Dead language

“ As a poet yourself, I am not sure that it would be an advantage to know a dead language so well that its forms and modes of thought ran, though perhaps unconsciously, into those of the living one in which you compose. ”

“ Nay, we prefer the humblest original painting to a feeble copy of a great picture,—a barely “good” original book to any lifeless translation. A living dog is better than a dead lion; for the external attributes of the latter are nothing without the spirit that makes them terrible.
The difficulty of translating from a dead language, of whose onomatopœia we are ignorant, will appear still more clearly, when we consider what gross and ludicrous blunders are made in translating even from one living language into another. ”

“ We know how great are the barriers the varying tongues raise between living peoples: how much effort must be given to acquire a language foreign to us, even when surrounded by the sound of it in our daily life, and assisted by teachers, yet supreme human ingenuity has, from these fragments of broken stones, reconstructed dead tongues and forgotten histories of civilizations that for millenniums have been but dust blown through voiceless deserts. ”

“ What can be done? It is the decree of fate. In vain, therefore, should we seek to petrify the mobile physiognomy of our idiom in a fixed form. In vain do our literary Joshuas cry out to the language to stand still; languages and the sun do not stand still. The day when they become fixed, they are dead.—That is why the French of a certain contemporary school is a dead language.
Such are, substantially, but without the more elaborate development which would make the evidence in their favour more complete, the present ideas of the author of this book concerning the drama. ”

“ Incidentally it is evident that the impulse to thinking, in the case of a people with a dead language, will be most powerful and produce the greatest apparent results in the beginning, when the language has not yet become clear enough to everyone. It is also evident that, as soon as the language becomes clearer and more definite, this impulse to thinking will tend more and more to die away in the chains of the language. ”

“ When we consider the question of taking greater pains, it is natural that this can be done by the people with the living language. A living language can stand on a higher level of culture in comparison with another, but it can never in itself attain that perfection of development which a dead language quite easily attains. ”

“ But compare that usage with the rude freedom of some modern spooks, as John Kendrick Bangs's spectral cook of Bangletop, who lets fall her h's and twists grammar in a rare and diverting manner. For myself, I'd hate to be an old-fashioned ghost with no chance to keep up with the styles in slang. Think of having always—and always—to speak a dead language! ”

“ The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise from any superior abstruseness in the languages themselves, but in their being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same thing with any other language when it becomes dead. ”

“ Similarly, the investigations of a people with a living language go down, as we have already said, to the root where ideas stream forth from spiritual nature itself; whereas the investigations of a people with a dead language only seek to penetrate a foreign idea and to make themselves comprehensible. ”

“ and all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. ”

“ Language, which is more accustomed and adapted to express the appearances than the realities of things, leads us astray very much when we use the phrase 'the dead' as if it expressed the continuance of the condition into which men pass in the act of dissolution. ”

“ The fallacy of the systematic critics arises from the 132 principle that a modern language is stationary and stable, like those which are emphatically called “the dead languages,” in which every deviation unsupported by authority is legally condemned as a barbarism. ”

“ For just as facts are the skeletons of truths, so words are single bones, and the dictionary is a vast ossuary. Talk of the dead languages—all languages are dead unless spoken, and spoken with real feeling. ”

“ As long as it is alive and spoken, it is constantly changing and will not remain “fixed” according to the whimsical desire of the purist. When it ceases to be used upon the lips of the people as a [Pg 120] medium of communication of their thoughts and feelings, then it will cease to change and grow and will become “fixed.” But when a language is no longer spoken, it is characterized as dead. ”

“ They seek the living among the dead: that is, they seek it where it never can be found. Let us ask whether one inevitable result—one disadvantage of the possession of a highly cultivated language, is not this:—that, being fraught with numberless associations, it enables poetasters and false philosophers to abound—inasmuch as it enables them to make words stand in place of things and do the business of thoughts? ”

“ If we die, it will be because we have wished it. Our language is not dead; on the contrary, although not widely spread, it is in itself much more alive than English, which as a literary language is in full decay. We may congratulate ourselves that our idiom is intact. ”

“ They get symbols which for them are neither immediately clear nor able to stimulate life, but which must seem to them entirely as arbitrary as the sensuous part of the language. For them this advent of history, and nothing but history, as expositor, makes the language dead and closed in respect of its whole sphere of imagery, and its continuous onward flow is broken off. ”

“ Even that is often a trying problem. But to find also such words as shall graduate and adjust their depth of feeling to the scale of another language, and that language a dead language, is many times beyind all reach of human skill. ”

“ However, if the dead languages continue to be taught in our schools, I could wish them to be taught through a different medium than at present. Those languages might be taught on other subjects than wars, famines, and massacres, immoral mythologies and the history of base and vicious characters. It has been the common misfortune of historians to take especial notice of base and vicious characters. Hitherto profligacy has been the chief passport to immortality, and the virtuous few have passed through life unheeded before or after death with but very few exceptions. ”

“ Although such a language may be stirred on the surface by the wind of life and thus present the appearance of having a life of its own, nevertheless it has a dead element deeper down, and by the entrance of the new circle of observation and the breach with the old one it is cut off from the living root. ”

“ It seemed to be forgotten that a language with all its construction visible is a language little fitted for the more advanced mental processes; that its images are material; and that, on the other hand, a certain spiritualizing and subtilizing effect of alien derivations is a privilege and an advantage incalculable—that to possess that half of the language within which Latin heredities lurk and Romanesque allusions are at play is to possess the state and security of a dead tongue, without the death. ”

“ In short, the records of dead speech must be interpreted by the facts of living language, just as the conditions which brought about the deposition of the rocks can only be explained by the [157] forces still at work upon the surface of the globe. Here as elsewhere in science, we must proceed from the known to the unknown. ”

“ While our sons are not on speaking terms with many live languages, it ill becomes them to go fooling around the dead and dying. I do not think it necessary that our sons should study these defunct tongues. A language that did not have strength enough to pull through and crawled off somewhere and died, doesn't seem worth studying. ”

“ It must be distinctly understood that many passages and allusions in the Book of the Dead still remain obscure, and that in some places any translator will be at a difficulty in attempting to render certain, important words into any modern European language. ”

“ I sometimes suspect that many persons doubt of their importance, from the fact of their being distinguished as the dead languages, while, perhaps, they are exactly the only immortal ones—unchangeable throughout all ages in their primitive purity. ”

“ Willie F.—Your idea that time spent in the study of the dead languages is lost time, and that you would prefer to devote yourself wholly to your native tongue, is perhaps a natural one, but it is based on an error. Latin and Greek are dead languages in the sense that they are not spoken in any land by living people to-day. ”

“ The philologist might next proceed to point out that the geographical relations of living and dead languages favour the hypothesis of the living ones having been derived from the extinct, in spite of our inability, in most instances, to adduce documentary evidence of the fact or to discover monuments of all the intermediate and transitional dialects which must have existed. ”

“ But aside from all lighter thoughts there is something very moving and pathetic in the death of an old language. Permit me to tell you, not as a philologist, a character to which I have no claim, but as an imaginative writer, how the death of an ancient tongue affects me. ”

“ The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. ”

“ To the latter belong most of that taught at our universities and public schools—especially what are called the ‘dead languages’—all but useless as regards the needs and realities of after life, and but of little value even for its adornments. Lore more valueless, and time worse spent than in acquiring it, are scarce possible to be conceived. ”

“ I trade both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our native language. ”

“ It may occur to some hypercritical person to suggest that the English language has frequently been murdered in my den, and that it is its horrid corse which is playing havoc at my home, crying out to heaven and flaunting its bloody wounds in the face of my conscience, but I can pass such an aspersion as that by with contemptuous silence, for even if it were true it could not be set down as wilful assassination on my part, since no sane person who needs a language as much as I do would ever in cold blood kill any one of the many that lie about us. ”

“ Great writers enrich languages, good translators slow down their impoverishment. The dying off of tongues is a remarkable metaphysical phenomenon that warrants study. A language doesn’t take its leave until it has created another one, sometimes a number of others. Its death throes are mingled with giving birth. For certain insects, death consists in the laying of eggs. So it is likewise for languages. Languages start dying as a result of a thickening of the idiom which takes away their transparency. ”

“ Is it possible that any one now believes that the whole world would be of one speech had the language not been confounded at Babel? Do we not know that every word was suggested in some way by the experience of men? Do we not know that words are continually dying, and continually being born; that every language has its cradle and its cemetery—its buds, its blossoms, its fruits and its withered leaves? Man has loved, enjoyed, hated, suffered and hoped, and all words have been born of these experiences. ”

“ What folly, then, to dream of mapping out our minds in however general terms, of providing for the endless mysteries of the future a terminology and an idiom! We follow the vein, we mine and accumulate our treasure, but who can tell which way the vein may trend? Language is the nourishment of the thought of man, that serves only as it undergoes metabolism, and becomes thought and lives, and in its very living passes away. ”

“ As soon as phonetic corruption shows itself in a language, that language has lost what we considered to be the most essential character of all human speech, namely, that every part of it should have a meaning. ”

“ When men found themselves all of a sudden inspired to talk in foreign languages which they had never learnt, to utter words of which they themselves did not know the meaning, do you not see how it must have made them feel that all language is God’s making and God’s giving? Do you not see how it must have made them feel what awful, mysterious things words were, like those cloven tongues of fire which fell on the apostles? The tongues of fire signified the difficult foreign languages which they suddenly began to speak as the Spirit gave them utterance. ”

“ The drift of culture, another way of saying history, is a complex series of changes in society’s selected inventory—additions, losses, changes of emphasis and relation. The drift of language is not properly concerned with changes of content at all, merely with changes in formal expression. It is possible, in thought, to change every sound, word, and concrete concept of a language without changing its inner actuality in the least, just as one can pour into a fixed mold water or plaster or molten gold. ”

“ It is during times when the higher classes are either crushed in religious and social struggles, or [pg 069] mix again with the lower classes to repel foreign invasion; when literary occupations are discouraged, palaces burnt, monasteries pillaged, and seats of learning destroyed,—it is then that the popular, or, as they are called, the vulgar dialects, which had formed a kind of undercurrent, rise beneath the crystal surface of the literary language, and sweep away, like the waters in spring, the cumbrous formations of a by-gone age. ”