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.[1] 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,[2] 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
- ↑ For this reason I am one of those who believe that, even quite late, Etruscan still played a very important part in the colleges of the Roman priesthood.
- ↑ Precisely for this reason it has to be recognized that the Homeric poems, which were first fixed in the colonization period, can only give us an urban literary language and not the courtly conversation-language in which they were originally declaimed.
