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Culture and civilization: original elements and foreign assimilations in the historical progress of languages |
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b) In search of roots
The latin roots of the Holy Roman Empire represent that uniformity of codes,
in Mediaeval Europe, without which the emergence of Latin as the 'official'
language of culture from the 15th Century to the 18th
would be inconceivable. In like manner, the Troubadours' poetic image of the
donna angelicata provides the pivot on which metaphors of the Soul would
come to hinge in premodern cultures, with all their particular symbology of
mirrors, ghostly doubles and wayfarers. Languages too have their place in this
tradition.
In Europe there are diurnal languages and nocturnal languages. The former
incline toward objectivity, the latter toward subjectivity. Diurnal languages
are generated in federalistic milieux characterized by interaction between
national cultures. They are languages of 'civilization'. Nocturnal languages are
solidly nationalistic. They are languages of 'culture'. Diurnal languages have
as their substratum the codes of legal and mercantile expression. Anyone engaged
in decoding neo-latin languages should start from the Pandette di
Giustiniano: the first organic collection of laws common to the latin world.
It would then become clear how in diurnal languages the fundamental element is
the nexus between subject and object, whilst the complement serves to 'set the
scene' in which the interaction is placed. Quite the opposite applies in
nocturnal languages, where the notion of 'complement' simply does not exist,
unless as an indicator of 'manner'; in this sense, 'how' is more important than
'what' in nocturnal languages. In German, wenn suggests the outcome of an
action, stemming from fulfilment of the conditions which determined the reasons
or justifications for the action. So, wenn is neither 'when' nor
'whenever'. Neither temporal nor causal. If anything, it conveys the idea that
time has a logic all its own, running its course outside of our control. By
contrast, weil indicates a chronological succession of events unfolding
inexorably to produce an inescapable result (a destiny? In German, the tragic
hero is always begotten of a weil).
If, adopting a well-established metaphor, we understand the light of day as a
symbol of enlightening Reason and the shadows of night as expressing the culture
of the Other Self, it will be clear that the neo-latin languages are languages
of the daytime, and the broad body of those originating from Saxon and Germanic
stock are languages of the night-time. Or in short: the former are languages of
denotation, the latter of connotation. Or again: the one type of language gives
importance to the 'what', as defined by hierarchical reference, and the other to
the 'how', as defined by the psychological oscillations of the Ego.
Underlying this divisive dichotomy there is a historical process. Neo-latin
languages derive from the assimilation of Greek culture bedded in a legal and
commercial language that had two characteristics: 1) it was a product of
artificial synthesis, built on a system of academic rules; 2) it reflected the
needs of coexistence and the emergence of a life involving relations between
different cultures and languages. Ductility therefore, or what we might better
refer to as anthropocentricity, was not the special feature of Latin. Greek on
the other hand was the language used by a modest city of fourteen thousand
inhabitants ¾ the Athens
of the fourth century ¾
which grew from a dialectic structuring of attitudes particular to the various
arts and professions (including Philosophy and the Theatre). In Greek, then, one
has the aorist, precursor of the German preterit and the English present
continuous, which before being English was Saxon. In aoristic expression, what
matters is the result: that circumstance whereby if event A does not come about,
then event B cannot even be contemplated (Aristotle's tertium non
datur...). In Latin, by contrast, the organization of meaning is never
logical, but always spatiotemporal and therefore hierarchical. In nocturnal
languages, the concept of 'near' and 'remote' as denotative of tense, of
chronological sequence, does not even exist.
In the broad sense, diurnal languages could be considered Copernican, and
nocturnal languages Ptolemaic. In the first, it is meaning that gives voice to
the universe of language; in the second it is sense: indistinct, subjective, not
reducible to any linguistic hierarchy. In short: diurnal languages are
centripetal, nocturnal languages centrifugal.
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