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,[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] Islam spread the Arabic script universally amongst its adherents, irrespective of whether their spoken language was Semitic, Mongolian, Aryan, or a Negro tongue.[4] 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
- ↑ Radio broadcasting does not controvert this. Its characteristic quality is not (as is often supposed) dissemination to vast numbers irrespective of physical distance, but a special intimacy of address to the listening individual. — Tr.
- ↑ See the article "Semitic Language," Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.
- ↑ Similarly the modern Jews of the Dispersion write Yiddish, which is a modified German, in Hebrew characters. — Tr.
- ↑ See Lidzbarski, Sitz. Berl. Akad. (1916), p 1218. There is plentiful material in M. Miese, Die Gesetze der Schriftgeschichte (1919).
