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.