CITIES AND PEOPLES (B) PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 2(2)

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSP ECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 137-155

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.137-138

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. [...] 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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.138-139

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. 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 no t even an increased capacity for self-expression by existing means, like, say, the transition from word to sentence (H. Paul), 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. [...] 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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.141

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 poss ible 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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.143

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 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 (t he 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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.144

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.145

So far, then, the inner history of word-languages shows three stages. In the first there appears, within highly developed but wordless communicationlanguages, 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. [...] 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 t he 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 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 erne-sal (women's language).

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.146-147

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 sou nd 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. [...] 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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.147

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.148

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?

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.148-149

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, simultaneously with the horse, at a much later date, the bearers of these names being apparently first soldiers of fortune and afterwards potentates. 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 Aryanspeaking regions without any necessity for "migrations" of a "primitive" folk. [...] 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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.151

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 ivriting. 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?

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.152

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.1 52

May the attempt be made, thus early, to write a morphology of the Culturelanguages? 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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.153-154

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.154

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 f orm" 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. [...] 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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.155

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. [...] 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 koiné, 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.