Zibaldone
Page 88
“Among the announcements of books there is Letters on India by Maria Graham, the author of a Journal of her stay in India, the most noteworthy feature of which is a curious comparison of Sanskrit with Latin, Persian, German, English, French, and Italian, and there is a lengthy discussion of the main works composed in Sanskrit.”1 Biblioteca Italiana, vol. 4, p. 358, November 1816, no. 11, Appendix, Italian section, reviewing the Giornale enciclopedico di Napoli, no. 5. (22 April 1821.)
Copernicus’s system taught philosophers that the planets which make up the solar system are equal2 (an equality not taught by nature, indeed, the reverse), in the way that reason and nature used to teach men and all living beings that individuals of the same species were naturally equal. (22 April 1821.)
Writing must be writing and not algebra; [976] it must represent words with agreed signs, and it is the function of the words thus represented to express and bring out the ideas and feelings, or the thoughts and affects of the mind. What is this mishmash of dashes, dots, spaces, double and triple exclamation marks and what have you? I’m waiting to see hieroglyphic writing come back into fashion, and with people no longer wanting to write feelings and ideas but represent them, and not knowing how to signify things with words, we’ll try depicting or signifying them with signs, as the Chinese do, whose writing does not represent words, but things and ideas. Isn’t this just taking the art of writing back to its infancy? Learn, learn the art of style, that art our forefathers had such mastery of, that art which today is for the most part lost, that art which anyone wishing to write must master in all its profundity, in all its variety, in all its perfection. And that way you will compel the reader to suspend judgment, to pay attention, to reflect, to read with calm, to be open to the feelings required, you will compel the reader, I repeat, with words, not with marks, nor by using two pages to write what could be contained in one, if the dashes, and the divisions, etc., were removed. What wonder is produced by imitations of this sort? Isn’t wonder one of the chief rewards of imitation, one [977] of the preeminent causes of the delight that it produces? Wouldn’t it be better for a writer who writes like this to take up painting instead? Hasn’t he got the wrong job? Wouldn’t he have far more success in producing the effects he is looking for by writing the way he does? There is no wonder without difficulty. And what difficulty is there in imitating in this fashion? What difficulty is there in expressing the pounding of horses’ hooves with a clip-clop, clip-clop and the sound of bells with a ding-dong, ding-dong, as the Romantics do? (Bürger in “Lenore,” Biblioteca Italiana, tome 8, p. 365).1 This is the imitation of wet nurses and mountebanks, and it is exactly what is done in this manner of writing and with these signs, which were utterly unknown to all the ancients and great masters, and for good cause. (22 April, Easter Sunday, 1821.)
The more any sort of imitation oversteps the limits of the instrument intended for it, the one that characterizes and describes it, the more it abandons its nature and properties, the more does wonder diminish, for example, if glass eyes or wigs for sculpted tresses were introduced in sculpture, which imitates with marble. And precisely the same goes for writing, which imitates with words, and must not abandon its instrument. Especially if the new instruments are too simple and obvious, [978] at odds with the dignity and wonder of imitation and confusing the imitation of the poet or artist with the shabby imitation of wet nurses, mimes, mountebanks, and monkeys, and the kind of imitation that is performed all day long with words, gestures, or trivial handiwork, without anyone marveling at it or thinking it divine, a work of genius. (23 April 1821.)
No one today can choose the path of virtue except the mad, the timid and cowardly, or the weak and wretched. (23 April 1821.)
“Through the invention of gunpowder the energy men previously had was transferred to machines, and men were changed into machines, so that it has essentially altered the manner of waging war.” Biblioteca Italiana, tome 5, p. 31. Prospetto storico-filosofico, etc., by Count Emanuele Bava di S. Paolo, second and final extract.1 (23 April 1821.)
For p. 975. A very timid language is not a good or perfect instrument for appreciating a bold and courageous language, for appreciating courage and bold flights, nor is a language that is all rules and mathematics and precision and reason a perfect instrument for appreciating a language that is naturally and blithely irregular (as are all the ancient languages, Eastern and Western), a language regulated by imagination, etc.; nor is a language that does not have, one might say, any sense of particularity regarding expressions, etc. (οὐδὲν τι ἴδιον), the best instrument for appreciating the particularities [979] of other languages. (24 April 1821.)
“He rapidly surveys the research into the language of the first inhabitants of Italy, and seems to be of the opinion that the language of those peoples, just like Greek and Latin indeed, derived from Indian, since the Indian peoples moved in swarms from Eastern shores to Western ones, and settled in Greece and Italy. When the Latin language” (that is to say, the one derived, according to Ciampi, from Indian) “had taken shape, that is, was made elegant, Etruscan, Oscan, Volscian, the crudest ancient Latin, did not perish on that account; but although these latter did not constitute the language of the capital and government, they were perhaps still spoken by the populace, in the same way in which the populace of the various provinces of Italy still cling to their own dialects. Indeed, some Tuscan words are still even now probably of Etruscan origin.” Biblioteca Italiana, tome 7, p. 215, reviewing Ciampi’s work entitled De usu linguae italicae saltem a saeculo quinto R. S. Acroasis. Accedit, etc., Pisa, Prosperi, 1817.1 (24 April 1821.)
“He even obtains an argument in his favor from the Wallachian language, which, having originated with Roman soldiers, left there in garrisons by Trajan, has many words and phrases that match Italian, putting their [980] remote antiquity beyond dispute.” Biblioteca Italiana, loc. cit. in the previous thought, reviewing the same work, p. 217, end.1 (24 April 1821.)
“The language of Latium must have been propagated in neighboring Illyrian and eastward, just as it was propagated in both Gauls to the west; and the name Romania, which has been preserved up until our own day; and the language known to the Wallachians as ROMANESKI, which so closely resembles Latin (as a recent traveler confirms) (see Caronni in Dacia, Milan 1812, page 32), let alone the great number of Roman antiquities unearthed in those parts, which provide convincing proof of these facts.” Cavaliere Hager’s original article in the Spettatore of Milan, 1 April 1818, Issue 97, p. 245, end.2 (25 April 1821.)
“It is enough that the word Oco, which also means eye in Russian” (that is to say, along with the word Glass which means the same thing), “should be so similar to the oculus of Latin, for it to be shown that this word is no less related to the Latin word than the word occhio in Italian, oculus simply being the diminutive of the word occus or occos which meant an occhio in ancient Greek, as Esichius and Isidorus attest.” From the passage quoted directly above, p. 244, beginning.3 So it is, then, that the Russian word Oco was derived from Latin through the propagation [981] of the Latin language in Illyrian, occurring in the late Empire (Hager, ibid., p. 244, toward the middle, etc., and Biblioteca Italiana, vol. 8, p. 208, reviewing the work by this same Hager: Observations sur la ressemblance frappante que l’on découvre entre la langue des Russes et celle des Romains, Milan 1817, published by Stella, large 4to, where the author demonstrates this propagation),1 the Russian language being a daughter of the Illyrian (ibid.);2 this and the Spanish word ojo (which is pronounced oco, with the c aspirated in the Spanish fashion) demonstrate that the very ancient word occus, though it disappeared from Latin texts, was preserved in Vulgar Latin. (25 April 1821.) Occhio [eye], however, comes from oculus, just as you get sonnaCCHIoso [drowsy] and the ancient sonnoCCHIoso from somniCULosus, you get orecchia [ear] from auricula, ginocchio [knee] from geniculum or genuculum (see p. 1181 margin), finocchio [fennel] from foeniculum, macchia [stain] from macula, pecchia [bee] from apicula or apecula, stoppia [stalk]
from stipula (one should note that the Spanish, too, say ojo from oculus, and oreja, oveja from auricula, ovicula, etc.), unghia from ungula, etc. See p. 2375 (and pp. 2281ff.).
For p. 740. The Greek language was always preserved in a pure state, in large part because of the Greeks’ great ignorance of Latin. A point that indeed becomes clear through other examples which I have adduced in another thought [→Z 44] (namely, those of Longinus in the very timid judgment he makes about Cicero and Plutarch in the Preface to the Life of Demosthenes, on which see Toup on Longinus, p. 134). And likewise through the fact that where the Romans cited Greek words and passages all the time, and in Greek script, the Greek authors never cited or used Latin words except in Greek, and Mingarelli expressed astonishment at the two or three Latin words barbarously written in Latin characters in a work published by him for the first time by Didymus Alexandrinus, a theologian of the fourth century, as if there were something unique about them (Didymus Alexandrinus, De trinitate, Bk. 1, ch. 15, Bologna, Typis Laelii a Vulpe, 1769, folio, p. 18, Greek and Latin edition by Giovanni Luigi Mingarelli. See ibid. his note 3 and the “Lettera a Mons. Giovanni Archinto sopra un’opera inedita di un antico teologo” [“Letter to Monsignor Giovanni Archinto on an unpublished work by an ancient theologian”] published first in Venice in Calogerà’s Nuova raccolta, tome 9, and republished in the Appendix to the aforementioned work: chap. 3, pp. 465, end–466, beginning: “it would be no easy matter to find [982] another such example of this in another Greek writer”). This proves that both the Greek authors themselves and Greek readers were wholly ignorant of Latin, since the writers did not reckon themselves capable of citing Latin words as written; and they rarely used them as transcribed into Greek letters, by contrast with the Romans regarding Greek words and passages in Latin characters, etc. One may gather from the following words of Cavaliere Hager in the passage quoted above (p. 980) p. 245 just how much the Greeks must have had to struggle with circumstances to maintain themselves in this virginity even before Constantine, and after the conquest of Greece by the Romans. “To grasp the degree to which the Romans were encouraged to impose not only their yoke but also their language upon peoples subdued by them, one simply has to consult St. Augustine’s celebrated work, De civitate Dei: ‘Opera data est, ut imperiosa civitas, non solum iugum, verum etiam linguam suam, domitis gentibus per pacem societatis, imponeret’ [‘But the imperial city has taken pains to impose on conquered peoples, as a bond of peace, not only her yoke but her language’] (Bk. 19, ch. 7). To the Greeks themselves, says Valerius Maximus, they would never give an answer except in Latin: ‘illud quoque magna perseverantia custodiebant, ne Graecis unquam nisi latine responsa darent’ [‘they steadfastly kept to the rule never to make replies to Greeks except in Latin’] (Bk. 2, ch. 2, § 2) and that notwithstanding the fact that the Greek language was so familiar to the Romans; nonetheless, in order to spread the Latin language they even obliged those Greeks who did not know it to explain themselves by means of an interpreter in Latin: ‘Quin etiam … per interpretem loqui cogebant … quo scilicet latinae vocis honos per omnes gentes venerabilior diffunderetur’ [‘Indeed … they obliged {the Greeks} to … speak through an interpreter … so that Latin speech might be the more widely venerated throughout the nations’]” (ibid.). [983] And nonetheless Greece resisted. But after Constantine, “at the Byzantine Court,” the same author continues, loc. cit., “as is seen in St. Chrysostom (Adversus oppugnatores vitae monasticae, Bk. 3, tome 1, p. 34, Paris 1718, ed. Montfaucon) you could make your fortune by knowing Latin; and up until the time of Justinian, the laws of the Greek Emperors were published in Greece itself in Latin.” And he immediately adds in a note: “The Pandects were published at Constantinople in Latin.”1 (25 April 1821.)
In the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions, tome 24, one may find Bonamy, Réflexions sur la langue latine vulgaire.2 (25 April 1821.) The Mémoires de Trévoux should also be consulted in this regard, the year 1711, p. 914.3
“One of our missionaries” (that is to say, an Italian) “Father Paolino da S. Bartolomeo, demonstrated the affinity of the German language not only with an Indian language but with one that ceased to be a vernacular many centuries ago, Samscrdamic” (that is, Sanskrit: which is also what he calls it on p. 208: Samscrdamic) “which is the mother of all the languages of India.”4 Biblioteca Italiana, vol. 8, p. 206. (25 April 1821.)
It is plain enough that the Latin verb serpo [to creep] is the same as the Greek ἕρπω, and the same goes for the derivations, serpyllum [thyme], etc. But that ancient Latin, and then Vulgar Latin, still used, at any rate in composition, the same verb without the [984] s, as in Greek, I gather from the neuter Italian verb inerpicare or innerpicare, which means exactly the same thing as the Greek ἀνέρπω [to creep upward], a compound of ἕρπω, that is sursum repo, and likewise ἀνερπύζω [to creep upward]. (Scapula has no example of the use of the verb ἀνέρπω, but he does gloss it as sursum repo. There is, however, an example in Arrian, Expeditio, bk. 6, ch. 10, § 3 and in the index it is glossed as sursum repo.) This verb, while it has no root in our language, nor in Latin as we know it, has a very obvious one in the aforesaid verb ἕρπω, from which it can only be derived through Latin, that is, through the use of the Roman vernacular, which is different in this regard from the language of writers. (25 April 1821.)
On the qualities and merits of the Sanskrit language, see some points taken from an article about Jones in the Notizie letterarie of Cesena, 1791, 24 Nov., p. 365, column 1.1 On its sometimes wayward use of compounds see ibid., p. 363, column 2, end. A waywardness similar to that sometimes found in ancient authors, especially in poets, especially Latin ones, but to a somewhat greater degree, reflecting the nature of Eastern peoples who tend always and in every sphere to push on to the furthest, intolerable, excess in things. (25 April 1821.)
The discovery and use of firearms, aside from the effects noted by me in other thoughts [→Z 262, 659–60], has also notably diminished the courage of soldiers, and generally of young men. “La victoire … s’obtient aujourd’hui par la regularité et la précision des manoeuvres, souvent sans en venir aux mains. Nos guerres ne se décident plus guère que de loin, à coups de canon et de fusil; et nos timides fantassins, sans armes défensives, effrayés par le bruit et l’effet de [985] nos armes à feu, n’osent plus s’aborder: les combats à l’armes blanches sont devenus fort rares” [“Victory … is obtained nowadays through the regularity and precision of maneuvers, often without even fighting at close quarters. Our wars are scarcely ever decided in any other way but from a distance, through cannon and rifle fire; and our timid infantrymen, without defensive weapons and terrified by the noise and the impact of our firearms, no longer dare to engage: combats using cold steel have become very rare”]. Thus Baron Rogniat, Considérations sur l’art de la guerre, Paris, Firmin Didot, 1817, Introduction, p. 1. And like soldiers, so too other men who use firearms rather than cold steel, with every battle, private or public, now being reduced to betrayals or to action at a distance, without any fighting at close quarters; aside from the influence that military education and the nature of wars have on nations as a whole. I would do well to read the whole of the book quoted, where the art of war is very clearly expounded, and there is much philosophy, the ancients are constantly compared with the moderns, and the various peoples one with the other, and the science of man applied to this same art, etc. And war certainly does pertain to the philosopher, both as cause of very important and significant events, and as something linked to countless branches of the theory of society, and of men and living beings. (25 April 1821.)
Overwhelming restriction and superstition and tyranny in regard to the purity of language leads straight to barbarism and license, just as excessive servitude leads to the overwhelming and immoderate liberty of peoples. Who do not then attain freedom today, because [986] their servitude is not excessive and tyranny, more moderate than it has ever been, is perfect and worse than ever.1 (25 April 1821.)
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br /> As there is never either the act or the possession of pleasure, so there is neither the act nor possession of usefulness, for the useful is none other than that which leads to happiness, which resides only in pleasure, by whatever name it happens to be called. (25 April 1821.)
From a comparison between the poems of Ossian, the true, natural, and native poetry of England, and Eastern poetry one may deduce (ironically)2 just how natural its present poetry is to England (such as Lord Byron’s), “being derived in large part from the East,” as the highly esteemed journal the Edinburgh Review says with regard to Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (London 1817), entitled “Oriental Romance” (Spettatore of Milan, 1 June 1818, Foreign Section, Issue 101, p. 233, and you can take a look at it).3