or Chaucer "rescued their languages from obscurity," because they must have had audiences for their writing before they started.
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Since Ostler isn't actually trained as a historian, that may not be the sort of book he intended to write, but it is what he actually wrote.
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