Nationalism and Culture (49 page)

impose a common fate on a nation, just as it can arbitrarily create or destroy a nation; for the nation is not an organically evolved entity, but something artificially created by the state, with which it is most intimately intergrown, as every page of history shows. The state itself, howevei-, is not an organic structure, and sociological research has demonstrated that everywhere and at all times it has appeared as a result of forceful intervention of warlike elements in the life of peaceful human groups. The nation is, therefore, a purely political concept arising solely from the adherence of men to a definite state. Also, in the so-called "law of nations," the word has exclusively this meaning, as is apparent from the fact that any man can become a member of any nation by naturalization.

How arbitrarily the adherence of whole groups of people to a nation is determined by the brutal compulsion of the stronger, the history of every country shows by numerous examples. Thus, the inhabitants of the present French Riviera went to sleep one evening as Italians and awoke next morning as Frenchmen because a handful of diplomats had so decided. The Heligolander was a member of the British nation and a faithful subject of the British government until Britain got the idea of selling the island to Germany; then the national membership of the inhabitants underwent a fundamental change. If on the day before this decision it was their greatest merit to be good English patriots, then after the transfer of the island to Germany this highest virtue became the greatest sin against the "spirit of the nation." There are many such examples, and they are characteristic of the whole formative history of the modern state. One need but glance at the stupid and stumbling provisions of the Versailles treaty to get a classic example of how nations are artificially manufactured.

And just as the stronger can today and at all times decide upon the national membership of the weaker according to his pleasure, so it was and is also empowered to end the nation's existence arbitrarily if for reasons of state this appears to him desirable. Read the reasons on which Prussia, Austria and Russia based their intervention in Poland and prepared the partition of that land. They are stated in the famous pact of August 5, 1772, and are truly a shining example of conscious mendacity, nauseating hypocrisy, and brute force. It is merely because these phenomena have heretofore been given so little consideration that we have such curious illusions concerning the real nature of the nation. It is not "national differences" which lead to the formation of the various states; it is the states which artificially create national differences and further them on principle, for these have to serve the states as moral justification for their own existence. Tagore has stated this inherent antagonism between the nation and society in these splendid words:

A nation, in the sense of the political and economic union of a people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose. Society as such has no ulterior purpose. It is an end in itself. It is a spontaneous self-expression of man as a social being. It is a natural regulation of human relationships so that men can develop ideals of life in cooperation with one another.^

The contrast between the political organization of North and South America serves as an excellent example of the fact that a nation does not organically evolve itself, create itself, as is often asserted, but is rather the artificial creation of the state mechanically imposed on various human groups. In North America the Union succeeded in combining all the land between the Canadian and Mexican borders, between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, into a powerful federated state, a process greatly furthered by favorable circumstances of various kinds. And this happened in spite of the fact that the United States contained the most motley mixture of people assembled from all the nations and races of Europe and of other continentsj so that it has been rightly called the melting-pot of the nations.

South and Central America, however, are separated into sixteen different states with sixteen different nations, although the racial relation between these peoples is incomparably closer than it is in North America, and the same language—with the exception of Portuguese in Brazil and various Indian tongues—prevails in all. But the political evolution o/ Latia America was of a different order. Although Simon Bolivar, the "liberator" of South America from the Spanish yoke, sought to create a federated state for all South American countries, his plan did not succeed5 for ambitious dictators and generals, like Prieto in Chile, Gamarra in Peru, Flores in Ecuador, Rosas in Argentina, opposed this project by all possible means. Bolivar was so disappointed by the machinations of his rivals that shortly before his death he wrote: "In South America there is neither trust nor faith; neither among men nor among the various states. Every treaty is here but a scrap of paper and what are here called constitutions are but a collection of such scraps."

The result of the power lust of small minorities and dictatorially inclined individuals was the creation of quite a number of national states, which in the name of national interest and national honor waged war against one another quite as we do. If political events in North America had developed as they did in the lands of the southern continent, then there would be today Californlans, Michiganders, Kentuckians and Penn-sylvanians, just as in South America there are Argentinians, Chileans,

' Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, New York, 1917, p. 19.

Peruvians and Brazilians. Here is the best proof that the nation's existence is founded purely on political endeavor.

Whoever yields to the illusion that community of material and intellectual interest and identity of morals, customs and traditions constitutes the real nature of the nation, and from this arbitrary assumption tries to deduce the necessity of national endeavors, deceives himself and others. Of this kind of unity nothing is discernible in any of the existing nations. The force of social circumstances is always stronger than the abstract assumptions of all nationalistic ideology.

THE NATION AS COMMUNITY OF LANGUAGE. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. FOREIGN CONSTITUENTS IN LANGUAGE. PURISM AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. LITERARY LANGUAGE AND POPULAR SPEECH. RELIGION, SCIENCE, ART, PROFESSION, ETC., AS MEDIATORS OF NEW LANGUAGE VALUES. LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LOANWORDS IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT. ORIENTAL SYMBOLISM IN LANGUAGE. FOREIGN MATERIAL IN NATIVE GUISE. SPEECH AND THOUGHT. NATURE AND LANGUAGE. WORK AND LANGUAGE. THE SYMBOLISM OF LANGUAGE. LINGUISTIC ATAVISMS. THE ILLOGICAL IN LANGUAGE FORMATION. CONSTANT CHANGE IN LINGUISTIC EXPRESSION. THE INADEQUACY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL LANGUAGE THEORIES. THE INFLUENCE OF THE CULTURAL CIRCLE VERSUS THE TIE OF COMMUNAL SPEECH. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. IDIOM AND LANGUAGE. THE BELIEF IN THE URSPRACHE. CONCERNING THE COMMON GENEALOGY OF THE ARYAN LANGUAGES. PEOPLES THAT CHANGE THEIR LANGUAGE. NATIONS WITH DIFFERENT LANGUAGE DISTRICTS.

OF all the evidences which have been cited for the existence of a national ideology, community of language is by far the most important. Many see in community of language the essential characteristic of the nation. A common language is, in fact, a strong tie for any human grouping; and Wilhelm von Humboldt says with some reason: "The true homeland is really the language." Karl Julius Weber saw in language the real characteristic of nationality: "In nothing does the national character, the imprint of the mental and spiritual power of a people, express itself so clearly as in its language."

Likewise, the best known representatives of nationalistic ideas in the last century, like Schleiermacher, Fichte, Jahn and the men of the German League of Virtue; Mazzini, Pisacane, Niemojowsky, Lelewel, the "Young Europe," and the German democrats of 1848, confined their concept of the nation to the realm of a common language. Arndt's song, "What is the German's Fatherland?" shows this. It is significant that Arndt as well as Mazzini based their efforts at national unification not

on popular speech, but on the written language, so as to include the largest possible fatherland.

A common language naturally appears highly important to the advocates of the national idea because it is a people's highest means of expression and must, in a certain sense, be regarded as a sample of its intellectual life. Language is not the invention of individual men. In its creation and development the community has worked and continues to work as long as the language has life in it. Hence, language appeared to the advocates of the national idea as the purest product of national creativeness and became for them the clearest symbol of national unity. Yet this concept, no matter how fascinating and irrefutable it may appear to most, rests on a totally arbitrary assumption. Among the present existing languages there is not one which has developed from a definite people. It is very probable that there were once homogeneous languages, but that time is long past, lost in the grayest antiquity of history. The individuality of language disappears the moment reciprocal relations arise between different hordes, tribes and peoples. The more numerous and various these relations become in the course of the millenniums, the larger borrowings does every language make from other languages, every culture from other cultures.

Consequently, no language is the purely national product of a particular people, nor even of a particular nation. Towards the development of every one of our cultural languages peoples of the most various origins have contributed. This was inevitable, because a language as long as it is spoken at all continually absorbs foreign elements in spite of all the noise of the purification fanatics. For every language is an organism in constant fluxj it obeys no fixed rules, and flies in the face of all the dicta of logic. Not only does it make the most diversified borrowings from other languages, a phenomenon due to the countless influences and points of contact in cultural life, but it also possesses a stock of words that is continually changing. Quite gradually and unnoticeably the shadings and gradations of the concepts which find their expression in words alter, so that it often happens that a word means today exactly the opposite of what men originally expressed by it.

In reality, there exists no cultural language which does not contain a great mass of foreign material, and the attempt to free it from these foreign intruders would lead to a complete dissolution of the language— that is, if such a purification could be achieved at all. Every European language contains a mass of foreign elements with which, often, whole dictionaries could be filled. How, for instance, would the German or the Dutch language look if all the words borrowed from French or Latin were removed from it, not to speak of words of other origin? How, the Spanish language, without its countless elements borrowed from the Ger-

mans and the Arabs? And what a mass of German, English, and even Turkish words has penetrated into the Russian and Polish tongues! Similarly, the Hungarian language contains a great number of words of Italian and Turkish origin. Rumanian consists only one-half of words of Latin descent j three-eighths of its stock of words are from the Slavic, one-eighth from the Turkish, Magyar and Greek. In the Albanian, until now, only five or six hundred original words have been distinguished j all the rest is a mixture of the most varied elements. Fritz Mauthner remarks very correctly in his great work, Contributions to a Critique of Language, that it is owing simply to "the accident of point of view that, for example, we speak of the French language as Romance and of the English as Germanic." And it is well known that the Latin language itself, from which all the Romance languages trace their descent, contained a body of words of Greek origin, to the number of several thousand.

For the development of every language the acceptance of foreign elements is essential. No people lives for itself. Every enduring intercourse with other peoples results in the borrowing of words from their language; this is quite indispensable to reciprocal cultural fecundation. The countless points of contact which culture daily creates between people leave their traces in language. New objects, ideas, concepts—religious, political, and generally social—lead to new expressions and word formations. In this, the older and more highly developed cultures naturally have a strong influence on less developed folk-groups and furnish these with new ideas which find their expression in language.

Many of the newly acquired elements of speech gradually adapt themselves so completely to the phonetic laws of the adopting language that eventually their origin can no longer be recognized. We quite involuntarily feel that words like Existenz, Idee, Melodie, Musik, Muse, Natur, Religion, and a hundred others are foreign words in the German language. And the speech of political life is completely permeated with foreign words. That Bourgeoisie, Proletariat, Sozialismus, Bolschevismus, Anarchismus, Kommunismus, Liberalismus, Konservatismus, Fascismus, Terrorismus, Diktatur, Revolution, Reaktion, Partei, Parliament, Demokratie, Monarchie, Refublik, and so on, are not German speech elements, we recognize at the first glance.

But there is also a great mass of words of foreign descent in the German language which have in the course of time become so colloquial that their foreign origin has been completely forgotten. Who would, for example, regard as strangers such words as Abenteuer, Anker, Artzt, Bezirk, Bluse, Bresche, Brief, Essig, Fenster, Frock, Gruppe, Kaiser, Kantor, Kasse, Keller, Kelter, Kerker, Kette, Kirsche, Koch, Kofer, Kohl, Kreuz, Kuche, Lampe, Laune^ Markt^ Mauer, Meile, Meister, MUhle,

Miiller, Munze, Del, Or gel ^ Park, Pfa/il, Pfau, Pfeffer, Pfeiler, Pfirsich, Pflanze, Pjdrte, Pjosten, PjUhly Pjiitze, Pjtmd, Pobel, Prinz, Pulver, Radiescheriy Rest, Sckiissel, Sc/iule, Schzmndler, Schreiber, Siegel, Spekher, Speise, Slrasse, Teller, Tisch, Trichter, Vogt, Ziegel, Zirkel, Zoll, Zwiebel, and countless others? ^

Very frequently the foreign word changes in the course of time so completely that its mutilated form sounds like other words and we involuntarily give it a quite different meaning. Thus Armbrust (crossbow) has nothing in common with either Arm (arm) nor Brust (breast), but instead goes back to the Latin word arcubalista, meaning arc-thrower, or catapult. Likewise Ebenholz (ebony) has no relation to eben (smooth), but again goes back to the Hebrew word, hobnin, from obni, meaning stony. The German Vielfrass (wolverine), which, construed as a Germanic word, equals "much-eater," "glutton"—originates from the Norwegian fjeldfross (mountain-cat). Murmeltier (marmot) does not come from murtneln (to murmur), but was formed during the Middle Ages from the Latin muretn, accusative of mus (mouse), and montis or tnontanum — that is, "mountain mouse." The word Tolpatsch first appeared in the seventeenth century in southern Germany. It was a popular designation for Hungarian soldiers. The word owes its origin to the Hungarian talpas, meaning flat-foot. (In modern German, Tolpatsch means blockhead, booby—also the dodo.) Ohrjeige (box on the ear) comes from the Dutch word veeg (blow), Trafnpeltier goes back to the Latin dromedarius. H'dngematte (as if from German roots meaning hanging mat) comes from the South American word hanvaca. From the thieves' jargon comes Kiimtnelbldttchen (three-card monte), which has nothing in common with Kiimmel (caraway seed), but with the Hebrew word g'lmel (three). Likewise, the word Pleite, so much used today, is of Hebrew origin and comes from pietah (flight). French has left many traces in our language. Thus the quite senselessly conjoined tnutterseelenallein, about which there plays for us today all the sickly sentimentality of deutsches Gemiit, comes from mot tout seul (I, quite alone). Fisimatenten comes from fils de ma tante (son of my aunt). The German words jorsch and Porsche have the French base, jorce. When we say that we throw our lives into the Schanze {in die Schanze schlagen) this has nothing to do with Schanze (bulwark) j the expression comes instead from the French chance —equaling the Eng-