The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. Dialect and Standard Language

[ 1 ] The question posed to me yesterday after the lecture is directly related to what we have discussed, and, in light of what has been said over the past few days, it can be addressed very well today. Yesterday I attempted, at least in broad terms, to characterize how the content of instructional and educational material cannot, in fact, be the essential point. I said that we cannot simply take what we have as existing material in any science or other field, adapt it for children—much as we adapt botany or zoology—and then simply teach that content to them. I pointed out how the task of teaching can fundamentally become a task of education only if we are able to simultaneously transform the material for visual instruction—whatever its nature may be—into an educational experience. And I demonstrated this yesterday with regard to botany and zoology, at least in broad terms. In the art of education, we must strive more and more to ensure that, especially from the ages of 6 and 7 until puberty, we present everything to the child in such a way that the forces seeking to develop within the child are truly brought to fruition.

[ 2 ] Well, if we want to be able to do that, we must be capable of using in an appropriate way what the child, so to speak, already brings with them. And I have pointed out that a large proportion of children bring with them something we can put to good use in teaching and education: namely, the fact that a large number of children bring dialect into school. The children speak dialect, and they speak it in such a way that this dialect has developed in them under the influence of the instinct to imitate. If we truly possess the ability to observe such things, we will be able to convince ourselves that children who speak dialects have a much more intimate relationship with language than those who do not. How we can utilize this element of dialect speech in school to develop the element of so-called standard language—that was precisely the point of the question posed to me yesterday.

[ 3 ] Now, we must not overlook the fact that the deeper relationship that dialect-speaking children have with their language consists in the fact that the dialect as such—in the process of forming words and sentences—is felt and intended much more intensely than the so-called standard language, which is based more on mental images or on a feeling derived primarily from mental images. In any case, the emotional life is less present in the standard language—when the child speaks it from the very beginning—than in the dialect. The same is true of the impulses of the will.

[ 4 ] This actually points us, right from the start, to something extraordinarily important in all education and teaching, namely that human beings, more than we usually assume, draw their entire being from two sources that truly relate to one another like the North Pole and the South Pole. Therefore, if we strive to shape education or instruction in one direction or the other—if we primarily aim to base everything on perception, to base everything on the child, as it were, critically synthesizing the perceptions presented to them and thereby gradually developing—then we are moving toward one extreme. If we educate the child primarily by relying on their memory or on their acceptance of authority, we are moving toward another one-sided extreme.

[ 5 ] This is particularly evident in language, which shows that two extremes are always intertwined in human nature. Namely, language itself contains a clearly perceptible musical element—an element that is closely connected to human inner life. At the same time, however, language also possesses a plastic element, a drawing-like element. Even as very young children, without being aware of it, we try to imitate in our speech what we perceive through our senses. It becomes particularly clear in language how the musical and the plastic work in two completely opposite directions. If we develop the musical element more in a person—an element that will be cultivated especially through the sense of authority in school—then we thereby destroy what is the child’s plastic impulse. You see, the musical element of language develops under the influence of authority in such a way that the child constantly has the instinct, the impulse, to speak—right down to the smallest details of intonation—just as the person perceived as an authority figure speaks. Adaptation to the musical element of authority—whether we dogmatically say it is right or wrong—is simply there by the very nature of the child. Anyone with a keen eye for such things will very soon see how this musical element of language adapts to the person who is raising or teaching the child.

[ 6 ] However, the one-sided development of this musical element of language is downright devastating for the expressive element of language. If a person follows only this musical element of language, they are increasingly compelled to internalize language entirely, to follow their feelings and sensations in a certain way, by unconsciously reproducing, as it were, intonation, specific stress patterns, and specific nuances in the vowels—as they develop these in imitation of the person they regard as an authority. But this really only comes into play once the child is in elementary school. It is less the case during the period from birth to elementary school, when the child first learns language. At that stage, the child is an imitator, and develops language out of the whole human being, with the rest of the organism continually adapting to the human environment. Many factors influence speech during this time, leading to its malleable development. But because human beings are imitators—imitators right down to the innermost workings of their being—the malleable element also develops internally during this period. We can point to a fundamental difference in language development. From birth until the child loses its baby teeth, the child develops its language in a malleable way. If the child is then fortunate enough, during this stage of life, to adapt to a dialect—which is, from the outset, more intimately connected to the person than the standard written language—the child’s language development will be much more in accordance with their own will and sense of authority, and they will be more intimately connected to the language than they would be with the standard written language.

[ 7 ] In elementary school itself, as I have said, the musical element takes the place of the plastic element. The inner aspect is already at work. But because this internalization—the musical element as such—counteracts the sculptural element, it is necessary that we make appropriate use in elementary school education and instruction of what the child already possesses, what the child brings with them, and what they have developed through their own powers up to the ages of 6 and 7 alongside their language development.

[ 8 ] Now, to the greatest extent, it is precisely in language that the child exhibits something in which the unconscious has played a major role. And we must learn from the fact that primitive peoples often have a much richer grammar than the languages corresponding to a higher civilization. Outside the realm of proper Spiritual Science, little attention is paid to what must nevertheless be regarded as a well-established finding of genuine human observation: that human beings develop logic from within themselves, that they structure language in a truly logical way, and that we need not teach them grammar in any other way than by bringing to consciousness what is already fully formed in the structure of language. In teaching and learning grammar, our essential aim is to foster the child’s awakening, to foster the development of consciousness—that is, inner forces that can develop precisely around the age of nine—in the sense that I have described. We must use the element of language instruction to continually further awaken the child. We will be better able to do this if we take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself to work through the dialect. If, on the other hand, the child has learned standard colloquial language or so-called written language from the very beginning—before the age of seven—then it becomes extremely difficult for us to reach that unconscious aspect of the human being, which has already, in a certain sense, withered away—that unconscious aspect which has a completely natural relationship to the logical structure of language. So when we have both dialect-speaking children and those who do not speak the dialect in the same class, we should actually always base our grammar instruction on what the dialect-speaking children provide us with.

[ 9 ] Let’s try first to identify the structure of the sentence and then that of the word based on the dialect. We can do this, for example, by simply letting the child speak—say, a sentence, one that is as simple as possible. It will always contain something that is the main point: the inner experience of an activity. And the more we start from the inner experience of an activity, the more we will be able to bring about the awakening of consciousness in the child precisely through language instruction.

[ 10 ] I’d like to touch on something that is extraordinarily interesting. There is a vast body of very astute and witty literature on so-called subjectless sentences: it is raining, there is lightning, there is a flash of lightning, and so on. Both linguists and philosophers have contributed to the literature on these so-called subjectless sentences. But what is essential is actually scarcely touched upon in all of this literature. The essential point is that these sentences actually correspond to the most childlike way of thinking. These sentences correspond to that feeling in a child—which remains in a person whose mind has not yet been distorted—where the soul feels at one with the external world, where it has not yet established that distinction between the “I” and the external world. When I say, “It’s raining”—this is still based on an unconscious feeling that the activity taking place out there simply continues within the space inside my skin, that there is no “I” standing opposed to the outside world. One feels part of the world when saying, “It’s raining,” “There’s a storm,” or “There’s lightning”; one does not feel separated from the world. In a certain sense, these so-called subjectless sentences are the most primordial sentences of human nature. They are simply the first stage in the development of language, serving to give form to what is indicated as activity. Originally, after all—and we do not pay enough attention to this—we actually perceive the entire world as activity. In a certain sense, especially in the earliest childhood, we overlook everything that is nominal, that is, substantive. We take that for granted. In contrast, what strikes us above all is that which is active, that which, as an activity, takes on our own activity. You might say that this is contradicted by the fact that a child first says “Papa” or “Dada.” That does not contradict it, for by uttering precisely this sequence of sounds, the child enlivens the activity that the person in question conveys to it. You will notice everywhere that learning to speak is initially an enlivening of activity, and that the substantive aspect comes only afterward. This is something we can certainly take into account when we consider the dialectical. For dialect words—just try to sense them for yourself, precisely by letting the child say them and then feeling them within yourself—dialect words are such that immersing oneself in the gesture that might accompany the dialect word comes naturally. The dialect word demands much more that the person take part in it, that they immerse themselves in it. And by allowing the dialect word to be felt through and through, one can then, precisely through this dialect word, distinguish—which is already an abstraction—between subject and predicate. The predicate is derived from the activity; the subject is, in fact, always something that a person forms abstractly through their intellect on the basis of that activity. If we actually have dialectical sentences read aloud to us and then observe the images they evoke, and use these to develop grammar and syntax by illustrating what a person actually feels, then we are in fact using grammar and syntax instruction to awaken the child more and more.

[ 11 ] And then we can beautifully allow what is presented dialectically to interact with one another, have it translated into what is called “written language,” and thereby demonstrate—through immediate sensation and in lively interaction with the children—how a certain flavor of the language is stripped away in what is called “educated colloquial language,” in written language. Only then can we truly move on to what written language can help us internalize—that is, a certain training and cultivation of thought. For in written language, we must pay much more attention to the development of the underlying thought than we do in dialect. The dialect teaches us directly that human beings did not form speech out of thought, but rather that they learned to think through language—that is, language first emerged from the human unconscious. And as human beings observed language, it was actually from language that their thoughts first emerged. If we perceive this correctly, then we will associate a living sense with what I would like to call the “genius of language”—because it has always been called that—but which I wish to understand in a much more concrete sense than is usually the case. In many respects, language is far, far more intelligent than the individual human being. In fact, we can find our way into the entire complex organism of language in early childhood and only later discover the wonderful connections—which can be revealed only through very keen logic—that flow from our unconscious nature into language. Spiritual forces are at work in language. But one will not come to understand these spiritual forces if one considers them as active in human beings only in their abstract form, as is so often done today in this materialistic age.

[ 12 ] Here I would like to touch on something that is often cited as the foundation of analytical psychology and psychoanalysis, but which must be understood in a completely different sense than psychoanalysts usually do. Let’s take something that can happen at any time in life: A lady is invited to a home; she goes to an evening gathering that is being held there because the lady of the house herself has to go to the spa that evening due to an illness. The lady attends this evening gathering. That very same evening, the lady of the house must leave for her spa. The evening guests depart, as the husband is accompanying his wife to the train. The guests are now walking down the street. A horse-drawn cab comes around the corner. This cab is driving very fast at first. The entire group steps aside to the left and right onto the sidewalk. Only the lady who was invited that evening runs ahead of the horses, running and running, and despite all the coachman’s boorish outbursts, she cannot be persuaded to step aside. She does even more. As the carriage crosses a bridge—she probably knows the situation quite well—she throws herself into the water. She has to be rescued. The entire group knows nothing else to do with her but to take her back to the house where she had been invited. Now let’s hear from the psychoanalyst. He says: There is an isolated province of the soul. As a child, this lady once experienced a fright caused by a horse that was chasing her and the like. That then sank into the depths of her psyche. Now, on this very evening, it resurfaces. It is an ingenious theory, one that can be very compelling. But for those who have learned to observe reality—who have learned to immerse themselves in reality precisely through study of Spiritual Science—this explanation does not hold, for something entirely different is true. The lady—one cannot help but speak the truth—is simply in love with the master of the house, and she is very happy to have been invited to this evening gathering on the very day that the lady of the house has to go to the spa. The lady would never admit any of this to herself; after all, she is a respectable lady. She may be a very, very respectable lady in her conscious mind; but what she does not admit to herself is at work in her subconscious. She therefore arranges everything so that the only possible outcome is that the entire evening party will bring her back to the house at the very moment when the lady of the house has been sent off to the bath. That is what she wanted from the very beginning, but she had not brought it to her conscious awareness.

[ 13 ] Here you see an example of how thinking, cleverness, and intelligence operate without being guided by human consciousness. Anyone who observes life knows that there are people who, well in advance, arrange for something they wish to achieve, yet have no conscious awareness that they are doing so; but everything is arranged very systematically toward a specific goal. Above all, we must become aware that reason and intellect are not merely something we develop, but rather something that operates within our very being—something that has been at work within us long before we bring it into our consciousness.

[ 14 ] What we teach a child as language instruction has already been working within the child long before we bring it to the surface of consciousness. We should therefore not bring it to the surface with the intention that the child learn from it the guiding principles for speaking or writing, but rather we should bring it to the surface so that the child awakens and becomes conscious of what is at work unconsciously within them. Whether we have one intention or another in teaching and upbringing makes an enormous difference. It is these intentions in teaching and education that we must constantly keep in mind. And because the dialect is so intimately connected with this unconscious, we can truly derive grammar and syntax from the dialect by building upon what lives as reason within the human being itself. But if we are compelled to work with children who, from the outset, speak the cultivated colloquial language or the so-called standard written language, then we must not count too much on the intellect developing a kind of grammar as a guideline—and on people then conforming to this guideline by writing the dative, accusative, and so on, by placing a period in a certain spot, and so on; rather, something else must come into play. If we are compelled to teach children who speak without a dialect from the very beginning, then we must, above all, structure grammar instruction artistically once again; we must appeal to their sense of style. The linguistic instinct is brought with the child into elementary school. The sense of style in language—we must cultivate this in the child, if possible, right up to the age of nine. But we can do this only by working toward the development of this sense of style in an artistic manner. We will achieve this —though in an age that seeks to undermine all authority, this may be frowned upon by some—that we make use of the child’s natural inclination to follow authority and ensure that the sentences and everything else we present to the child are shaped as artistically as possible—so artistically, in fact, that we truly evoke in the child a sense of this artistic shaping. We can do this by making the child aware of the difference between a declarative sentence, an interrogative sentence, and an expressive sentence, and by having the child speak them in such a way that the expressive sentence is spoken with a different intonation than the declarative sentence; if we draw the child’s attention to how the declarative sentence is spoken neutrally and indifferently, while the emotive sentence is spoken with a certain emotional nuance; if we work directly toward this artistic element of language, and only then develop grammar and syntax from this artistic element of language.

[ 15 ] If, on the one hand, we use the dialect that children bring with them to develop, as it were, humanity’s natural instinct for language, and if, on the other hand, we use dialect-free language to awaken an inner sense of style, then we will achieve precisely what must be achieved in language instruction. We will discuss this in greater detail later. For now, I would just like to outline the basic principles.

[ 16 ] This principle, however, will tell you that we must always keep the developing child in mind. We ask: What emerges at this particular age, and what emerges at that age? If we do not have the sense that, with the change of teeth, a person is, in a sense, born a second time, then we will not have the right enthusiasm for educating and teaching. Of course, the birth of the physical body is more noticeable than what is born around the age of seven. In Spiritual Science, I characterize this by saying: at birth, the human physical body is separated from the body to which it was previously connected—the mother’s body. With the change of teeth, what I call the human etheric body is separated from the physical body with which it—this etheric body—had been intimately connected until about the age of seven, that is, until the change of teeth. Within the physical body, it has been working to bring the second set of teeth forth from this physical body. Now it is born free. And the abilities the child then brings with it for school are actually the liberated, the born abilities of the etheric body. This is, so to speak, the first spiritual element that the child presents to us as something spiritual in and of itself. As long as we have the child before us—up to the age of seven, up to the time of the change of teeth—we have it before us as a physical body. All other spiritual and soul elements act within this physical body, and we can only reach the child through the child’s own instinct to imitate. In the seventh year, the etheric body—those parts of human nature whose substance is etheric—becomes free and can now live on its own.

[ 17 ] I have already pointed this out: the human body actually consists of far more than 75 percent water. Why, then, do people in physiology and anatomy always speak of such things as if the human being consisted entirely of a solid body? What takes place within him also takes place in the configuration of the liquid. It also takes place in the configuration of the airy. And what the child develops in terms of spiritual and soul capacities from the time of tooth replacement onward does not take place in the solid, nor in the liquid, nor in the airy, but takes place in what we carry within the body as the ethereal—what we carry within us as warmth, as light ether, as chemical ether, and as life ether. It is simply nonsense to say: Thoughts play themselves out in such a way that they are something like processes in the nervous system, whereby one imagines the nerves as semi-solid or at least soft structures. No, thoughts take place by developing directly, before they are transformed into memories; thoughts take place in such a way that, after the age of seven, they no longer touch the physical body at all. When a person thinks, they think only within the etheric element that fills their body. You might say: Yes, but thoughts do become memories, so they do remain within the person. The etheric element is a volatile element that would immediately dissolve all thoughts if the thoughts were to exist solely within it. Yes, remembering is a much more complicated process than is commonly thought! People sometimes have a materialistic mental image: We think, then the thoughts find a home somewhere in the human soul, and then we bring them back up when we remember them. No, that is not how it works. Anyone who can observe the process of thinking will find the following: When I perceive something in the external world through my senses, I form thoughts based on it. I experience something in the external world—colors or whatever else is happening—and I form a thought based on it. When I recall something and form a thought, what would otherwise come to me from the external world rises up from within me. Just as I form a new thought based on the external world, so too do I form a new thought based on what rises up from within me. For remembering does not depend on thoughts descending into the soul, but rather on the fact that what physically acts upon the eye and ear has a continuation within the physical body, that there is a parallel process to thinking, and that this parallel process leaves behind a rhythmic pattern, which is then brought back up and perceived internally in the same way that perception otherwise acts externally. I don’t know if all of you—you will, of course, have done so yourselves—have probably observed in yourselves how human beings help themselves so that their memories come to the surface more easily. They try everything possible to reinforce mere thinking through the sensory when memories are to come to the surface. Just think for a moment how many people cram—how they actually seek to physically internalize what they take in as a thought, how they let this physical internalization proceed in parallel with their thinking. If they merely think, they do not remember it. They only remember when they hear what they themselves are memorizing, or when they otherwise involve their physical being in the process of memorization in some way. For us to remember, there must be a process running parallel to mere thinking. For thinking, under all circumstances—whether it arises from the external world or as a memory from within—is something fleeting. No thought is retained; rather, something else is retained, from which the thought is rekindled again and again. It is no different when I recall something and form a thought than when I form a thought about an event in the external world. In one case, it is an event in the external world to which it is linked; in the other, it is the process of inner experience. In any case, when I recall something, my organs are in rhythmic motion; my organs repeat what they had done under the impression of the experience. When I have the experience for the first time while observing the external world, I form the thought solely based on the external world. When I recall it, the thought is sparked by the inner world, by the organs, which in turn vibrate just as they did when I first had the experience.

[ 18 ] These are things that cannot, however, be proven as directly as external processes can be proven; rather, they are things that must be gradually gained through genuine observation of life and transformed into certainty. But you can do it. And then, when we consider this particular mode of thinking—which actually takes place in the ephemeral element of the ether—and when we realize that the physical organs must be capable of resonating in the same way that the ether resonates, then we will truly understand the entire transformation that human life undergoes during the change of teeth. Up until the change of teeth, the entire etheric body is at work. The warmth ether, the chemical ether, the light ether, and the life ether act within the organs, building them up and enabling them to resonate materially. Here, the etheric body is the architect, the sculptor of the physical body. Once the physical body has developed to the point where, under the influence of the etheric body—which then thinks and emancipates the intellect from the physical body—it can resonate like a string when another string tuned to it is plucked, the physical body has reached the stage it is at when the change of teeth has already occurred, then we can also count on the development of the etheric body as such, for then we are simultaneously shaping the physical body as we shape the etheric body. But one must have a sense of this coming into being of the etheric body with the change of teeth.

[ 19 ] One must, in turn, have a sense that something even higher is born within human nature with sexual maturity—something that, up to that point, has been working toward the further transformation of the human organism. Whether one calls what is born in a person’s 14th or 15th year the “astral body” and takes pleasure in this term, or whether one finds this expression distasteful, is not the point. What matters is that one becomes aware that, just as the intellectual element is born through the etheric body around the age of 7, the entire non-physical soul element is born around the ages of 14 and 15. Before that, our feeling and our willing are closely connected to the physical organism. Just as thinking is connected to the physical organism until the age of seven, so too, until the ages of 14 or 15—that is, until sexual maturity—feeling and willing are closely connected to the physical organism. And we must take care not to introduce thinking—which emerges bit by bit with the development of the etheric body—before sexual maturity, that is, before the child leaves elementary school; we must not introduce anything that stems, so to speak, from a premature independence of the will and the emotions. If the child is lovingly guided in reliance on authority, if the child learns to feel and will in reliance on others—on adults, on educators and teachers—then at the right moment, namely upon reaching sexual maturity, the child’s own independent feeling and willing will be born. We can develop our feelings and will in the right way only by properly developing them in relation to another person whom we regard as an authority. If we begin to develop our will independently too early—and especially if we turn too early to certain, I might say, secret functions of the will—it will harm us for the rest of our lives. And we turn to the finer aspects of the will too early when we are tempted to subject moral and religious impulses, in particular, to our own judgment prematurely.

[ 20 ] One cannot help but say that, until reaching sexual maturity, a child should learn to be moral and religious through the influence of moral and religious authorities. It is only upon reaching sexual maturity that a person’s psychological and spiritual nature becomes sufficiently independent of the body that we can leave it to their own judgment. You see, when one speaks of such things today, one faces, above all, a great deal of contemporary prejudice. When I addressed precisely this issue of the natural sense of authority in more or less public speeches in Germany—at a time when everything there was still under the influence of a pseudo-revolution that never actually became a real revolution— I was met everywhere with responses from those underground currents that would actually like to eliminate all authority even from childhood, that would prefer that all teaching and upbringing cease, and that children educate and teach one another democratically. I had to respond that this is not what children actually desire; properly understood, children want to be guided; they want to love an authority, and what develops within them as a love of authority is connected to their very nature.

[ 21 ] When a person reaches sexual maturity, love for the opposite sex develops as a matter of course. Certainly, it then takes on an individual form in the love of one man for one woman; but what takes on this individual form—what appears as a distinct reality in its full legitimacy—is at the same time the individual expression of a universal love for humanity, of universal human love. This universal human love, as a distinct form, develops just as the love for the opposite sex does with sexual maturity. The love that one human being has for another develops in its independence only with sexual maturity, for this love must, after all, be free from authority. This love is a true devotion. Until sexual maturity, love must be a need; love must be something that one’s own being selfishly demands. We must expect that the child in elementary school selfishly demands to be able to love—that is, to have beside them the authority to whom they are attached, to whom they devote themselves, because they take pleasure in this devotion, for nature itself urges them toward it. There is that which lives primarily in love—be it in love for fellow human beings, in love for nature, in love for the stars, in love for the supersensible beings and gods and God—it is what lives within the human being as love; it is, in essence, the content of the human astral body. This is born as an independent being with sexual maturity. Until sexual maturity, it works on one’s own human nature, just as the etheric body works on one’s own human nature until the age of 7, until the teeth are replaced.

[ 22 ] Only when one is deeply imbued with these things will one develop a true understanding of how language—insofar as the child brings it with them to school, at least in the form of a dialect—has developed precisely under the influence of the physical body itself; whereas, from the age of seven onward, we do not have the opportunity to introduce style into the conceptual element of language unless we ourselves develop a sense of style through our own, individually personal relationship—please do not misunderstand me—our loving relationship with the child. From this loving relationship, of course, a sense of style for the cultivated spoken language and the written language can also arise. But what we first want to instill—the child who has learned the dialect just as naturally as they learned to walk already carries the capacity for dialect within them—that is what we can draw out of the child. That is why it is also useful, in a certain sense, to draw the attention of children who have not had the good fortune to speak a dialect to the dialect spoken in their surroundings, and to let them learn from that dialect. Compared to the standard language, the dialect is also the artistic element; the standard language is the more rational, the more conventional. In this way, we make use of something that, as I have already explained, we must draw upon precisely in education: the artistic element—we use it, as it were, as if it were already in the child’s blood, shaping the dialect.

[ 23 ] These are the things that first come to mind when we talk about dialect and standard language. That was the point of the question. Now I will have more to say about the actual teaching of grammar, but I will also have to speak about what I consider to be the correct method for teaching arithmetic, and so on. We will see how, for example, even in arithmetic instruction, it is absolutely essential to be able to look deeply into what is actually taking place within a person between the ages of 7 and 14 or 15. If we educate a person in a way that runs counter to what is happening there, we harm them for their entire life. It is very easy to educate and teach in a way that goes against human nature, because human nature is ambivalent. We must simply be clear that we harm a person if we do something correctly in one respect but take it to the extreme. One aspect must always be balanced against the other. In language, we must balance the expressive element against the musical element. We will see how this applies to arithmetic. For of all the things that cause such terrible harm to people, what stems from arithmetic instruction is, for many people, the most harmful of all. The way we learn arithmetic generally runs counter to human nature. For everything that manifests today in many people as a tendency toward materialism is, at its core, nothing other than the result of flawed arithmetic instruction around the age of nine. And again, what is downright destructive for the entire later psychological development of so many people today is that they form judgments too early—that we present the curriculum to them in a way for which they are not yet mature enough. They absorb a great many formed judgments that then continue to influence them. People often speak of how, in a human being, one mental image associates with others. There is no more unfortunate way of speaking than this talk of the association of mental images. For when mental images associate within us—when one clumps together with another and we have to chase after them—then we are already possessed by our life of imagination; then we no longer have it under our control at all. The point is precisely that, through education and instruction, we must protect people from allowing their life of associations to gain the upper hand over their life of the will. More on this tomorrow.

From the Q&A session following the ninth lecture

[ 24 ] Dr. Steiner (on the question of why the dialect is so often regarded as inferior and sidelined in favor of the standard language):

[ 25 ] It is not an entirely easy question, as simple as it may seem...

[ 26 ] It is certainly, in many cases, merely a bad habit to consider the educated colloquial language—which is, after all, just a dialect that has gained a certain dominance through various historical circumstances—to be more refined. This is, in fact, the underlying reason for many people: they consider the dialect to be not refined enough. You see, I myself, being Austrian, have had to struggle with this quite a bit, because we Austrians always speak syntactically and grammatically correctly when we speak in our dialect; just like the Swiss language, we also have some variations, but we never speak incorrectly when we speak in our dialect. Now, especially during my school years, it was really quite the norm that we were no longer allowed to speak dialect at school. But that only resulted in us learning what is known as the infamous Austrian school language. In Austria, there are dialects, a cultured colloquial language, a written language, but also the actual “school language,” or “High German for schools.” This involves pronouncing most long vowels as short and all short vowels as long. So when we speak in our dialect, we say quite correctly: “d’Sunn” and “der Sun” (der Su)—“der Sohn,” long and short, perfectly correct. When we get to college, we inevitably learn to say: die Sone and der Sonn and other similar things. I must tell you that it really took me a long time to break out of the speech habits of this Austrian school language; sometimes you’ll still notice them!

[ 27 ] So in this case—maybe things were better later on, but that’s how it was when I was in school—it really shows that people would rather use a completely corrupted substitute for language than the proper dialect, which makes no mistakes.

[ 28 ] I believe this will not change until people are deeply imbued with the full significance of the non-intellectual element in education. I truly believe that one will honor what is given to one through the dialect only when one honors it from a pedagogical perspective. After all, for very many people, the rejection of “Swiss German” is really nothing more than a result of the school failing to function properly. If the school were to function properly, then, I believe, this phenomenon would not occur to the extent that you have quite rightly emphasized.

[ 29 ] Dr. Steiner (on the question of why the German language, unlike other cultural languages, is more prone to giving in to foreign languages):

[ 30 ] This is certainly related, at least in part, to the fact that in German, the educated vernacular occupies a somewhat different position in relation to the dialect than is the case with other educated vernaculars. In German, we have, in fact, made the most progress with regard to sound shifts in the educated vernacular. Isn’t that right? There is, after all, this law of sound shift; we must recognize that, for example, English has remained at an even earlier stage, one that High German has moved beyond. Now, the law of sound shift does not consist merely in what we might call the restructuring of linguistic elements; rather, it is also linked to an increasing abstraction of language. As the German language has evolved—in fact, ever since the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., particularly in High German—we have undergone a process that has given us the ability to express abstract concepts and ideas through words in a manner entirely different from that of other languages. Of course, only unbiased people will admit this. But if, for example, one wants to translate German philosophers into English or French, one cannot translate them—if one truly wants to translate them correctly. So the German language, as a language, has something that has already developed in the direction of abstraction. This gives it the ability to handle the abstract with extraordinary precision. The German dialects, on the other hand, adapt much more readily to foreign influences, but they do so—I would say—under the influence of a certain social element, which we can touch upon shortly. But “Standard German” has an extraordinarily hard time adapting to other circumstances, because Standard German has developed toward the abstract and therefore does not have the same ease in simply substituting its own word for another, as is the case in the opposite direction.

[ 31 ] When it comes to dialects, it’s interesting to observe how, strangely enough, the dialect becomes much more open to foreign influences—that is, to foreign languages. For example, there is a curious word in the Austrian dialect—I’ll write it as it’s roughly pronounced—“baschürli.” For instance, if a little girl hands you a small bouquet in a very dainty manner, you might say: the girl handed it over “baschürli.” This is a loanword that has been adopted but completely reshaped within the language itself, for it is nothing other than “possierlich.” I could give you countless other examples. With dialects, when they adopt something—which they do based on social circumstances—they process and reshape it.

[ 32 ] Standard German, the educated colloquial language, has really remained somewhat isolated. And now, hasn’t it, it is in danger of gradually becoming, in European life, a sort of dead language, just as Latin was. This is something people haven’t yet realized, because it has developed independently of the general course of European life. So there is certainly something in the historical circumstances that causes German to behave differently from other languages. Other languages encounter the same things everywhere. So they name them the same way. German has drawn so much from its language—things that it, I might say, names from a solitary linguistic height—and therefore it can no longer lend its word when it goes elsewhere, because it simply doesn’t mean the same thing. If you describe any ordinary everyday object in England with the same German word, it is simply no longer correctly described. Isn’t that right? Languages have, after all, formed their words from different foundations. We Germans are sculptors of language. We form the word “Kopf” (head). Yes, it is the same thing that is taken from the form; it is not unnecessary to point to the head of cabbage; it is the form that is meant when we speak of the head. We form the word “Fuß”—that’s connected to the furrow we sculpt as we walk. We sculpt language. Take “t£te,” “testa”—that means “to bear witness”; it’s formed from the act of doing, where testimony is given. Thus, you will find that the Romance languages are formed from entirely different foundations than the German language. And this is where the difficulty lies—isn’t it?—that we encounter in German when we want to designate the same thing in German in some way. We have it much easier with dialect than with standard colloquial language. Things that play a role in social life are simply not that straightforward. That is the point.