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Acknowledgments | |
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List of Maps, Tables and Figures | |
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Maps | |
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Tables | |
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Figures | |
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Preface | |
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Prologue: A Clash of Languages | |
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The Nature of Language History | |
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Themistocles' Carpet | |
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The language view of human history | |
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The state of nature | |
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Literacy and the beginning of language history | |
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An inward history too | |
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What It Takes to Be a World Language; or, You Never Can Tell | |
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Languages by Land | |
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The Desert Blooms: Language Innovation in the Middle East | |
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Three sisters who span the history of 4500 years | |
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The story in brief: Language leapfrog | |
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Sumerian-the first classical language: Life after death | |
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First Interlude: Whatever Happened to Elamite? | |
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Akkadian-world-beating technology: A model of literacy | |
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Phoenician-commerce without culture: Canaan, and points west | |
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Aramaic-the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia | |
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Second Interlude: The Shield of Faith | |
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Arabic-eloquence and equality: The triumph of 'submission' | |
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Third Interlude: Turkic and Persian, Outriders of Islam | |
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A Middle Eastern inheritance: The glamour of the desert nomad | |
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Triumphs of Fertility: Egyptian and Chinese | |
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Careers in parallel | |
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Language along the Nile | |
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A stately progress | |
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Immigrants from Libya and Kush | |
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Competition from Aramaic and Greek | |
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Changes in writing | |
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Final paradoxes | |
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Language from Huang-he to Yangtze | |
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Origins | |
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First Unity | |
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Retreat to the south | |
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Northern influences | |
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Beyond the southern sea | |
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Dealing with foreign devils | |
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Whys and wherefores | |
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Holding fast to a system of writing | |
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Foreign relations | |
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China's disciples | |
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Coping with invasions: Egyptian undercut | |
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Coping with invasions: Chinese unsettled | |
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Charming Like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit | |
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The story in brief | |
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The character of Sanskrit | |
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Intrinsic qualities | |
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Sanskrit in Indian life | |
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Outsiders' views | |
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The spread of Sanskrit | |
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Sanskrit in India | |
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Sanskrit in South-East Asia | |
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Sanskrit carried by Buddhism: Central and eastern Asia | |
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Sanskrit supplanted | |
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The charm of Sanskrit | |
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The roots of Sanskrit's charm | |
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Limiting weaknesses | |
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Sanskrit no longer alone | |
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Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek | |
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Greek at its acme | |
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Who is a Greek? | |
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What kind of a language? | |
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Homes from home: Greek spread through settlement | |
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Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war | |
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A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture | |
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Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning | |
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Intimations of decline | |
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Bactria, Persia, Mesopotamia | |
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Syria, Palestine, Egypt | |
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Greece | |
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Anatolia | |
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Consolations in age | |
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Retrospect: The life cycle of a classic | |
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Contesting Europe: Celt, Roman, German and Slav | |
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Reversals of fortune | |
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The contenders: Greek and Roman views | |
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The Celts | |
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The Germans | |
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The Romans | |
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The Slavs | |
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Run: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts | |
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Traces of Celtic languages | |
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How to recognise Celtic | |
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Celtic literacy | |
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How Gaulish spread | |
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The Gauls' advances in the historic record | |
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Consilium: The rationale of Roman imperium | |
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Mos Maiorum-the Roman way | |
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The desertion of Gaulish | |
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Latin among the Basques and the Britons | |
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Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances | |
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The Germanic invasions-irresistible and ineffectual | |
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Slavonic dawn in the Balkans | |
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Against the odds: The advent of English | |
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The First Death of Latin | |
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Languages by Sea | |
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The Second Death of Latin | |
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Usurpers of Greatness: Spanish in the New World | |
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Portrait of a conquistador | |
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An unprecedented empire | |
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First chinks in the language barrier: Interpreters, bilinguals, grammarians | |
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Past struggles: How American languages had spread | |
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The spread of Nahuatl | |
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The spread of Quechua | |
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The spreads of Chibcha, Guarani, Mapudungun | |
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The Church's solution: The lenguas generales | |
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The state's solution: Hispanizacion | |
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Coda: Across the Pacific | |
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In the Train of Empire: Europe's Languages Abroad | |
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Portuguese pioneers | |
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An Asian empire | |
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Portuguese in America | |
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Dutch interlopers | |
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La francophonie | |
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French in Europe | |
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The first empire | |
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The second empire | |
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The Third Rome, and all the Russias | |
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The origins of Russian | |
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Russian east then west | |
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Russian north then south | |
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The status of Russian | |
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The Soviet experiment | |
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Conclusions | |
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Curiously ineffective-German ambitions | |
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Imperial epilogue: Kominka | |
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Microcosm or Distorting Mirror? The Career of English | |
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Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French | |
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English overlaid | |
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Spreading the Anglo-Norman package | |
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The waning of Norman French | |
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Stabilising the language | |
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What sort of a language? | |
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Westward Ho! | |
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Pirates and planters | |
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Someone else's land | |
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Manifest destiny | |
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Winning ways | |
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Changing perspective-English in India | |
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A merchant venture | |
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Protestantism, profit and progress | |
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Success, despite the best intentions | |
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The world taken by storm | |
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An empire completed | |
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Wonder upon wonder | |
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English among its peers | |
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Languages Today and Tomorrow | |
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The Current Top Twenty | |
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Looking Ahead | |
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What is old | |
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What is new | |
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Way to go | |
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Three threads: Freedom, prestige and learnability | |
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Freedom | |
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Prestige | |
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What makes a language learnable | |
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Vaster than empires | |
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Notes | |
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Bibliography | |
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Index | |