waking-consciousness of man we to-day can scarcely form an idea.
Expression-speech, which appears in the earliest times with all the
religious seriousness of the Taboo, includes not only weighty and
strict ornament--which in the beginning coincides completely with
the idea of art and makes every stiff, inert thing into a vehicle
of the expression--but also the solemn ceremonial--whose web of
formulæ spreads over the whole of public life, and even over that
of the family[180]--and the language of costume, which is contained
in clothing, tattooing, and personal adornment, all of which have a
_uniform_ significance. The investigators of the nineteenth century
vainly attempted to trace the origin of clothing to the feeling of
shame or to utilitarian motives. It is in fact intelligible only as
the means of an expression-speech, and as such it is developed to a
grandiose level in all the high Civilizations, including our own of
to-day. We need only think of the dominant part played by the “mode” in
our whole public life and doings, the regulation attire for important
occasions, the nuances of wear for this and that social function, the
wedding-dress, mourning; of the military uniform, the priest’s robes,
orders and decorations, mitre and tonsure, periwig and queue, powder,
rings, styles of hairdressing; of all the significant displays and
concealments of person, the costume of the mandarin and the senator,
the odalisque and the nun; of the court-state of Nero, Saladin and
Montezuma--not to mention the details of peasant costumes, the language
of flowers, colours, and precious stones. As for the language of
religion, it is superfluous to mention it, for all this _is_ religion.
The communication-languages, in which every kind of sense-impression
that it is possible to conceive more or less participates, have
gradually evolved (so far as the peoples of the higher Cultures are
concerned) three outstanding signs--picture, sound, and gesture, which
in the script-speech of the Western Civilization have crystallized into
a unit of letter, word, and punctuation mark.
In the course of this long evolution there comes about at the last the
_detachment of speaking from speech_. Of all processes in the history
of language, none has a wider bearing than this. Originally all motives
and signs are unquestionably the product of the moment and meant
only for a single individual act of the active waking-consciousness.
Their actual and their felt and willed significances are one and the
same. But this is no longer so when a _definite stock of signs offers
itself_ for the living act of giving the sign, for with that not only
is the activity differentiated from its means, but the means are
differentiated _from their significance_. The unity of the two not
only ceases to be a matter of self-evidence, it ceases even to be a
possibility. The feeling of significance is a living feeling and,
like everything else belonging with Time and Destiny, it is uniquely
occurring and non-recurring. No sign, however well known and habitually
used, is ever repeated with exactly the same connotation; and hence it
is that originally no sign ever recurred in the same form. The domain
of the rigid sign is unconditionally one of things-become of the pure
extended; it is _not an organism, but a system_, which possesses its
own _causal_ logic and brings the irreconcilable opposition of space
and time, intellect and mood, also into the waking connexions of two
beings.
This fixed stock of signs and motives, with its ostensibly fixed
meanings, must be acquired by learning and practice if one wishes
to belong to the community of waking-consciousness with which it
is associated. _The necessary concomitant of speech divorced from
speaking is the notion of the school._ This is fully developed in the
higher animals; and in every self-contained religion, every art, every
society, it is presupposed as the background of the believer, the
artist, the “well-brought-up” human being. And from this point each
community has its sharply defined frontier; to be a member one must
know its language--i.e., its articles of faith, its ethics, its rules.
In counterpoint and Catholicism alike, bliss is not to be compassed
by mere feeling and goodwill. Culture means a hitherto unimagined
intensification of the depth and strictness of the form-language in
every department; for each individual belonging to it, it consists--as
his _personal_ Culture, religious, ethical, social, artistic--in
a lifelong process of education and training _for_ this life. And
consequently in all great arts, in the great Churches, mysteries and
orders, there is reached such a command of form as astonishes the
human being himself, and ends by breaking itself under the stress of
its own exigences--whereupon, in every Culture alike, there is set
up (expressly or tacitly) the slogan of a “return to nature.” This
_maestria_ extends also to verbal language. Side by side with the
social polish of the period of the Tyrannis or of the troubadours,
with the fugues of Bach and the vase-paintings of Exekias,[181] we
have the art of Attic oratory and that of French conversation, both
presupposing, like any other art, a strict and carefully matured
convention and a long and exacting training of the individual.
Metaphysically the significance of this separating-off of a
set language can hardly be over-estimated. The daily practice
of intercourse in settled forms, and the command of the entire
waking-consciousness through such forms--of which there is no longer
a sensed process of formation _ad hoc_, but which are just simply
there, and require understanding in the strictest sense of the
word--lead to an ever-sharper distinction between understanding and
feeling within the waking-consciousness. An incipient language is
felt understandingly; the practice of speaking requires one, first,
to feel the _known_ speech-medium and, secondly, to understand the
intention put into it on _this_ occasion. Consequently the kernel
of all schooling lies in the acquisition of elements of knowledge.
Every Church proclaims unhesitatingly that not feeling but knowledge
leads into its ways of salvation; all true artistry rests on the sure
knowledge of forms that the individual has not to discover, but to
learn. “Understanding” is knowledge conceived of as a being. It is that
which is completely alien to blood, race, time; from the opposition
of rigid speech to coursing blood and developing history come the
_negative_ ideals of the absolute, the eternal, the universally
valid--the ideals of Church and School.
But just this, in the last analysis, makes languages incomplete and
leads to the eternal contradiction between what is in fact spoken and
what was willed or meant by the speaking. We might indeed say that
lies came into the world with the separation of speech from speaking.
The signs are fixed, but not so their meaning--from the outset we feel
that this is so, then we know it, and finally we turn our knowledge
to account. It is an old, old, experience that when one wills to
say something, the words “fail” one (_versagen_, mis-say); that one
does not “express oneself aright” and in fact says something other
than what was meant; that one may speak accurately and be understood
inaccurately. And so finally we get to the art--which is widespread
even amongst animals (e.g., cats)--of “using words to conceal
thoughts.” One says not everything, one says something quite different,
one speaks formally about nothing, one talks briskly to cover the fact
that one has said something. Or one imitates the speech of another. The
red-backed shrike (_Lanius collurio_) imitates the strophes of small
song-birds in order to lure them. This is a well-known hunter’s dodge,
but here again established motives and signs are precedent for it,
just as much as they are a condition for the faking in antiques or the
forgery of a signature. And all these traits, met with in attitude and
mien as in handwriting and verbal utterance, reappear in the language
of every religion, every art, every society--we need only refer to the
ideas expressed by the words “hypocrite,” “orthodox,” “heretic,” the
English “cant,” the secondary senses of “diplomat,” “Jesuit,” “actor,”
the masks and warinesses of polite society, and the painting of to-day,
in which nothing is honest more and which in every gallery offers the
eye untruth in every imaginable form.
In a language that one stammers, one cannot be a diplomat. But in
the real command of a language there is the danger that the relation
between the means and the meaning may be made into a new means. There
arises an intellectual art of _playing_ with expression, practised by
the Alexandrines and the Romantics--by Theocritus and Brentano in
lyric poetry, by Reger in music, by Kierkegaard in religion.
_Finally, speech and truth exclude one another._[182] And in fact this
is just what brings up, in the age of fixed language, the typical
“judge of men,” who is all race and knows how to take the being that
is speaking. To look a man keenly in the eyes, to size up the speaker
behind the stump speech or the philosophical discourse, to know behind
the prayer the heart, and behind the common good-tone the more intimate
levels of social importance--and that instantaneously, immediately,
and with the self-evident certainty that characterizes everything
cosmic--that is what is lacking to the real Taboo-man, for whom _one_
language at any rate carries conviction. A priest who is also a
diplomat cannot be genuinely a priest. An ethical philosopher of the
Kant stamp is never a “judge of men.”
The man who lies in his verbal utterances betrays himself, without
observing it, in his demeanour. One who uses demeanour to dissimulate
with betrays himself in his tone. It is precisely because rigid speech
separates means and intent that it never carries it off with the keen
appraiser. The adept reads between the lines and understands a man
as soon as he sees his walk or his handwriting. The deeper and more
intimate a spiritual communion, the more readily it dispenses with
signs and linkages through waking-consciousness. A real comradeship
makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent
altogether. The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got
beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening
in front of their cottage and entertaining one another without a
word’s being passed, each knowing what the other is thinking and
feeling. Words would only disturb the harmony. From such a state
of reciprocal understanding something or other reaches back, far
beyond the collective existence of the higher animal-world, deep in
the primeval history of free-moving life. Here deliverance from the
waking-consciousness is, at moments, very nearly achieved.
V
Of all the signs that have come to be fixed, none has led to greater
consequences than that which in its present state we call “word.”
It belongs, no doubt, to the purely human history of speech, but
nevertheless the idea, or at any rate the conventional idea, of an
“origin” of verbal language is as meaningless and barren as that of a
zero-point for speech generally. A precise beginning is inconceivable
for the latter because it is compresent with and contained in the
essence of the microcosm, and for the former because it presupposes
many fully developed kinds of communication-speech and constitutes
only one element--though in the end the dominant element--of a slow and
quiet evolution. It is a fundamental error in all theories (however
diametrically opposed to each other) like those of Wundt and of
Jespersen[183] that they investigate speaking in words as if it were
something new and self-contained, which inevitably leads them into a
radically false psychology. In reality verbal language is a very late
phenomenon, not a young shoot, but the last blossom borne by one of the
ramifications of the parent stem of all vocal speeches.
In actuality a pure word-speech does not exist. No one speaks
without employing, in addition to the set vocabulary, quite other
modes of speech, such as emphasis, rhythm, and facial play, which
are much more primary than the language of the word, and with
which, moreover, it has become completely intertwined. It is highly
necessary, therefore, to avoid regarding the ensemble of present-day
word-languages, with its extreme structural intricacy, as an inner
unity with a homogeneous history. Every word-language known to us has
very different sides, and each of these sides has its own Destiny
within the history of the whole. There is not one sense-perception
that would be wholly irrelevant to an adequate history of the use
of words. Further, we must distinguish very strictly between vocal
and verbal languages; the former is familiar even to the simpler
genera of animals, the latter is in certain characters--individual
characters, it is true, but all the more significant for that--a
radically different thing. For every animal voice-language, further,
expression-motives (a roar of anger) and communication-signs (a cry
of warning) can be clearly distinguished, and doubtless the same may
be said of the earliest words. But was it, then, as an expression-
or as a communication-language that verbal language _arose_? Was it
in quite primitive conditions, independent, more or less, of any and
every visual language such as picture and gesture? To such questions
we have no answer, since we have no inkling of what the pre-forms of
the “word,” properly so called, were. Naïve indeed is the philology
which uses what we of to-day call “primitive” languages (in reality,
incomplete pictures of very _late_ language-conditions) as premisses
for conclusions as to the origin of words and the Word. The word is
in them an already established, highly developed, and self-evident
means--i.e., precisely what anything “originally” is _not_.
There can be no doubt that the sign which made it possible for the
future word-language to detach itself from the general vocal speech of
the animal world was that which I call “name”--a vocal image serving
to denote a Something in the world-around, which was felt as a being,
and by the act of naming became a numen.[184] It is unnecessary to
speculate as to how the first names came to be--no human speech
accessible to us at this time of day gives us the least _point d’appui_
here. But, contrary to the view of modern research, I consider that
the decisive turn came not from a change of the throat-formation or
from a peculiarity of sound-formation or from any other physiological
factor--if any such changes ever took place at all, it would be the
race side that they would affect--not even an increased capacity for
self-expression by existing means, like, say, the transition from
word to sentence (H. Paul[185]), but _a profound spiritual change_.
With the Name comes a new world-outlook. And if speech in general is
the child of fear, of the unfathomable terror that wells up when the
waking-consciousness is presented with the facts, that impels all
creatures together in the longing to prove each other’s reality and
proximity--then the first word, the Name, is a mighty leap upward.
The Name grazes the _meaning_ of consciousness and the _source_ of
fear alike. The world is not merely existent, a secret is felt in
it. Above and apart from the more ordinary objects of expression-
and communication-language, man names _that which is enigmatic_. It
is the beast that knows no enigmas. Man cannot think too solemnly,
reverently, of this first name-giving. It was not well always to speak
the name, it should be kept secret, a dangerous power dwelt in it.
_With the name the step is taken from the everyday physical of the
beast to the metaphysical of man._ It was the greatest turning-point
in the history of the human soul. Our epistemology is accustomed to
set speech and thought side by side, and it is quite right, if we take
into consideration only the languages that are still accessible at the
present day. But I believe that we can go much deeper than this and say
that with the Name religion in the proper sense, _definite_ religion in
the midst of formless quasi-religious awe, came into being. Religion in
this sense means religious _thought_. It is the new conception of the
creative understanding emancipated from sensation. We say, in a very
significant idiom, that we “reflect on,” “think _over_,” something.
With the understanding of things-named the formation of a _higher_
world, _above_ all sensational existence, is begun--“higher” both
according to obvious symbolism and in reference to the position of the
head which man guesses (often with painful distinctness) to be the home
of his thoughts. It gives to the primary feeling of fear both an object
and a glimpse of liberation. On this religious first thought all the
philosophical, scholarly, scientific thought of later times has been
and remains dependent for its very deepest foundations.
These first names we have to think of as quite separate and
individual elements in the stock of signs of a highly developed
sound- and gesture-language, the richness of which we can no longer
imagine, since these other means have come to be subordinate to
the word-languages, and their further developments have been in
dependent connexion therewith.[186] One thing, however, was assured
when the name inaugurated the transformation and spiritualization of
communication-technique--the pre-eminence of the eye over the other
sense-organs. Man’s awakeness and awareness was in an illuminated
space, his depth-experience[187] was a radiation outward towards
light-sources and light-resistances, and he conceived of his ego as a
middle point in the light. “Visible” or “invisible” was the alternative
which governed the state of understanding in which the first names
arose. Were the first _numina_, perhaps, things of the light-world that
were felt, heard, observed in their effects, _but not seen_? No doubt
the group of names, like everything else that marks a turning-point
in the course of world-happenings, must have developed both rapidly
and powerfully. The entire light-world, in which everything possesses
the properties of position and duration in space, was--in the midst
of what tensions of cause and effect, thing and property, object and
subject!--very soon listed with innumerable names, and so anchored in
the memory, for what we now call “memory” is the capacity of storing
for the understanding, by means of the name, _the named_. Over the
realm of understood visuals (_Sehdinge_) supervenes a more intellectual
realm of namings, which shares with it the logical property of being
purely extensive, disposed in polarity, and ruled by the causal
principle. All word-types like cases and pronouns and prepositions
(which arise, of course, much later) have a causal or local meaning in
respect of named units; adjectives, and verbs also, have frequently
come into existence in pairs of opposites; often (as in the E’we
languages of West Africa investigated by Westermann) the same word is
pronounced low or high to denote for example great and small, far and
near, passive and active.[188] Later these relics of gesture-language
pass completely into the word-form,[189] as we see clearly, for
example, in the Greek μακρός and μικρός and the _u_-sounds of Egyptian
designations of suffering. It is the form of thinking in opposites
which, starting from these antithetical word-pairs, constitutes the
foundation of all inorganic logic, and turns every scientific discovery
of truths into a movement of conceptual contraries, of which the
most universal instance is that of an old view and a new one being
contrasted as “error” and “truth.”
The second great turning-point was the use of _grammar_. Besides
the name there was now the sentence, besides the verbal designation
the verbal relation, and thereupon reflection--which is a thinking
in word-relations that follows from the perception of things for
which word-labels exist--became the decisive characteristic of man’s
waking-consciousness. The question whether the communication-languages
already contained effective “sentences” before the appearance of the
genuine “name” is a difficult one. The sentence, in the _present_
acceptation of the word, has indeed developed within these languages
according to its own conditions and with its own phases, but
nevertheless it postulates the _prior_ existence of the name. Sentences
as conceptual relations become possible only with the intellectual
change that accompanied their birth. And we must assume further
that within the highly developed wordless languages one character
or trait after another, in the course of continuous practical use,
was transformed into verbal form and as such fell into its place in
an increasingly solid structure, the prime form of our present-day
languages. Thus the inner build of all verbal languages rests upon
foundations of far older construction, and for its further development
is _not_ dependent upon the stock of words and its destiny.
It is in fact just the reverse. For with syntax the original group
of individual _names_ was transformed into a system of words, whose
character was given, not by their proper, but by their grammatical
significance. The name made its appearance as something novel and
entirely self-contained. But word-species arose as elements of the
sentence, and thereafter the contents of waking-consciousness streamed
in overflowing profusion into this world of words, demanding to be
labelled and represented in it, until finally even “all” became, in one
shape or another, a word and available for the thought-process.
Thenceforward the sentence is the decisive element--we speak in
sentences and not words. Attempts to define the two have been frequent,
but never successful. According to F. N. Finck, word-formation is an
analytical and sentence-formation a synthetical activity of the mind,
the first preceding the second. It is demonstrable that the same
actuality received as impression is variously understood, and words,
therefore, are definable from very different points of view.[190] But
according to the usual definition, a sentence is the verbal expression
of a _thought_, a symbol (says H. Paul) for the connexion of several
_ideas_ in the soul of the speaker. It seems to me quite impossible
to settle the nature of the sentence from its contents. The fact is
simply that we call the relatively largest mechanical units employed
“sentences” and the relatively smallest “words.” Over this range
extends the validity of grammatical _laws_. But as soon as we pass
from theory to practice, we see that language as currently used is
no longer such a mechanism; it obeys not laws, but _pulse_. Thus a
race-character is involved, _a priori_, in the way in which the matter
to be communicated is set in sentences. Sentences are not the same
for Tacitus and Napoleon as for Cicero and Nietzsche. The Englishman
orders his material syntactically in a different way from the German.
Not the ideas and thoughts, but the thinking, the kind of life, _the
blood_, determine in the primitive, Classical, Chinese, and Western
speech-communities the type of the sentence-unit, and with it the
_mechanical_ relation of the word to the sentence. The boundary between
grammar and syntax should be placed at the point where the mechanical
of speech ceases and the organic of speaking begins--usages, custom,
the _physiognomy_ of the way that a man employs to express himself. The
other boundary lies where the mechanical structure of the word passes
into the organic factors of sound-formation and expression. Even the
children of immigrants can often be recognized by the way in which the
English “_th_” is pronounced--a race-trait of the land. Only that which
lies between these limits is the “language,” properly so called, which
has system, is a technical instrument, and can be invented, improved,
changed, and worn out; enunciation and expression, on the contrary,
adhere to the _race_. We recognize a person known to us, without seeing
him, by his pronunciation, and not only that, but we can recognize a
member of an alien race even if he speaks perfectly correct German.
The great sound-modifications, like the Old High German in Carolingian
times and the Middle High German in the Late Gothic, have territorial
frontiers and affect only the speaking of the language, not the inner
form of sentence and word.
Words, I have just said, are the relatively smallest mechanical units
in the sentence. There is probably nothing that is so characteristic
of the thinking of a human species as the way in which these units
are acquired by it. For the Bantu Negro a thing that he sees belongs
first of all to a very large number of categories of comprehension.
Correspondingly the word for it consists of a kernel or root and a
number of monosyllabic prefixes. When he speaks of a woman in a field,
his word is something like this: “living, one, big, old, female,
outside, _human_”; this makes seven syllables, but it denotes a single,
clear-headed, and to us quite alien act of comprehension.[191] There
are languages in which the word is almost coextensive with the sentence.
The gradual replacement of bodily or sonic by grammatical gestures
is thus the decisive factor in the formation of sentences, but it
has never been completed. There are no purely verbal languages.
The activity of speaking, in words, as it emerges more and more
precise, consists in this, that through word-sounds we awaken
significance-feelings, which in turn through the sound of the
word-connexions evoke further relation-feelings. Our schooling in
speech trains us to understand in this abbreviated and indicative form
not only light-things and light-relations, but also thought-things and
thought-relations. Words are only named, not used definitively, and
the hearer has to feel what the speaker means. This and this alone
amounts to speech, and hence mien and tone play a much greater part
than is generally admitted in the understanding of modern speech.
Substantive signs may conceivably exist for many of the animals even,
but verb-signs never.
The last grand event in this history, which brings the formation of
verbal speech more or less to a close, is the coming of the verb.
This assumes at the outset a very high order of abstraction. For
substantives are words whereby things sense-defined in illuminated
space[192] become evocable also in after-thought, while verbs describe
_types_ of change, which are not seen, but are extracted from the
unendingly protean light-world, by noting the special characters of
the individual cases, and generating concepts from them. “Falling
stone” is originally a unit impression, but we first separate movement
and thing moved and then isolate falling as one _kind_ of movement
from innumerable other sorts and shades thereof--sinking, tottering,
stumbling, slipping. We do not “see” the distinction, we “know” it. The
difference between fleeing and running, or between flying and being
wafted, altogether transcends the visual impression they produce and is
only apprehensible by a word-trained consciousness. But now, with this
verb-thinking, even life itself has become accessible to reflection.
Out of the living impress made on the waking-consciousness, out of the
ambiance of the becoming (which gesture-speech, being merely imitative,
leaves unquestioned and unprobed) that which is life itself--namely,
singularity of occurrence--is unconsciously eliminated, and the rest,
as effect of a cause (the wind wafts, lightning flashes, the peasant
ploughs), is put, under purely extensive descriptions, into suitable
places in the sign-system. One has to bury oneself completely in the
solid definiteness of subject and predicate, active and passive,
present and perfect, to perceive how entirely the understanding here
masters the senses and unsouls actuality. In substantives one can still
regard the mental thing (the idea) as a copy of the visual thing, but
in the verb _something inorganic has been put in place of something
organic_. The fact that we live--namely, that we at this instant
perceive something--becomes eventually a _property_ of the something
perceived. In terms of word-thought, the perceived endures--“is.” Thus,
finally, are formed the categories of thought, graded according to what
is and what is not natural to it; thus Time appears as a dimension,
Destiny as a cause, the living as chemical or psychical mechanism. It
is in this wise that the style of mathematical, judicial, and dogmatic
thought arises.
And in this wise, too, arises that disunity which seems to us
inseparable from the essence of man, but is really only the expression
of the dominance of word-language in his waking-consciousness.
This instrument of communication between Ego and Tu has, by reason
of its perfection, fashioned out of the animal understanding of
sensation, a thinking-in-words which stands proxy for sensation.
Subtle thinking--“splitting hairs,” as it is called--is conversing
with oneself in word-significances. It is the activity that no kind of
language but the language of words can subserve, and it becomes, with
the perfection of the language, distinctive of the life-habit of whole
classes of human beings. The divorce of speech, rigid and devitalized,
from speaking, which makes it impossible to include the whole truth in
a verbal utterance, has particularly far-reaching consequences in the
sign-system of words. Abstract thinking consists in the use of a finite
word-framework into which it is sought to squeeze the whole infinite
content of life. Concepts kill Being and falsify Waking-Being. Long ago
in the springtime of language-history, while understanding had still to
struggle in order to hold its own with sensation, this mechanization
was without importance for life. But now, from a being who occasionally
thought, man has become a thinking being, and it is the ideal of every
thought-system to subject life, once and for all, to the domination of
intellect. This is achieved in theory by according validity only to the
known and branding the actual as a sham and a delusion. It is achieved
in practice by forcing the voices of the blood to be silent in the
presence of universal ethical principles.[193]
Both, logic and ethics alike, are systems of absolute and eternal
truths for the intellect, and correspondingly untruths for history.
However completely the inner eye may triumph over the outer in the
domain of thought, in the realm of facts the belief in eternal truths
is a petty and absurd stage-play that exists only in the heads of
individuals. A true system of thoughts emphatically cannot exist, for
no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are always
brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned _a priori_
by its own form and can never reach that which the words mean--apart,
again, from the case of technics, in which the concepts are instruments
and not aims in themselves. And this _ignorabimus_ is in conformity
also with the intuition of every true sage, that abstract principles of
life are acceptable only as figures of speech, trite maxims of daily
use underneath which life flows, as it has always flowed, onward. Race,
in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that, under all
the great names, it has been thinkers--who are personalities--and not
systems--which are mutable--that have taken effect upon life.
VI
So far, then, the inner history of word-languages shows three stages.
In the first there appears, within highly developed but wordless
communication-languages, the first names--units in a new sort of
understanding. The world awakens _as a secret_, and religious thought
begins. In the second stage, a complete communication-speech is
gradually transformed into grammatical values. The gesture becomes the
sentence, and the sentence transforms the names into words. Further,
the sentence becomes the great school of understanding _vis-à-vis_
sensation, and an increasingly subtle significance-feeling for abstract
relations within the mechanism of the sentence evokes an immense
profusion of inflexions, which attach themselves especially to the
substantive and the verb, the space-word and the time-word. This is the
blossoming time of grammar, the period of which we may probably (though
under all reserves) take as the two millennia preceding the birth of
the Egyptian and Babylonian Culture. The third stage is marked by a
rapid decay of inflexions and a simultaneous replacement of grammar by
syntax. The intellectualization of man’s waking-consciousness has now
proceeded so far that he no longer needs the sense-props of inflexion
and, discarding the old luxuriance of word-forms, communicates freely
and surely by means of the faintest nuances of idiom (particles,
position of words, rhythm). By dint of speaking in words, the
understanding has attained supremacy over the waking-consciousness,
and to-day it is in process of liberating itself from the restrictions
of sensible-verbal machinery and working towards pure mechanics of the
intellect. Minds and not senses are making the contact.
In this third stage of linguistic history, which as such takes place
in the biological plane[194] and therefore belongs to _man as a type_,
the history of the higher Cultures now intervenes with an entirely
new speech, the speech of the distance--writing--an invention of such
inward forcefulness that again there is a sudden decisive turn in the
destinies of the word-languages.
The written language of Egypt is already by 3000 in a state of
rapid grammatical decomposition; likewise the Sumerian literary
languages called _eme-sal_ (women’s language). The written language
of China--which _vis-à-vis_ the vernaculars of the Chinese world has
long formed a language apart--is, even in the oldest known texts,
so entirely inflexionless that only recent research has established
that it ever had inflexions at all.[195] The Indogermanic system is
known to us only in a state of complete break-down. Of the Case in Old
Vedic (about 1500 B.C.) the Classical languages a thousand years later
retained only fragments.[196] From Alexander the Great’s time the dual
disappeared from the declension of ordinary Hellenistic Greek, and the
passive vanished from the conjugation entirely. The Western languages,
although of the most miscellaneous provenance imaginable--the Germanic
from primitive and the Romanic from highly civilized stock--modify
in the same direction, the Romanic cases having become reduced to
one, and the English, after the Reformation, to zero. Ordinary German
definitely shed the genitive at the beginning of the nineteenth century
and is now in process of abolishing the dative. Only after trying to
translate a piece of difficult and pregnant prose--say of Tacitus or
Mommsen--“back”[197] into some very ancient language rich in inflexions
does one realize how meantime the technique of signs has vaporized
into a technique of thoughts, which now only needs to employ the
signs--abbreviated, but replete with meaning--merely as the counters
in a game that only the initiates of the particular speech-communion
understand. This is why to a west-European, the sacred Chinese texts
must always be in the fullest sense a sealed book; but the same holds
good also for the primary words of every other Culture-language--the
Greek λογός and ἀρχή, the Sanskrit _Atman_ and _Braman_--indications of
the world-outlook of their respective Cultures that no one not bred in
the Culture can comprehend.
The external history of languages is as good as lost to us in just
its most important parts. Its springtime lies deep in the primitive
era, in which (to repeat what has been said earlier), we have to
imagine “humanity” in the form of scattered and quite small troops,
lost in the wide spaces of the earth. A spiritual change came when
reciprocal contacts became habitual (and eventually natural) to them,
but correspondingly there can be no doubt that this contact was first
sought for and then regulated, or fended off, by means of speech, and
that it was the impression of an earth filled with men that first
brought the waking-consciousness to the point of tense intelligent
shrewdness, forcing verbal language under pressure to the surface.
So that, perhaps, the birth of grammar is connected with the race
hall-mark of the grand Number.
Since then, no other grammatical system has ever come into existence,
but only novel derivatives of what was already there. Of these
_authentic_ primitive languages and their structure and sound we know
nothing. As far as our backward look takes us, we see only complete and
developed linguistic systems, used by everyone, learned by every child,
as something perfectly natural. And we find it more than difficult to
imagine that once upon a time things may have been different, that
perhaps a shudder of fear accompanied the hearing of such strange and
enigmatic language--an awe like that which in historic times has been
and still is excited by script. And yet we have to reckon with the
possibility that at one time, in a world of wordless communication,
verbal language constituted an aristocratic privilege, a jealously
preserved class-secret. We have a thousand examples--the diplomats with
their French, the scholars with their Latin, the priests with their
Sanskrit--to suggest that there may have been such a tendency. It is
part of the thoroughbred’s pride to be able to speak to one another
in a way that outsiders cannot understand--a language for everybody
is a vernacular. To be “on conversational terms with” someone is a
privilege or a pretension. So, too, the use of literary language in
talking with educated people, and contempt for dialect, mark the true
bourgeois pride. It is only we who live in a Civilization wherein it is
just as normal for children to learn to write as to learn to walk--in
all earlier Cultures it was a rare accomplishment, to which few could
aspire. And I am convinced that it was just so once with verbal
language.
The tempo of linguistic history is immensely rapid; here a mere century
signifies a great deal. I may refer again to the gesture-language of
the North Indians,[198] which became necessary because the rapidity
of changes in the tribal dialects made intertribal understanding
impossible otherwise. Compare, too, the Latin of the recently
discovered Forum inscription[199] (about 500) with the Latin of Plautus
(about 200) and this again with the Latin of Cicero (about 50). If we
assume that the oldest Vedic texts have preserved the linguistic state
of 1200 B.C., then even that of 2000 may have differed from it far more
completely than any Indogermanic philologists working by _a posteriori_
methods can even surmise.[200] But _allegro_ changes to _lento_ in the
moment when script, the language of duration, intervenes and ties down
and immobilizes the systems at entirely different age-levels. This is
what makes this evolution so opaque to research; all that we possess is
remains of written languages. Of the Egyptian and Babylonian linguistic
world we do possess originals from as far back as 3000, but the oldest
Indogermanic relics are _copies_, of which the linguistic state is much
younger than the contents.
Very various, under all these determinants, have been the destinies
of the different grammars and vocabularies. The first attaches to
the intellect, the second to things and places. Only grammatical
systems are subject to natural inward change. The use of words, on the
contrary, psychologically presupposes that, although the expression
may change, inner mechanical structure is maintained (and all the more
firmly) as being the basis on which denomination essentially rests.
_The great linguistic families are purely grammatical families._ The
words in them are more or less homeless and wander from one to another.
It is a fundamental error in philological (especially Indogermanic)
research that grammar and vocabulary are treated as a unit. All
specialist vocabularies--the jargon of hunter, soldier, sportsman,
seaman, savant--are in reality _only stocks of words_, and can be
used within any and every grammatical system. The semi-Classical
vocabulary of chemistry, the French of diplomacy, and the English of
the racecourse have become naturalized in all modern languages alike.
We may talk of “alien” words, but the same could have been said at
some time or other of most of the “roots,” so-called, in all the old
languages. All names adhere to the things that they denote, and share
their history. In Greek the names for metals are of alien provenance;
words like ταῦρος, χιτῶν, οἶνος are Semitic. Indian numerals are
found in the Hittite texts of Boghaz Keüi,[201] and the contexts
in which they occur are technical expressions which came into the
country with horse-breeding. Latin administrative terms invaded the
Greek East,[202] German invaded Petrine Russia in multitudes, Arabic
words permeate the vocabulary of Western mathematics, chemistry, and
astronomy. The Normans, themselves Germanic, inundated English with
French words. Banking, in German-speaking regions, is full of Italian
expressions,[203] and similarly and to a far greater extent masses of
designations relating to agriculture and cattle-breeding, to metals and
weapons, and in general to all transactions of handicraft, barter, and
intertribal law, must have migrated from one language to another, just
as geographical nomenclature always passed into the proper vocabulary
of the dominant language, with the result that Greek contains numerous
Carian and German Celtic place-names. It is no exaggeration to say that
the more widely an Indogermanic word is distributed, the _younger_ it
is, the more likely it is to be an “alien” word. It is precisely the
very oldest names that are hoarded as private possessions. Latin and
Greek have only quite young words in common. Or do “telephone,” “gas,”
“automobile,” belong to the word-stock of the “primitive” people?
Suppose, for the sake of argument that three-fourths of the Aryan
“primitive” words came from the Egyptian or the Babylonian vocabularies
of the third millennium; we should not find a trace of the fact in
Sanskrit after a thousand years of unwritten development, for even in
German thousands of Latin loan-words have long ago become completely
unrecognizable. The ending “-ette” in “Henriette” is Etruscan--how
many genuine Aryan and genuine Semitic endings, notwithstanding their
thoroughly alien origin, defy us to prove them intruders? What is
the explanation of the astounding similarity of many words in the
Australian and the Indogermanic languages?
The Indogermanic system is certainly the youngest, and therefore the
most intellectual. The languages derived from it rule the earth to-day,
but did it really exist at all in 2000 as a specific grammatical
edifice? As is well known, a single initial form for Aryan, Semitic,
and Hamitic is nowadays assumed as probable. The oldest Indian
texts preserve the linguistic conditions of (probably) before 1200,
the oldest Greek those of (probably) 700. But Indian personal and
divine names occur in Syria and Palestine,[204] simultaneously with
the horse, at a much later date, the bearers of these names being
apparently first soldiers of fortune and afterwards potentates.[205]
May it be that about 1600 these land-Vikings, these first _Reiter_--men
grown up inseparable from their horses, the terrifying originals of the
Centaur-legend--established themselves more or less everywhere in the
Northern plains as adventurer-chiefs, bringing with them the speech
and divinities of the Indian feudal age? And the same with the Aryan
aristocratic ideals of breed and conduct. According to what has been
said above on race, this would explain the race-ideal of Aryan-speaking
regions without any necessity for “migrations” of a “primitive” folk.
After all, it was in this way that the knightly Crusaders founded their
states in the East--and in exactly the same locality as the heroes with
Mitanni names had done so twenty-five hundred years before.
Or was this system of about 3000 merely an unimportant dialect of a
language that is lost? The Romanic language-family about A.D. 1600
dominated all the seas. About 400 B.C. the “original” language on the
Tiber possessed a domain of little more than a thousand square miles.
It is certain that the geographical picture of the grammatical families
at about 4000 was still very variegated. The Semitic-Hamitic-Aryan
group (_if_ it ever did form a unit) can hardly have been of much
importance at that time. We stumble at every turn upon the relics of
old speech-families--Etruscan, Basque, Sumerian, Ligurian, the ancient
tongues of Asia Minor, and others--that in their day must have belonged
to very extensive systems. In the archives of Boghaz-Keüi eight new
languages have so far been identified, all of them in use about the
year 1000. With the then prevailing tempo of modification, Aryan may in
2000 have formed a unit with languages that we should never dream of
associating with it.
VII
Writing is an entirely new kind of language, and implies a complete
change in the relations of man’s waking-consciousness, in that it
_liberates it from the tyranny of the present_. Picture-languages which
portray objects are far older, older probably than any words; but here
the picture is no longer an immediate denotation of some sight-object,
but primarily the sign of a word--i.e., something already abstract from
sensation. It is the first and only example of a language that demands,
without itself providing, the necessary preparatory training.
Script, therefore, presupposes a fully developed grammar, since the
activity of writing and reading is infinitely more abstract than that
of speaking and hearing. Reading consists in scanning a script-image
_with a feeling of the significances of corresponding word-sounds_;
what script contains is not signs for things, but signs for other
signs. The grammatical sense must be enlarged by instantaneous
comprehension.
The word is a possession of man generally, whereas writing belongs
exclusively to Culture-men. In contrast to verbal language it is
conditioned, not merely partially, but entirely, by the political and
religious Destinies of world-history. All scripts come into being
in the _individual_ Cultures and are to be reckoned amongst their
profoundest symbols. But hitherto a comprehensive history of script
has never been produced, and a psychology of its forms and their
modifications has never even been attempted. _Writing is the grand
symbol of the Far_, meaning not only extension-distance, but also,
and above all, duration and future and the will-to-eternity. Speaking
and listening take place only in proximity and the present,[206] but
through script one speaks to men whom one has never seen, who may not
even have been born yet; the voice of a man is heard centuries after
he has passed away. It is one of the first distinguishing marks of
the _historical_ endowment. But for that very reason nothing is more
characteristic of a Culture than its inward relation to writing. If
we know as little as we do about Indogermanic, it is because the two
earliest Cultures whose people made use of this system--the Indian and
the Classical--were so _a-historic_ in disposition that they not only
formed no script of their own, but even fought off alien scripts until
well into the Late period of their course. Actually, the whole art of
Classical prose is designed immediately for the ear. One read it as
if one were speaking, whereas we, by comparison, speak everything as
though we were reading it--with the result that in the eternal seesaw
between script-image and word-sound we have never attained to a prose
style that is perfect in the Attic sense. In the Arabian Culture, on
the other hand, each religion developed its own script and kept it even
through changes of verbal language; the duration of the sacred books
and teachings and the script as symbol of duration belong together.
The oldest evidences of alphabetical script are found in southern
Arabia in the Minæan and Sabæan scripts--differentiated, without
doubt, according to sect--which probably go back to the tenth century
before Christ.[207] The Jews, Mandæans, and Manichæans in Babylonia
spoke Eastern Aramaic, but all of them had scripts of their own. From
the Abbassid period onward Arabic ruled, but Christians and Jews
wrote it in their own characters.[208] Islam spread the Arabic script
universally amongst its adherents, irrespective of whether their spoken
language was Semitic, Mongolian, Aryan, or a Negro tongue.[209] The
growth of the writing habit brings with it, everywhere and inevitably,
the distinction between the written and the colloquial languages. The
written language brings the symbolism of duration to bear upon its own
grammatical condition, which itself yields only slowly and reluctantly
to the progressive modifications of the colloquial language--the
latter, therefore, always representing at any given moment a younger
condition. There is not one Hellenic κοινή, but two,[210] and the
immense distance between the written and the living Latin of Imperial
times is sufficiently evidenced in the structure of the early Romance
languages.[211] The older a Civilization becomes, the more abrupt
is the distinction, until we have the gap that to-day separates
written Chinese from Kuan-Chua, the spoken language of educated North
Chinese--a matter no longer of two dialects but of two reciprocally
alien languages.
Here, it should be observed, we have direct expression of the fact that
writing is above everything a matter of status, and more particularly
an ancient privilege of priesthood. The peasantry is without history
_and therefore without writing_. But, even apart from this, there is
in Race an unmistakable antipathy to script. It is, I think, a fact
of the highest importance to graphology that the more the writer has
race (breed), the more cavalierly he treats the ornamental structure
of the letters, and the more ready he is to replace this by personal
line-pictures. Only the Taboo-man evidences a certain respect for
the proper forms of the letters and ever, if unconsciously, tries to
reproduce them. It is the distinction between the man of action, who
makes history, and the scholar, who merely puts it down on paper,
“eternalizes” it. In all Cultures the script is in the keeping of
the priesthood, in which class we have to count also the poet and
the scholars. The nobility despises writing; it has people to write
for it. From the remotest times this activity has had something
intellectual-sacerdotal about it. Timeless truths came to be such,
not at all through speech, but only when there came to be script for
them. It is the opposition of castle and cathedral over again: which
shall endure, deed or truth? The archivist’s “sources” preserve facts,
the holy scripture, truths. What chronicles and documents mean in
the first-named, exegesis and library mean in the second. And thus
there is something besides cult-architecture that is not decorated
with ornament, but _is_ ornament[212]--the _book_. The art-history
of all Cultural springtimes ought to begin with the script, and the
cursive script even before the monumental. Here we can observe the
essence of the Gothic style, or of the Magian, at its purest. No other
ornament possesses the inwardness of a letter-shape or a manuscript
page; nowhere else is arabesque as perfect as it is in the Koran
texts on the walls of a mosque. And, then, the great art of initials,
the architecture of the marginal picture, the plastic of the covers!
In a Koran in the Kufi script every page has the effect of a piece
of tapestry. A Gothic book of the Gospels is, as it were, a little
cathedral. As for Classical art, it is very significant that the one
thing that it did not beautify with its touch was the script and the
book-roll--an exception founded in its steady hatred of that which
endures, the contempt for a technique which insists on being more
than a technique. Neither in Hellas nor in India do we find an art of
monumental inscription as in Egypt. It does not seem to have occurred
to anybody that a sheet of handwriting of Plato was a relic, or that a
fine edition of the dramas of Sophocles ought to be treasured up in the
Acropolis.
As the city lifted up its head over the countryside, as the burgher
joined the noble and the priest and the urban spirit aspired to
supremacy, writing, from being a herald of nobles’ fame and of eternal
truths, became a means of commercial and scientific intercourse. The
Indian and the Classical Cultures rejected the pretension and met the
working requirement by importation from abroad; it was as a humble tool
of everyday use that alphabetical script slowly won their acceptance.
With this event rank, as contemporaneous and like in significance,
the introduction into China of the phonetic script about 800, and the
discovery of book-printing in the West in the fifteenth century; the
symbol of duration and distance was reinforced in the highest degree
by making it accessible to the large number. Finally the Civilizations
took the last step and brought their scripts into utilitarian form.
As we have seen, the discovery of alphabetical script in the Egyptian
Civilization, about 2000, was a purely technical innovation. In the
same way Li Si, Chancellor to the Chinese Augustus, introduced the
Chinese standard script in 227. And lastly, amongst ourselves--though
as yet few of us have appreciated the real significance of the fact--a
new kind of writing has appeared. That Egyptian alphabetic script is in
no wise a final and perfected thing is proved by the discovery of its
fellow, our _stenography_, which means no mere shortening of writing,
but _the overcoming of the alphabetic script by a new and highly
abstract mode of communication_. It is not impossible, indeed, that in
the course of the next centuries script-forms of the shorthand kind may
displace letters completely.
VIII
May the attempt be made, thus early, to write a morphology of the
Culture-languages? Certainly, science has not as yet even discovered
that there is such a task. Culture-languages are languages of
_historical_ men. Their Destiny accomplishes itself not in biological
spaces of time, but in step with the organic evolution of strictly
limited lifetimes. _Culture languages are historical languages_, which
means, primarily, that there is no historical event and no political
institution that will not have been determined in part by the spirit
of the language employed in it and, conversely, that will not have
its influence upon the spiritual form of that language. The build
of the Latin sentence is yet another consequence of Rome’s battles,
which in giving her conquests compelled the nation as a whole to think
administratively; German prose bears traces even to-day of the Thirty
Years’ War in its want of established norms, and early Christian dogma
would have acquired a different shape if the oldest Scriptures, instead
of being one and all written in Greek, and been set down in Syriac form
like those of the Mandæans. But secondarily it means that world-history
is dependent--to a degree that students have hitherto scarcely
imagined--_upon the existence of script as the essentially historical
means of communication_. The State (in the higher sense of the word)
presupposes intercourse by writing; the style of all politics is
determined absolutely by the significance that the politico-historical
thought of the nation attaches in each instance to charters and
archives, to signatures, to the products of the publicist; the battle
of legislation is a fight for or against a written law; constitutions
replace material force by the composition of paragraphs and elevate a
piece of writing to the dignity of a weapon. Speech belongs with the
present, and writing with duration, but equally, oral understanding
pairs with practical experience, and writing with theoretical thought.
The bulk of the inner political history of all Late periods can be
traced back to this opposition. The ever-varying facts resist the
“letter,” while _truths demand it_--that is the world-historical
opposition of two parties that in one form or another is met with in
the great crises of all Cultures. The one lives in actuality, the other
flourishes a text in its face; all great revolutions presuppose a
literature.
The group of Western Culture-languages appeared in the tenth century.
The available bodies of language--namely, the Germanic and Romance
dialects (monkish Latin included)--were developed into script-languages
under a single spiritual influence. It is _impossible_ that there
should not be a common character in the development of German,
English, Italian, French, and Spanish from 900 to 1900, as also in
the history of the Hellenic and Italic (Etruscan included) between
1100 and the Empire. But what is it that, irrespective of the area
of extension of language-families or races, acquires specific unity
from the landscape-limit of the Culture alone? What modifications have
Hellenistic and Latin in common after 300--in pronunciation and idiom,
metrically, grammatically, and stylistically? What is present in German
and Italian after 1000, but not in Italian and Rumanian? These and
similar questions have never yet been systematically investigated.
Every Culture at its awakening finds itself in the presence
of _peasant-languages_, speeches of the cityless countryside,
“everlasting,” and almost unconcerned with the great events of history,
which have gone on through late Culture and Civilization as unwritten
dialects and slowly undergone imperceptible changes. On the top of
this now the language of the two primary Estates raises itself as the
first manifestation of a waking relation that _has_ Culture, that _is_
Culture. Here, in the ring of nobility and priesthood, languages become
Culture-languages, and, more particularly, _talk belongs with the
castle, and speech to the cathedral_. And thus on the very threshold
of evolution the plantlike separates itself from the animal, the
destiny of the living from the destiny of the dead, that of the organic
side from that of the mechanical side of understanding. For the Totem
side affirms and the Taboo side denies, blood and Time. Everywhere we
meet, and very early indeed, rigid cult-languages whose sanctity is
guaranteed by their inalterability, systems long dead, or alien to
life and artificially fettered, which have the strict vocabulary that
the formulation of eternal truths requires. Old Vedic stiffened as a
religious language, and with it Sanskrit as a savant-language. The
Egyptian of the Old Kingdom was perpetuated as priests’ language, so
that in the New Empire sacred formulæ were no more understandable than
the _Carmen Saliare_ and the hymn of the Fratres Arvales in Augustan
times.[213] In the Arabian pre-Cultural period Babylonian, Hebrew, and
Avestan simultaneously went out of use as workaday languages--probably
in the second century before Christ--indeed on that very account Jews
and Persians used them in their Scriptures as in opposition to Aramaic
and Pehlevi. The same significance attached to Gothic Latin for the
Church, Humanists’ Latin for the learning of the Baroque, Church
Slavonic in Russia, and no doubt Sumerian in Babylonia.
In contrast with this, the nursery of talk is in the early castles
and palaces of assize. Here the _living_ Culture-languages have been
formed. Talk is the custom of speech, its manners--“good form” in
the intonation and idiom, fine tact in choice of words and mode of
expression. All these things are a mark of _race_; they are learned not
in the monastery cell or the scholar’s study, but in polite intercourse
and from living examples. In noble society, and as a hall-mark of
nobility, the language of Homer,[214] as also the old French of the
Crusades and the Middle High German of the Hohenstaufen, were erected
out of the ordinary talk of the country-side. When we speak of the
great epic poets, the Skalds, the Troubadours, as creators of language,
we must not forget that they began by being trained for their task, _in
language as in other things_, by moving in noble circles. The great art
by which the Culture finds its tongue is the achievement of a race and
not that of a craft.
The clerical language on the other hand starts from concepts and
conclusions. It labours to improve the dialectical capacities of the
words and sentence-forms to the maximum. There sets in, consequently,
an ever-increasing differentiation of scholastic and courtly, of
the idiom of intellectual from that of social intercourse. Beyond
all divisions of language-families there is a component common to
the expression of Plotinus and Thomas Aquinas, of Veda and Mishna.
Here we have the starting-point of all the ripe scholar-languages of
the West--which, German and English and French alike, bear to this
day the unmistakable signs of their origin in scholars’ Latin--and,
therefore, the starting point of all the apparatus of technical
expression and logical sentence-form. This opposition between the
modes of understanding of “Society” and of Science renews itself again
and again till far into the Late period. The centre of gravity in
the history of French was decisively on the side of race; i.e., of
talk. At the Court of Versailles, in the salons of Paris, the _esprit
précieux_ of the Arthurian romances evolves into the “conversation,”
the classical art of talk, whose dictature the whole West acknowledges.
The fact that Ionic-Attic, too, was fashioned entirely in the halls
of the tyrants and in symposia created great difficulties for Greek
philosophy: for later on, it was almost impossible to discuss the
syllogism in the language of Alcibiades. On the other hand, German
prose, in the decisive phase of Baroque, had no central point on which
it could rise to excellence, and so even to-day it oscillates in point
of style between French and Latin--courtly and scholarly--according as
the author’s intuition is to express himself well or accurately. Our
Classical writers, thanks to their linguistic origin in office or study
and their stay as tutors in the castles and the little courts, arrived
indeed at personal styles, and others are able to imitate these styles,
but a specifically German prose, standard for all, they were unable to
create.
To these two class-languages the rise of the city added a third, the
language of the bourgeoisie, which is the true script-speech, reasoned
and utilitarian, prose in the strictest sense of the word. It swings
gently between the expression-modes of elegant society and of learning,
in the one direction thinking for ever of new turns and words _à la
mode_, in the other keeping sturdy hold on its existing stock of ideas.
But in its inner essence it is of a _mercantile_ nature. It feels
itself frankly as a class badge _vis-à-vis_ the historyless-changeless
phrasing of the “people” which Luther and others employed, to the great
scandal of their superficial contemporaries. With the final victory
of the city the urban speech absorbs into itself that of elegance and
that of learning. There arises in the upper strata of megalopolitan
populations the uniform, keenly intelligent, practical κοινή, the
child and symbol of its Civilization, equally averse from dialect
and poetry--something perfectly mechanical, precise, cold, leaving
as little as possible to gesture. These final homeless and rootless
languages can be learned by every trader and porter--Hellenistic in
Carthage and on the Oxus, Chinese in Java, English in Shanghai--and
for their comprehension talk has no importance or meaning. And if we
inquire what really created these languages, we find not the spirit of
a race or of a religion, but the spirit of economics.