The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] I believe I have shown you something of the development of language through a few characteristic examples, so that you can, in a sense, gain insight into the inner workings of the genius that shapes language from these examples. If you wish to navigate your way through linguistic phenomena and their developments, it will be necessary for you to understand guiding principles derived from such characteristic phenomena. Of course, I have been able to suggest only a few things to you, and even today, by summarizing the foundations of these observations, I will be able to show you only a general guideline. Hopefully, we will be able to continue these reflections here in the very near future. What you have been able to see primarily through our reflections is surely that, at the primitive stages of linguistic development, people are inwardly receptive to—and inwardly animated by—the harmony between sound and thing. Whether this thing is a sensation or an external process, an external object, or an external fact: when it comes to forming sounds for sensations that a person experiences in the external world, then the sounds are formed vocally in the broadest sense. In language, “vocalic” refers to everything formed internally, everything that is felt internally and that, arising from those emotional and volitional elements present in the sensation, finds its way into the sound. In all vowels, in all vowel formations, we must therefore see, as it were, the feelings and impulses of the will—which a person experiences in relation to the external world—that are thrust into the larynx. In all consonants, we must see what a person mimics in gestures based on what they perceive in the external world.

[ 2 ] Let us assume, for example, that a person wants to express an angle; he first has this angle as a mental image. If he were to trace the sides of this angle with his hand, he would do so in this way (gesture). The same movement that they make with their hand in this way is, in reality, the movement they make with their speech organs when forming certain consonants. In this respect, language is merely the audible expression of gestures—gestures that are not made externally with the limbs, but rather with much finer parts of the human organism, with the respiratory system available to humans. If you take this inner law into account, you will gradually form a general understanding of how language either directly imitates the external world or how it is an imitation of what a person experiences sensually in relation to the external world.

[ 3 ] Let us assume, for example, that a person is faced with two situations that present themselves in such a way that he can do one thing or the other. This initially prompts him, instinctively, to consider how he might do one thing or the other. If a person is still more or less—as indeed all people are at a primitive stage of language development—an “imitator,” then the relationship they enter into with the external world still takes the form of an outward, gestural expression. They do it this way (the gesture is demonstrated): He makes a decision between his right half and his left half; that is, he expresses this by internally splitting himself in two, because two sets of external facts are presented to him. He splits himself internally into two parts to weigh which way the greater weight in his thinking leans. So, he does it like this (gesture): he separates, decides, or divides. And of course, if he is to reach a favorable decision, he must go back as far as possible: therefore, he not only divides himself, but he also judges himself, and you must understand the word “judgment” entirely as a gesture internally transformed into sound. Thus, all consonantal formation is gesture formation that has simply metamorphosed into a set of sounds.

[ 4 ] The underlying principle can be traced throughout the entire course of language development. At first, human beings are creatures who live more in the external world; only gradually do they become inner beings; initially, they live in the external world. They live in close connection with things, especially in those times when the original, primitive clairvoyance still exists. In the times of this very original, primitive clairvoyance, human beings do not think much about themselves; nor do they have a specific conception of themselves, but they know that there are all kinds of ghosts and elemental spirits, which they perceive in what we now call external objects; yet they also still see themselves as elemental beings. “You,” he tells himself, “were brought into the world by your father and mother.” He still views himself objectively. That is why we find that the language-forming genius, in the earliest stages of language formation, acts primarily through consonants, and primitive languages are mainly consonantal languages, because primitive humans still lack inner life. Primitive peoples, who have thus remained at these original stages, therefore have an abundance of consonantal structures in their language—consonantal sounds that very clearly reveal the element of imitation of external phenomena. Take, for example, such clicking sounds, where the human speech organs directly produce something akin to heavy whip cracks and the like—as certain African peoples still produce—which later cease when human beings begin to reveal more of their inner, sensory element in their sound systems. Thus, a first stage must be recognized in consonantal formations. A second stage must then be seen in the formation of vowels. But the inner quality that confronts us in these vowel formations is merely a transitional phase, and when signs of aging begin to appear in relation to the linguistic genius, the vowel-forming power ceases once more, and the power to form consonants takes its place.

[ 5 ] So, in fact, the path that humans take in language development goes from the outside to the inside and then back again from the inside to the outside. But what can be directly observed in the sound system is fundamentally essential to the entire process of language formation. It is so profoundly essential that we encounter it again in all forms of language. Everywhere we first encounter a stage of language development where, in a sense, human beings still create their language selflessly and unconsciously; at this stage, they still have the impulse to attach one word—which designates one thing—externally to another. But at this stage, human beings are also very lively creatures. As human beings later internalize and spiritualize themselves, they lose a bit of this primitive liveliness; they become more inward-looking, less lively, indeed more abstract, and they lack the power to later pour what is for them an external perception into the word itself: they attach it more. — We can study such phenomena, and tracing them through characteristic examples is extraordinarily interesting. If, for example, you have salbom (“I anoint”) in Old High German, you can then go through all the personal pronouns: salbom: I anoint, salbos: you anoint, salbot: he anoints, salbomes: we anoint, salbot: you (plural) anoint, salbont: they anoint. In these six words, through which the verb “to anoint” is conjugated, you always have “salbo” as the element that belongs to the actual verb, to the action. Whatever is appended to it must always be regarded as that which indicates the presence of the personal pronoun in the word: thus, for “I”: m, for “you”: s, for “he”: t, for “we”: mes, for “you (plural)”: t, for “they”: nt. The fact that these final sounds are still present within the words themselves is to be understood in the following way. First, the opposites “I,” “you,” “he,” “we,” “you (plural),” and “she/they” appear at such a primitive stage as the one we are dealing with here in such a way that they are very external to the person: he adds them to what expresses the action. Yet it is inwardly alive; he vividly connects them to the designation of the action. Thus, this twofold aspect must be taken into account: first, the orientation toward the external; second, the addition to the inner, living transformative power of the main word itself. You can see that “I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” and “it” were not originally perceived merely as an organic part—and thus already somewhat internalized—within the verb itself from the fact that these designations, which are simply glued together with the main word, exist in the related Sanskrit as entirely independent designations for “I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” and “it.” For the “m” that you find in Old High German is merely the metamorphosed “mi”: “I” in Sanskrit; the “s” is the metamorphosed “si”: “you” in Sanskrit; “t” = “ti”: “he,” “she,” “it”; “mes” = the metamorphosed “masi”: “we” in Sanskrit; the “t” is the transformed “tasi”: “you all”; “nt” is the “anti”—spoken only somewhat fleetingly—which corresponds to “she” in Sanskrit. So you can still see in Sanskrit that it is not simply a matter of internally inflecting the main verb and then perceiving the personal pronoun in the inflection; no, the personal pronoun is already present in one’s conception. One is inwardly alive enough to organize this personal designation into the sound system that expresses the most essential aspect. This is an important distinction; for you might easily believe that at these primitive stages there is primarily an internal inflection of words. No, that is not it: it is an inner vitality that links both components together. So the activity is, as such, a consonantal activity, not a vocalic one. When a language like Latin then reaches the stage where it perceives the personal designation within the inner organism of the sound system itself, that is already a stage corresponding to a greater inner life of the linguistic genius in question. Thus the linguistic genius climbs upward from externality into interiority; and it does so by first appending to the end what it perceives as an external fact: salbom: I anoint; salbos: you anoint! Just as at more primitive stages one does not say Karl Meyer but rather der Meyer-Karl, so it was here as well; what specifies is appended at the end. Here, too, it is no different: the specified element—that which is specified by the personal designation—is appended at the end.

[ 6 ] It is precisely this approach—removing this designation from the end and adding it independently at the beginning—that leads to the utmost internalization, to that internalization which then perceives the inner realm in a spiritually abstract manner. Thus, one isolates the person and places them at the forefront. And you can discern something important in language; you can go back to the primitive forms of the language-forming genius, where this genius actually knows nothing of the “I” and “You,” separate from external things, and thus still forces into the word what it has to say about this “I” and “You.” Then it finds it within the word itself—a language at this stage is Latin—and then it extracts it, arrives at self-contemplation, arrives at egoism, and places the “I” and “You” at the forefront. This becoming egoistic, this arrival at self-contemplation, is, in essence, what is clearly reflected in the development of language. One could say that “Know thyself,” at a certain subconscious level, was carried out in the wake of the Apollonian maxim: “Know thyself”—through the subsequent development of Western language, which then extracted terms denoting personality from the lexicon; these terms were still expressions of the inner world, though they had not yet completely detached themselves from it internally. You will simply not be able to study languages unless you follow what I said yesterday: unless you regard them as expressions of psychological development.

[ 7 ] You see, in the living language you can still quite clearly trace the remnants—I would say—of the vocalizing and consonantizing power. In verbs, in action words, there is something that gives them a more vocalizing character in general, whereby the vocalic element is the main feature. You need only give it a moment’s thought, and you will be able to say to yourself: In those verbs—words of action—the vocalizing, the inner feeling, will be the main thing; they express something into which a person, so to speak, immerses themselves, with which they connect. You see, there is a difference between the inner state your soul is in now and the one it was in not long ago. Now you are sitting, and you have been sitting for quite a while. You have connected with what this sitting expresses; this sitting is something very intimately connected to you. The fact that you have come to this sitting happened because you first sat down; you are less intimately connected to that act of sitting down—it is more external to you. You cannot sit down for half an hour because you cannot connect so intimately with the act of sitting down; but you can sit for half an hour and even longer because you can connect with the act of sitting on an inner level. It is true that the sound structure for “sitting” must be perceived by you as vocalizing, while for “sitting down” it must be perceived as more externalized, more consonantal. But if you perceive it as vocalizing, then you will also have the inner power to vocalize, drawn from the genius of language formation, and you will vocalize by using the word in different ways: “sitting,” “sat,” “had sat.” In the consonantal activity you perform—which is expressed through “Setzen”—you will indeed be consonantal and will not form “setzen” in some way as “satzen” or something similar; rather, you must represent an external action, and you do this by saying “setzen.” And if you now want to express that this happened some time ago, you say: “setzentat”—you are making yourself sit, and this undergoes a metamorphosis into “setzte”; for the “te” is the metamorphosed “tat.” Among people who still possess some of this language-forming power within them today, consonantization still occurs in such cases—it is a figurative form of consonantization. But such people must then be at a more primitive stage of development compared to the general public. Such people still possess the capacity today to vocalize as little as possible, and all the more to imitate outward activity—the external reality—in the sound patterns they express by joining and fusing sounds with the act itself. You can see this, for example, when a somewhat more primitive farmer—who had taken pride in sending his son to university—made the following remark: He was asked what his son was doing at the university. At first, the son had used his more modest inheritance less to immerse himself in the abstract intellectual aspects of university life and more to lose himself in its external trappings. And so, when asked what his son was doing at the university, the father said: “He goes for walks, he loafs about, he drinks, he gets up to mischief—but he doesn’t do anything!”

[ 8 ] There is a strong sense of inwardness in that which is transformed into the language-forming action verb. In those sound patterns that have retained their character to this day—namely, their semantic character—you will always sense how what is said to “end in a vowel”—that is, what changes its sound through vocalization when conjugated—expresses that with which a person feels a deeper inner connection. In contrast, in everything that is formed inwardly but expresses that with which a person does not connect so deeply—that which, therefore, does not become a felt experience for them but remains merely something observed—they will not be able to develop ablaut. For example, when you say: “I sing, I sang,” there you have ablaut. It is quite different when you say: “I scorch, I burn.” “Senge”—this word derives its sound structure from the fact that the fire sings. “I senge” = “I make something sing.” When you sing, you connect inwardly with what you wish to express through the sound structure; when you “senge,” you do not connect inwardly with it; you observe it by observing yourself externally: therefore, it does not undergo vowel alternation, but forms “I senge,” “I sengte.”

[ 9 ] When you no longer notice such things today, it is simply because the words have undergone such a profound metamorphosis that it is no longer perceptible. In such cases, one must go back to earlier stages of the sound system. It is truly extraordinarily significant that one can actually trace this three-stage development of human life: first, the relationship with the external world; then, internalization; and finally, the next stage of internalization, where one points to one’s own inner self through words—as, for example, in personal pronouns—that one can truly follow these three stages. And you will make it much easier for yourselves to understand the development of language if you engage in observing this principle. Language truly becomes, through this, a convergence of the mental element and the volitional element within the human being, and at its primitive stage it appears such that, where the sound is still very closely connected to the imaginative, the mental aspect is even difficult to distinguish from the volitional. Our current speech, particularly our Standard German, is in fact already something extraordinarily bound to the will. We speak with the will and habitually learn to apply the will as we learn to speak; and we accompany this speech with the mental images we have become accustomed to associating with those expressions of the will. In English, it is quite different, and therefore, for those who can observe such things, speaking Standard German—the dialects are, after all, even more similar to English—is actually, for the impartial observer, a completely different human activity than speaking English. Speaking English is much more an activity in which thinking occurs during the very act of speaking and the production of sounds, whereas speaking Standard German is an activity in which thinking does not occur during the production of sounds, but rather proceeds as a parallel phenomenon alongside the production of sounds. In general, the Western languages have preserved much more of this unity—this instinctive unity of sound and mental image—than the Central European languages. And that is why the Western European languages have also taken on such a rigid form. It is almost impossible to formulate anything in the Western European languages without being told: “You can’t say that; that’s not how you express yourself.”—This is something that does not exist in Standard German in this form. There, you can say almost anything: you can place the subject here or there, because thought runs more parallel to the sound system than in the Western languages. Only by delving into the earlier stages of our language’s development do we increasingly encounter a strict interconnection between mental image and sound structure; and thus, in our older stages and dialects, we can study what still exists today in Western languages as an atavism.

[ 10 ] If you study language from this perspective with a keen sense of language, it will simultaneously lead you deep into the essence of Folk-souls. Let’s suppose we have an object, a thing, before us. As primitive humans, we form the sound system for this object from consonantal and vocalic elements; so, let’s say “Wagen” for what moves along. When we have the same object in the plural before us—that is, a number of such objects—we form the plural by saying: “die Wägen.” “Die Wagen” is technically correct, but it is actually a form not derived from the organic structure of the language—a form more typical of written language. Why do we form the umlaut here? We derived the sound system from the singular. That is where our consciousness was ignited in the formation of language; that is where it came to life; that is what we were attentive to. When we now form the plural, we have a less comprehensive view of the facts; we feel the need to express the matter somewhat more vaguely: we soften the sound “a” into “ä.” Thus, the original sound structure is always formed through normal, conscious observation of a fact or a sensation. That which is then observed less—or can be observed less—is indicated by a softening. The key here is to see only how something shifts within the person. In many German regions, the dialect says not “der Wagen” but “der Wogn.” For if, during the formation of the sound structure, normal attention was such that an “o” responded, then the blurring is expressed simply by saying “die Woagn” in the plural. You can observe this in a whole series of phenomena.

[ 11 ] There is just one more thing I would like to bring to your attention. You see, much of the consonantal language formation of earlier times was based on intuition; and much of what the soul perceived and absorbed into its constitution has been preserved even in primitive minds and can be studied there. But this intuition, when it was particularly vivid, was still thoroughly linked to a kind of primitive clairvoyance—not merely to the perception of the external world, which is a sensory one. The vividly concrete word designations—which, thank God, we have still preserved—would never have emerged otherwise. Let us take an example: A person with primal sensibility, who was still—however faintly—within the sphere of atavistic clairvoyance, sensed that it is generally the case with human beings that their physical body contains within itself something we today call the etheric body; so that the primitive human being certainly perceived the head (as depicted) and—protruding above it—the second head. He perceived the head as the expression of thought. One could therefore say, using a term very similar to our own: The primitive human beings with original clairvoyance defined the human being in terms of thought. They have it in the word manas as human. Human is, after all, the same as manas. Now, that is the human being as we usually encounter him. Yet the atavistically clairvoyant human knew that one can also encounter other human beings who—I am, of course, joking, but this should not be trivialized—had not bound this supersensory human being so neatly and philistinely to the sensory one, but who somehow found that it did not quite fit into the other human being. So they felt: this etheric body is out of whack, which is then projected onto the whole being: the human being is out of whack. The displacement of the etheric body is a purely external fact—put simply. And it is precisely this kind of vividness, which harks back to a vividness from times when one could still observe the spiritual, that is extraordinarily interesting. And if people were to do this—if the learned linguists were not so asleep that they proceed in a purely external, materialistic manner and do not at all delve into the inner soul life, which finds its expression only in the outwardly language-forming aspects—then the linguistic sciences would of their own accord be able to move first into the science of the soul and then into the Spiritual Science. That is why it is such a pity that our linguistics has become so materialistic. For as a result, not even young people have the opportunity to observe the workings of the soul and the spirit in language formation and its understanding.

[ 12 ] I now believe that for those of you who are teachers at Waldorf schools, what I wanted to present—in a sense—as guidelines through examples can already be useful to you if you take it to heart. First, because it will inspire you to notice certain aspects of language that, when you incorporate the spirit of this approach into your teaching, you will be able to put to use in the most diverse ways. This can certainly be applied in your interactions with your students, since speech is, after all, the connecting element of the lesson. In particular, it helps greatly when one tries oneself to restore some of the original intensity of feeling and vividness to the words: in this way, one trains oneself to feel more vividly than one otherwise would. We modern people actually go about for the most part as living corpses, not least because our language has fallen so far from the heart. It has become an unconscious element of the will. We no longer sense the : and # and e and n—what lies within them in terms of the soul; we do not train ourselves to imbue sounds that are the same with corresponding emotional feelings. We are abstract in our understanding and comprehension, but we are also abstract in our speech. For those who possess a truly vivid sense of language, much of what people say today sounds as if it were the output of a phonograph whose record was inscribed ages ago. We must once again be able to reconnect with language. However, a kind of self-education will then be so necessary that we listen inwardly when we say “rau,” and inwardly perceive the sound sequence “ra»».” And when we say—as we perceive this shape (it is drawn)—“that is a rhombus,” we can perceive “rau” in such a way that what we just felt in the roughness we perceive as the sensation of corners. Then we will also be able to rise to the occasion—even today, when we have such a shape—to perceive its angularity as related to “rau,” and we will perceive the “t” as “txt”: that which is “rau” is the rhombus. It would be a powerful element to unfold the intangible in the classroom if we did not allow the sound structure and the mental image to drift so far apart. Please, how much can we really perceive in terms of the intangible when we talk to the child about this shape and say, “This is a rhombus”?—We ourselves perceive nothing when we say “rhombus.” What kind of foundation could develop for the attention that underlies teaching if we were to re-educate ourselves based on the sound elements and then also feel the need to educate the children in this direction?

[ 13 ] This refers to everything you can gain, in terms of content, for your self-education from such a view of language as I have tentatively attempted to outline for you in these sessions. But I also wanted to show you methodological aspects, my dear friends: My aim was to develop important guidelines using characteristic, concrete examples. I believe that a typical university professor today could probably expand what I have presented to you here in these few hours into three volumes. He would, of course, strive for completeness, but it would be less likely that the very main principles—those that stimulate our thinking, our mental images, and our feelings—would emerge in the process. If you proceed in elementary education in the same way as has been done here in this language course, then you will develop sound methodological principles; you will make every effort to seek out truly characteristic examples of what you wish to present to your students; and you will be able to combine the observation and perception of characteristic examples with the perception of the spiritual aspect of these examples. For there is no better way to drive children into materialism than by giving them abstract instruction. Spiritual instruction is given through concrete examples; but one must not neglect to allow the soul and spirit to reveal themselves through these concrete examples. That is why I believe that what I have given you here can serve as a practical, methodological supplement to the course I gave you before the start of Waldorf school instruction. And I believe that you could also gain a great deal if you were to consider now: How can I—translated into terms suitable for children—structure my own lessons—and this can be done in all subjects—so that they reflect this drawing out of the spiritual through individual concrete examples? If you do this, you will also not easily fall into the danger that almost all teaching faces: failing to cover the material. One only fails to cover the material when one breaks it down into isolated fragments; for then one is too easily tempted to render the individual fragments one goes through uncharacteristic and to let the characteristic aspects emerge through sheer accumulation. Of course, there are uncharacteristic examples in every branch of teaching. With these, one must string many things together. If one takes the trouble to choose characteristic examples and to develop the spiritual aspect through these examples, then one can achieve a certain economy in teaching. I would be pleased, my dear friends—and especially those of you here who are teachers at the Waldorf School, to whom I say this in all friendship—I would be pleased if this twofold aspect had been noted in these improvised lessons: first, the encouragement of self-education through a certain communion with the genius of language, and second, if the methodology of teaching could be influenced somewhat in the sense I just hinted at.

[ 14 ] Then, when I return—hopefully very soon—we will continue these reflections on language.