Mauthner Translation I.

Essence of Language As I thus prepare to give a critique of human language, I must precisely because the object of

my investigation is equally designated with the means of the investigation, namely by the word language examine the concept much more precisely than is done elsewhere. I surely need not

spend a long time on the concept critique . From time immemorial, critique means the separating or distinguishing activity of the human understanding. The attentive observation of two similar facts must necessarily lead to the consideration of their distinguishing marks, if the distinction is great enough for our organs; for there are no identical facts. Therefore, whoever promises the critique of a phenomenon, promises no more than and no less than a conscientious observation or investigation of that phenomenon. That anyone can do with good conscience, and the result of his investigation does not otherwise hang upon his will, but rather upon the observed reality and upon the sharpness of his sense organs. The Language What, however, is the language which I plan to attentively observe and have promised the reader? I do not want to pay attention to the individual words of a decided upon language like the writer of a dictionary; I do not want to combine the various forms of a single language into groups like a grammarian. However, I also do not want to write the history of a particular language, nor the history of a language family, like that which comparative linguistics, like that unsolvable problem which comparative linguistics has placed for itself, first for our own language family and then for all languages of the earth. Nevertheless, I obviously want to investigate what is common to human languages, what one can pretty abstractly and roughly call the essence of language. Here, it first stands out that the language in this sense signifies something entirely different from a language or the

languages . By those phrases, one after all can, if necessary, think of something real, even if this reality, because it is a fleeting sound, hardly allows material things to be taken into account. What reality, however, would in the end be more than a fleeting form? I am not at all on the verge of getting involved in sophistries. If one has called the architectonic monuments and the fossilized remnants of the primeval world a language, in which the prehistory of culture or nature speaks to us, then that is a figurative expression. If one is reminded of hieroglyphics and cuneiform writing, where some old people only through written characters (thus seeking to speak to us only through visible symbols), then nevertheless every such language would be (if they were deciphered), a spoken language at bottom. Even the visible sign language of our deaf-mutes is but only a visible determination of a vernacular language adapted to conditions, and it points to a spoken language just as much as behind our normal script. It belongs to a different train of thought which certainly does not exclude the feeling of unity of the facts that we people of books can get on throughout constant practice of reading while switching

off the spoken language in our consciousness. Nevertheless, unconsciously the so-called centre of audible language works even during the reading of book-people. The individual languages are therefore extraordinarily complicated phonetic groups, through which groups of people make themselves understood with one another. What, however, is the language , with which I have to deal with? What is the essence of language? In what relation does the language stand to the languages? The simplest answer would b: the language does not exist; the word is such a pale abstraction that something real hardly corresponds to it. If the human language as a tool of cognition, especially my mother tongue as a tool, were reliable, then I would have to give up the attempt of this critique at the outset. This is because the object of the investigation would then be an abstraction, an unreal and incomprehensible concept. For that reason, I stand before the first saddening dilemma. Only if the

human language and especially my mother tongue are neither reliable nor logical, only then will I discover something still real behind the extreme abstraction; but then, because of the unreliability of the tool, I would not be able to so rigorously carry out the investigation, as I would like. However, since here I do not actually write these opening sentences at the beginning of my observations, but rather after years-long effort, I already know that this saddening dilemma will be pursued by me step by step. What sense the abstraction the language has, that will be something clear if, for the time being, we have found out how abstract and unreal is that which we have accepted as something real even provisionally with good faith: the individual languages. What are these individual languages, which pass as the object of linguistics, that young-blooded science, which in this year (1896) has become 80 years old? If one considers that this science has placed for itself the problem of separating various languages of people according to tribes, peoples, and then again dialects, etc., then one must recognize that linguistics is allowed to take as its starting point the individual languages only provisionally and with reservation. Their object is rather the enormous mass of all human sounds that have ever been spoken or written somewhere on the earth by people for the purposes of communication. Linguistics has placed for itself the task to arrange this enormous stock according to words and according to educational forms subsequently or previously according to nearer and further relationships . The folk demarcation according to vernacular languages and according to dialects serves, as I have said, only for the provisional orientation. It may one day be discovered that the language of ancient Indians is closely related to ours; it may once again be discovered that the lower German dialect of the High German language stands furthermore as the likely believed low-German speaking Mecklenburger. In the area of east Asian languages, such surprises belong to everyday events.