The Ancient Languages

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IN THE FABLES of the Golden Age we are told that men understood the language of all animals, trees, flowers, and grasses. That is a reminder of the fact that in the first language that had just come from the fullness of silence, there was still the all-containing fullness.

This language climbed upwards toward the vault of heaven at the same time.

It formed an arch over all the sounds of the earth, and all the sounds of the whole of nature met together. As everything that rises from the earth is taken up into the vault of heaven, so all the voices of the earth were taken up by the one heaven of language. Every single voice entered in and became a part of it, and therefore every voice was understood. This heaven of the languages was the homeland of all voices; they all came to themselves and to each other in this heaven. This language was unobtrusive despite its powerfulness, as unobtrusive as silence itself.


The ancient languages are constructed radially, always beginning from and returning to the centre that is silence, like a fountain with its jets all starting in an arc from the centre, returning to it and disappearing in it.

In modern writings the idea seems to arise from the movements of a man walking straight forward. In the writings of the ancients on the other hand it seems to arise from that of a bird hovering and advancing in circles. (Joubert)

In the early languages there was a mixture of reticence and power: reticence and shyness because language had only just emerged from silence, and power because it had to make sure of its position, to establish itself so that it could not be swept back into silence.

A quiver full of steel arrows, a firmly secured anchor rope, a brazen trumpet splitting the air with its few piercing tones: that is the Hebrew language--it can say but little, but what it says is like the beating of hammers on the anvil. (Renan, Israel)

Almost unchangeable, like a piece of the Cyclopean wall, the ancient words stand as if waiting, as if they might be called back into silence just as they were sent out of silence. It is as though they felt themselves still under the control of silence, as if they were still glancing backwards to the silence whence they came. It was also always possible that another, higher word, a corrective, might come out of the silence.

The early languages had to secure a firm position for themselves--and they were therefore static. The individual words were like stakes set in the ground, each one on its own, with hardly any connection between one stake and the next. The architecture of the language was vertical. Each word sank down vertically, column-wise, into the sentence.

In our old laws the language usually sounds grave and strong; less abrupt, less curt, rather slow and yet without dragging. (Jakob Grimm)

In language today we have lost the static quality of the ancient tongues. The sentence has become dynamic; every word and every sentence speeds on to the next. The architecture of the language is different: the vertical columns have been laid low and the sentence is determined by the impulse of the horizontal onward drive. "The vertical columns would hold up the universal flight like a barrier--but everything now moves horizontally, in the line of flight." (The Flight from God). The sentence becomes fluid and dynamic. The words jostle each other in their violent onward drive. Language today is sharp and aggressive and there is often more aggressiveness in the very form of the language than in the content it is expressing. Language is too self-conscious: each word comes more from the preceding word than from the silence and moves on more to the next word in front than to the silence.


In the ancient languages one notices that the birth of words from silence was not taken for granted but was considered an event of sufficient importance to require a pause in the flow of language before the arrival of the next word. Words were constantly being interrupted by silence. As a river being born receives at every moment waters from different springs, in like manner after every word a new spring of silence flowed into the stream of the sentence

In the ancient languages the word was merely an interruption of the silence. Every word was rimmed around with silence. It was this surrounding rim of silence that gave it its individual shape, and kept it separate and distinct from all other words, fenced off from them with its individuality guarded by the silence. If there is no silence between words they lose their individual shape and personality. Instead of being persons they become an undifferentiated mass.

In the ancient languages there was a silence in the interval between two words. The language breathed silence, spoke silence, into the great silence from which it came.

In the classical style silence usually occupies an important space. Silence predominates in the style of Tacitus. Vulgar anger breaks out, the lower kind of anger chatters, but there is an indignation which feels the need of silence in order to leave the word to the things that are done in expectation of future justice. (Ernest Hello)

It is important that the ancient languages should be taught in schools because they reveal the origin of language in silence, the power of silence over language, and the healing influence of silence on language so much more clearly than these things are revealed today in our own language.

It is also important that through the ancient languages that are "useless", man should be redeemed from the world of mere profit and utility. We cannot "do much" with the ancient languages, but they bring us into touch with something that takes us beyond the world of pure expedience.

It is also important that dialects should be preserved. For a man who is in the habit of speaking dialect finds it impossible to move unchecked from word to word when he is writing or speaking the standard language. He always has to start out from the dialect to reach the standard written language at all. The standard language is not something ready-made that he takes for granted. When a man who usually speaks dialect speaks the standard language he drags the dialect underneath him like a brake-shoe under a cart. Dialect words are less easily manoeuverable. Like the silence that interrupts the flow of words and prevents language from becoming a mechanical routine, dialect, though to a lesser degree, protects the separate individuality of words.

Probably it is against the whole nature of language and therefore against the whole nature of man that dialects should be absorbed by the uniform standard language and that this should expand too far beyond its proper limits. In all human concerns there is a definite relationship between the quantity and the quality of a phenomenon. A human phenomenon cannot expand beyond a certain measure without destroying itself, and apparently this applies to language as to everything else.

The finest truth of the English language is injured by its all-too-universal expansion. . . . Any bird lover must admit that the sparrow has many virtues but it must give him a nasty jerk to think of the powers of propagation of this small bird. If he thinks too hard he will become obsessed by the idea of a world from which all the more fastidious species have disappeared and only a universal sparrowdom remains. (Basil de Sélincourt)

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Picard, Max. The World of Silence. Trans. Stanley Godman. London: Harvill, 1948.