Daily Archives: October 5, 2026

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Types of Empire & Imperialism (Special Mention) (5) Lingua Franca – Linguistic Imperialism

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Trade languages of the world in 1908 from The Harmsworth Atlas and Gazetteer (public domain image)

 

 

(5) LINGUA FRANCA – LINGUISTIC IMPERIALISM

 

The lingua franca – literally the Frankish tongue – is more generally used as a term for a “common tongue” or language among different people.

And generally, it is one native to the imperial nation or state of an empire, although it can arise from trading nations – but also from cultural or religious influence, as well as “diplomatic and administrative convenience” or scholarly and scientific convention, albeit these things also tend to be by-products of empire.

The most famous “imperial” lingua franca is of course English in the contemporary world (from the British Empire and American hegemony), but notable predecessors (or rivals) include French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, and of course Latin.

Whether or not a lingua franca emerges from “linguistic imperialism” is far more contentious. Empires as a general rule do not deliberately stamp out the native languages of their subjects – although occasionally they will to “acculturate” those subjects within their empire, or more brutally, in displacing or wiping out those subjects altogether.

Indeed, the Roman Empire was famously multilingual. Latin may have had first place as the original language of the Romans – but Greek loomed almost as large among elite Romans and larger among eastern provinces, with the eastern Roman empire even shifting its official language to Greek from Latin after the western half of the empire fell. Other languages in the classical empire included Aramaic or Syriac, Coptic, Punic, Celtic, and ultimately Germanic languages such as Gothic.

However, empires often reduce linguistic diversity not so much through deliberate policy but through the priority or privilege of the language of the imperial nation as lingua franca – people follow the lingo to the money or power that comes from speaking it.

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Empires (Special Mention) (5) Naz! Empire

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Europe at the height of Axis success by Gorak ten-en for Wikipedia “Naz! Germany” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

 

(5) NAZ! EMPIRE

 

The evil empire par excellence. Although that is an overstatement – it was barely an empire.

Despite styling itself as the Third Reich after the first German “empire” or Reich of a thousand years, the Holy Roman Empire, it didn’t even last as long as the second, Wilhelmine Germany.

In total, Naz! Germany lasted only twelve years from 1933 to 1945 – for which it could only be described as imperial, at least beyond its original borders, for a little over half of that, from 1938 onwards. Well, perhaps from its involvement in the Spanish Civil War before that, although that failed to yield a reliable client state – and it was arguably preparing for its imperialism from its very inception.

And even for war beyond its borders from 1939 to 1945, the second half of that period was defending or retreating from conquests made in the first half – before its complete collapse, defeat, unconditional surrender, occupation and partition. So its empire was about three years of conquests, albeit impressive, then defending or retreating from those conquests before falling altogether.

The evil part, however, is not an overstatement. It can probably best be summed up by the Encyclopedia of Fantasy’s comparison of the First World War with the Second – “despite the attempts of propagandists on both sides, no wholly evil figure emerges from World War I to occupy the world’s imagination, no one of a viciousness so unmitigated that it seems almost supernatural; H!tler, on the other hand, has all the lineaments of a Dark Lord, and the Reich he hoped to found was a parody of the true Land”.

The Naz! empire, short-lived as it was, consisted of its conquests and occupied territory in Europe and north Africa – as well as its allies that started off resembling client states at best and finished off resembling hostages at worst.

And it was notorious for all the worst features of empire – war, extortion, plunder, slavery and genocide – arguably as a form of hyper-imperialism, both in intent and scale, more so by being crammed into a few short years.

It couldn’t even aspire to the caustic observation of empire by the Roman historian Tacitus through the mouthpiece of a Caledonian chieftain – that they make a desert and call it peace. Rather they made a desert and called it war.

The most that could be said for it was that its occupation of western Europe, extortionate as it was from the outset, was relatively benign until later in the war – relatively that is, compared to its occupation of eastern Europe, brutal or genocidal as it was from the outset

“It has been argued, and not altogether frivolously, that the crucial German mistake of the Second World War was to have behaved atrociously to Poland and correctly to France when the reverse would have served German interests to better effect”.

On a related side note, I have never understood why the Germans crushed the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, rather than simply withdraw to leave it as a thorn in the Soviet side.

Ironically, there were strains of anti-imperialism within the Naz! empire, similar to those other modern imperial powers that styled themselves as anti-imperialist while creating empires or enacting imperialism of their own. That was particularly so as it opposed the British Empire and hence sporadically invoked or supported anti-imperialism against that empire, as well as its propaganda posing as defending itself (or Europe) from Soviet and American forms of imperialism.

But it couldn’t even do that right – as it was not particularly concerned with expressing such sentiments during its high tide of conquest, and they only came to the fore as it became increasingly desperate defending against its defeat.

 

RATING:
S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT DEVIL-TIER?)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Adaptations of the Odyssey (5) Robert Graves – The Greek Myths

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Cover 2017 Penguin paperback edition (fair use)

 

 

(5) ROBERT GRAVES –

THE GREEK MYTHS (1955)

 

Similarly to Bulfinch’s Mythology, this book by Graves is a general compendium of Greek myths, including the Odyssey.

However, The Greek Myths by Graves is distinct from Bulfinch’s Mythology in that it extends beyond mere summary to interpretation, albeit Graves’ idiosyncratic interpretation to his overarching “poetic theme” or monomyth of the Goddess, and hence arguably an adaptation.

Essentially, Graves’ study of Greek mythology comes in two parts, summary and interpretation.

The first is a conventional compendium of Greek mythology – literary retellings of the various myths from their sources – and it is this part that is the basis for the book as my favorite single volume study of Greek mythology, albeit somewhat dense in its prose style.

The second part – his interpretative notes or commentary – is where things get wilder, albeit all in good poetic fun. This is where Graves ‘decodes’ or reconstructs Greek mythology to his monomyth of the Goddess or prehistoric matriarchal religion – “Graves interpreted Bronze Age Greece as changing from a matriarchal society…to a patriarchal one under continual pressure from victorious Greek-speaking tribes. In the second stage local kings came to each settlement as foreign princes, reigned by marrying the hereditary queen, who represented the Triple Goddess, and were ritually slain by the next king after a limited period, originally six months. Kings managed to evade the sacrifice for longer and longer periods, often by sacrificing substitutes, and eventually converted the queen, priestess of the Goddess, into a subservient and chaste wife, and in the final stage had legitimate sons to reign after them”.

So there you go. Of course, the historical accuracy of Graves’ interpretation or commentary has been almost universally contested or considered to be idiosyncratic – “the interpretive notes are of value only as a guide to the author’s personal mythology”.

And that extends to his interpretation of the Odyssey, of which I’ll always remember his interpretation of recurring katabasis or descent to the underworld – death and rebirth. One scene that indeed strikes as a ritual burial of death and rebirth is that of the Phaeacians taking Odysseus – who is in a seemingly supernatural state of slumber – ashore on Ithaca, placing him and the treasures they gave him in a cave.