The Linguistic History of Asia, Part I: Voices from the Past
The first languages to surface from murky prehistory emerged from the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers sometime in the 5th Millennium B.C. Scribes in the city-states of Sumer in what is today central Iraq made the first records in cuneiform, a writing system made by pressing reed wedges into clay.
Sumerian seems to have been a language isolate, which grew, flourished, and died in the distant past. But other languages of the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of human civilisation, belonged to the Afro-Asiatic (historically: Hamito-Semitic) language family, which includes such modern progeny as Arabic and Hebrew. Among these were Akkadian, which superseded Sumerian; Aramaic, which was the lingua franca of the Middle East into the early Middle Ages and was the daily language of Jesus and his disciples; and the Ancient Egyptian language, whose daughter language Coptic survives as the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians.
Akkadian was written in cuneiform, while the Egyptians developed their own hieroglyphic script that developed from basically drawings of things to an abstract, sophisticated script. Meanwhile, a revolution was sweeping the Phoenician city-states of the maritime Levant. The Phoenicians developed the world’s first alphabet, with perfectly abstract characters standing for sounds combined to convey words. It was adapted their Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking neighbors, as well as their Greek trading partners. The Greeks adapted their own letters and, importantly, flipped the orientation to read left to right, unlike Eastern alphabets like Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew. Greek colonists in turn introduced the alphabet to Italy, where the Romans developed the letters you are reading now. The Phoenician alphabet ultimately spawned the scripts of Asian languages as far afield as Persia, India, and Southeast Asia.
Phoenician is another Afro-Asiatic language, but a new player was about to arrive in the region. In the 3rd Millennium B.C., Aryan nomads from the Caucasus mountains conquered a vast swath of Eurasia from Western Europe to North India. Their descendants on the Iranian Plateau, who have always called themselves Iranians (Aryans), founded the mightiest empire in the ancient world. The Persian Empire tended to respect the traditions of their subjects, and governed mainly in Aramaic in their non-Iranian territories. Outside Iran proper the Persian language did not much trickle down from the elite, but it had phenomenal staying power, remaining the prestige court language of a vast swath of Asia into the 20th Century.
To the east, the Indo-European language family put down deeper roots. The Aryans conquered the fertile plains of North India, subjugating the natives of the subcontinent, whom they relegated to the bottom rungs of the nascent Indian caste system. Native Dravidians held strong in the south; Hindi and its cousins (Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, etc.) are more closely related to English than to their southern neighbours.
Sanskrit, the language of the Aryans, has a standing in India closely analogous to that of Latin in Europe. It was the language of the great empires of Classical India, and is the mother of the modern languages of North India; it remains relevant as the liturgical language of Hinduism.
Another Indo-European interloper briefly took Asia by storm. In 334 B.C. Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont from Greece and laid into the Persian Empire. In a matter of years he defeated the shah, conquered Persia, and was driving into India when his homesick troops made him turn back.
Greek had deep roots in coastal Asia Minor, but these conquests sowed seeds far and wide. Alexander himself burned high and hot for just a few years before dying of a fever on his way home; willing his empire “to the strongest” turned out not to be a stable succession plan, and his generals carved up their own competing domains. Greek became the common tongue of the Eastern Mediterranean, with new metropolises like Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria overtaking Athens and Sparta as centers of Hellenic culture. It failed to flourish in Persia, though a few Greek communities in what is today Afghanistan endured for centuries.
Just over the great mountains that loomed over their valley homes was an entirely different world. The ancestors of the Han Chinese moved out from the fertile North China Plain. In the late 3rd Century B.C. the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, comprehensively dominated a vast empire.
The highly-advanced and centrally-minded imperial government integrated the peoples of China with exceptional thoroughness. Two thousand years ago China was already a remarkably homogeneous country. Dialects of Chinese can be as different from one another as English and Swedish, but disunity was papered over by a unique writing system.
Chinese characters were originally simple pictographs, but over centuries morphed into an abstract writing system, in which each word is represented by a unique character, few of which retain any obvious bearing to what they represent. (My favorite, 帝, meaning “emperor,” still looks like a guy with an impressive hat). Because the characters have no bearing on their pronunciations, they can be equally understood by speakers of any dialect. The significance of this for China’s long-term cultural unity can hardly be overstated. Unfortunately, it also makes it extremely hard to trace the development of the Chinese language over the centuries: it is as if Europeans never stopped writing exclusively in Latin.
As young neighbouring nations sought to imitate the splendour of China, one of the first things they copied was their written language. But Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese are totally unrelated to Chinese, so conveying their grammar with characters that were already mind-boggling for Chinese was challenging. Japanese scholars developed new Japanese characters for use in conjunction with kanji (Chinese) noun substantives. The Vietnamese made a less complete effort, but ultimately abandoned characters in favour of the Latin alphabet under French tutelage in the 19th Century. In the 15th Century, King Sejong the Great of Korea, frustrated with how irrational and difficult the characters were, ordered his top scholars to develop a new writing system tailored to their tongue. Their creation, Hangul, is widely considered the best writing system in the world. It consists of phonetic characters arranged into blocks representing syllables, with elements representing similar sounds looking accordingly similar. Bizarrely, thanks to the resistance of conservative scholars, it was marginalized for five hundred years, only catching on after World War II.
As mentioned above, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese belong to entirely separate language families. Chinese is Sino-Tibetan, being distantly related (to roughly the same extent that English is related to Farsi) to Tibetan, Burmese, and debatably Thai. Vietnamese has some Austroasiatic cousins in Cambodia and among the hill tribes of Southeast Asia. Japanese and Korean are more or less alone in the world. But Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have been transformed by their heavy borrowing from Chinese vocabulary. Loanwords are easily identifiable to a relatively poor Chinese speaker like myself.
At around the same time Japanese emissaries arrived in the Tang Dynasty court to learn civilisation, on the other end of the continent, a storm was brewing. In the early 7th Century A.D., an ambitious Arab merchant was hanging out in a cave having a mid-life crisis when an archangel came to him to reveal the true word of God. Muhammad’s Arabic gospel inspired his warlike compatriots, who had long served as auxiliaries in the endless war between Rome and Persia, to conquer the world for themselves and Allah.
Exhausted by centuries of war, the two empires buckled under the sandstorm. The Romans surrendered Syria, Egypt, and North Africa, and retrenched to their hard core in Asia Minor; the Persian Empire collapsed. Many of the subjects of the new Islamic state were related to the Arabs, and readily learned their language. Aramaic speakers had to make only a relatively short jump (something like the distance between English and German) to assimilate. Greek disappeared from the region. Persian, on the other hand, held strong. Persians eventually adopted the Arabs’ religion, and, like many converts, their script (which, like so many others, grew from the Phoenician script). But they kept their ancient Indo-European language. Indeed, Persian enjoyed a renaissance as the language of court, statecraft, and high culture throughout the Islamic world.
As the centuries wore on, the Arabic of different corners of the vast Islamic empire inevitably drifted into new dialects. But the Quran, the unadulterable word of God revealed in the language of the first conquerors and read and heard daily by the faithful everywhere, was a profound conservative influence on the Arabic language. To this day, Arabs from across the Arab world can read the 7th Century Arabic of the Quran (I am told it is roughly like a modern English speaker reading Shakespeare). For comparison, here is the first opening of the Lord’s Prayer (“Our father…”) in the English of the same time: Fæder ure, þu þe eart on heofonum, si þin nama gehalgod…
Within a few centuries of the Islamic conquests, Arabic was the language of daily life for a vast swath of the world stretching from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia. Converts from Persia to India to the East Indies borrowed heavily from Arabic, especially in religious vocabulary, as well as Arabic script, but kept speaking the languages of their fathers.
The East Indies (present-day Indonesia and Malaysia) were traditionally a pagan, Hindu-influenced society. Their languages belong to the Austronesian family, whose proto speakers originated in Taiwan before sailing off to colonize the East Indies, the Philippines, and a smattering of far-flung islands stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Madagascar. They are known for being very easy to learn, with fun phonetics and such amusing features as constructing plurals simply by doubling nouns (e.g. buaya buaya, “crocodiles”). But anyway, when sophisticated Muslim merchants arrived in their ports, they adopted their religion with gusto. Arabic remained the preserve of traders and priests, but it left an indelible impact on Malayan languages, not least because they adopted the somewhat incongruous Arabic script.
Islam and its attendant linguistic influence never really caught on in mainland Southeast Asia. Burmese and Thai, though unrelated racially or linguistically to Indians, still looked to India culturally, practiced Buddhism, and wrote in Indic scripts.
It is an interesting fact of Eastern linguistics that east of India practically no national language is related to any other. This stands in stark contrast to Europe, for example, where virtually all languages are related to some degree. Coming from this background, the European fathers of linguistics instinctively looked for connections among diverse tongues. Linking Indian languages to European ones was a major coup, but other theories failed to pan out. The most prominent is the Altaic family, encompassing the diverse languages of Central Asia (Mongol, Manchu, Kazakh, etc.) and sometimes Korean and Japanese. Modern linguists mostly discredit the Altaic hypothesis, asserting that these languages belong not to a family but a sprachbund, a group of unrelated languages that have grown together due to proximity and contact.
Speakers of these languages were known to their neighbours as horsemen of the apocalypse. From the days when the first people settled down to farm and build cities, barbarian warriors were there to ride out from the steppes and terrorise them. Sometimes they would so enjoy a raid that they would decide to stay and crown themselves the new kings of the places they conquered. But their linguistic legacy was negligible- like the German conquerors of the Roman Empire, they typically adopted the language and culture of their civilised subjects. In the 13th Century the Mongols conquered the largest land empire in history, stretching from the Sea of Japan to the Danube, but their language never left the steppe.
Future generations of khans-cum-emperors had little more success. The Manchu conquered China in 1644, after a disaffected general waved them through the Great Wall. Within a generation they were already fighting an uphill battle to maintain their language even among their own sons and daughters, who increasingly preferred the standard Mandarin dialect of Chinese. By the fall of their Qing Dynasty in 1911, Manchu was practically a dead language. Today, the only evidence that it was until shockingly recently the de jure state language of the most populous empire on earth are the vertical squiggles alongside Chinese characters in inscriptions in the Forbidden City.
The exception to this rule was Turkish. The Turks were originally another steppe nomad tribe who rode into the Islamic Middle East, but although they stopped following the hawk and embraced Islam, they never eschewed their language. As they took over Asia Minor, the ancient core of the ailing Byzantine (formerly Roman) Empire, they integrated the native Greeks (this explains why today’s Turks look more like Europeans than Mongols). Greek survived in Constantinople and a few other locales into the last century, but the new nation of Turkey was born.
Still, the linguistic picture in the Ottoman Empire was confusing. An educated Turk might speak Persian at court, Arabic in the mosque, and Turkish in the army. None of these languages is related to the others, though borrowing, especially from the former two into Turkish, was extensive. If he lived in Constantinople, he would probably know some Greek. Outside Anatolia, Arabic in all its multifarious regional flavours still predominated.
The Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 had far-reaching impacts. Among them, it cut Europeans off from the Oriental spices and luxuries for which their tastes had only recently been whetted. To get their fix, Europeans would have to get creative. Some wondered if it might be possible to go around the Turks and reach the East by sea.
