From the Tree to the Labyrinth (81 page)

This passage displays two contradictions. In the first part, the fact that two languages evolved through different morphological rules is, if anything (as we have said), an argument against monogenetism. In the second part, with a specific quotation from Isidore, Maistre tries to play the etymological card. But at least the etymology of the seventeenth-century monogeneticists consisted of showing how the words of each language had developed from a single Hebrew root (the only one, for that matter, to have a presumed “iconic” or motivated relationship with the thing signified). Here, on the contrary, the game consists of demonstrating that within each language, and with quite different mechanisms, compound words can be created whose meanings are born from the sum of the meanings of their simple components, which is what happens in the natural languages when they compose terms like
screwdriver, corkscrew, parasol,
or when spontaneous agglutinations are born, as in the transformation of Mediolanum into Milan—though, alas, this never happened with the Latin word
cadaver.
Even if Isidore’s etymology of
cadaver
were plausible, and even if had the etymology attributed to it by Maistre, this would in no way prove any iconic and motivated relation between simple words and signified reality but rather, if anything, that new coinages are often born from the wordplay typical of the rhetors of decadence and not from an instinctive folk wisdom.

The fact that this aspect could escape Maistre is explained only by the religious—and not linguistic—exigency that he convince his readers (almost pedagogically) that language says originally the Truth. And we sense this from some expressions of outright joy with which he glimpses the action, within every human language, of this impulse to tell always the truth, no matter what: “It is a pleasure to be present, so to speak, at the work of this hidden principle that forms languages. Sometimes you see it struggling against some difficulty that impedes its development: it searches a form that it lacks; its materials resist it; then it will extricate itself from its embarrassment with a happy solecism, and it will say very effectively, ‘Rue passante,’ ‘couleur voyante’ ‘place marchande’ ‘métal cassant,’ etc.” (51).

No objection would be made as to the efficacy of these compounds, were it not for the fact that Maistre is not always fond of compounds (or of the hidden action a language forms in order to mint them), as if a language, in some of its vicissitudes, remained faithful to its own obligation to truth and in other instances degenerated. As examples of degeneration, he cites the fact that already in his own day (and in the St. Petersburg familiar to him) on visiting cards one could find titles such as
Minister, Général, Kammerherr, Fräulein, Général-Anchef, Général-Dejourneí, Joustizii-Minister,
and that on commercial posters words like
magazei, fabrica, meubel,
or that in the course of military drills commands were heard such as
directii na prava, na leva, deployade en échiquier, en echelon, contre-marche,
or that in the army functions should be named
haupt-wacht, exercise hause, ordonnance-hause, commisariat, cazarma, canzellari.

Immediately afterward, he mentions terms considered “beautiful, elegant, and expressive” that presumably existed in “your primitive language”:
souproug
(bridegroom), which precisely means “he who is attached with another to a single yoke,” and he comments that “nothing more correct or more inspired” could have been found, just as “we must admit that the savages or the barbarians who once deliberated to form such nouns surely did not lack refinement” (52).

It is obvious that there is no reason (except the imponderable one of taste) to decide that
place marchande
is legitimate and
contremarche
is not. It is unclear why to describe the bridegroom as someone attached to the same yoke (which could be simply a carnival taunt) seems beautiful, whereas it is horrible to give an order for an army to deploy itself like a chessboard (an effective spatial metaphor). Perhaps here Maistre laments only the introduction of barbarisms and therefore the pollution of one language with terms borrowed from another. In any case, he seems to react according to his personal stylistic preferences, “by ear.”

The point is that, if language must be considered the only way to enter into a rapport with the Sacred, every etymology must be “good”; in every metaphor, even the most banal, there should shine a truth, even in
screwdriver.
Since
rue passante
is not ancient to belong to the golden age, in recognizing it as an undegenerate expression Maistre is simply privileging the freshness of popular language over that of bureaucratic language. If he were to trace these and other discriminants, he would shift from mystical linguistics to sociolinguistics, an intention that is very far from his mind.

In fact, he returns constantly to the idea that the perfect language is that of the origins:

The formation of the most perfect, the most meaningful, the most philosophic words, in the full force of the term, invariably belongs to the time of ignorance and simplicity. One must add, to complete this great theory, that similarly the name-making talent invariably disappears in the measure that one descends to the epochs of civilization and science. In all the writings of our time on this interesting question, there has been a continuously expressed wish for a
philosophic language
, but without anyone knowing or even suspecting that the most philosophic language is that in which philosophy is least involved. Two little things are lacking to philosophy to create words: the intelligence to invent them and the power to get them adopted. If it sees a new object, it pages through its dictionaries to find an antique or foreign word, and almost always it turns out badly. The word
montgolfière,
for example, which is national, is correct, at least in one sense, and I prefer it to
aréostat,
which is the scientific term and which says nothing. One might as well call a ship a
hydrostat.
See this crowd of new words borrowed from the Greek this past twenty years, as crime or folly has found the need: almost all have been taken or formed in a way that is contrary to their literal meaning. The word
théophilanthrope,
for example, is more foolish than the thing, which is to say a lot: an English or German schoolboy would have known how to say, on the contrary,
théanthrophile.
You tell me that this word was invented by wretches in a wretched period; but chemical nomenclature, which was certainly the work of very enlightened men, begins with a solecism of the worst sort,
oxygène
instead of
oxygone.
Moreover, although I am not a chemist, I have excellent reasons to think that this whole dictionary will be effaced; but merely looking at the matter from the philological and grammatical point of view, it would be perhaps the most unfortunate thing imaginable if the recently disputed metric nomenclature did not win the all-time award for barbarism. (56–57)

Why should
oxygen
be more unhappy than the very unhappy
oxygon?
This is what Maistre does not explain. If language is seen as what the world was for the Middle Ages, as a natural revelation of Truth, nothing in language should be wrong. As medieval thinkers said, even monsters should show the power of God. Furthermore, as Maistre is the first to assert, in language there is a glottogonic force that overcomes all human resistance (and hence language is always right).

It must, however, be said that, at least in one case, Maistre’s reasoning finds a logically plausible formulation. He seeks, in effect, to distinguish three concepts: (1) the historical paternity through which every language derives from another, all tracing their ancestry back to the same, primigenial source; (2) the autonomous force whereby every language develops its own genius, and (3) the presence within each language of a “superlinguistic” force, a sort of divinely bestowed
energheia
that causes, within each language, without necessarily any historical descendance or borrowing, the same miracle of the primordial language to take place. Thus the following passage becomes comprehensible, as it denies thesis 1 in the first paragraph and affirms thesis 2 in the second:

And what can we say of the surprising analogies that can be noticed between languages separated by time and space to the point of never having been able to influence each other?

1. Please notice that I am not to be understood to be speaking of simple conformities of words acquired simply by way of contact or communication;

2. I speak only of conformities of ideas, proved by synonyms of sense, totally different in form
, which excludes all idea of borrowing
. I will only have you notice one very singular thing, which is that when it is a question of rendering some of those ideas whose natural expression would in some way offend delicacy, the French often chanced upon the same turns of phrase formerly employed by the Greeks in their day to save these shocking naïvetés, that must appear quite extraordinary since in this regard we acted on our own without asking anything of our intermediaries, the Latins. (52, my emphasis)

But after the assertion that every language resolves its own problems by itself, thesis 3 emerges, which sets out to prove that it is no longer a language’s autonomy but rather the existence of an original and divine force, the word, that becomes the source of every language.

If, on this point of the origin of language, as on so many others, our century has missed the truth, it is because it has a mortal fear of meeting it. Languages began, but
the word
never, and not even with man. The one has necessarily preceded the other, since
the word
is possible only through the VERB [i.e., the Word of God]. Every particular language comes into being like an animal, by birth and development, so that man never passed from a state of
voicelessness
to the use of the word. He has always spoken, and it is with sublime reason that the Hebrews called him a TALKING SOUL. (54)

But then, immediately afterward, and without a break, thesis 1, rejected in the first paragraph, is reproposed:

When a new language takes form, it is born in the midst of a society that is in the full possession of language; and the action or the principle that presides at this formation cannot arbitrarily invent one word. It uses those it finds around it or
that it calls from farther away;
it nourishes itself on them, it chews them, it digests them, and it never adopts them without modifying them to some degree. (54, my emphasis)

Finally, to underline the (always good) naturalness with which each single language, grinding or digesting previous elements, forms always suitable words, there is a gloss: “In a century passionate for every gross expression excluding order and intelligence, they have talked a lot about arbitrary symbols; but there are no arbitrary symbols, every word having its reason” (54). This negates what was previously asserted, namely, that having invented
oxygen
was a sign of degeneration. In fact, Maistre is biased: he thinks (from the beginning) that the modern inventors of
oxygen
were degenerate (inasmuch as they were modern), while the ancient inventors of
cadaver
were right (inasmuch as they were ancient). He is not seized by the suspicion that not even the ancient inventors of
cadaver
were the original Name Giver.

However, we also accept the proposition according to which languages live on borrowings; they transform and adapt, and yet their every word is natural and motivated. If Maistre returned to his example of
rue passante,
he would find that there is a motivation for the compound, but he would not be able to explain the motivation of
rue
and of
passer,
unless he repeated all the contortions of the classic etymologists. Thus, arriving at the crucial point, he gives up. Or, rather, he probably believes that he is not giving up, if the following passage is the expected demonstration. But the total mutual contradiction of the provided examples forces us—in the interest of the reader—to mark within the passage the various theses (all in disagreement among themselves) that it demonstrates. In our view, the theses are the following:

1.
Thesis of obscure borrowing.
Sometimes in a language there existed a word that then somehow passed into another language, which abandoned it but passed it on to a local dialect; for this reason, we may find in an Alpine locality a word used today in the Slavic area. This thesis, however, does not explain why words must reflect the nature of things, nor does it say that they do reflect it.

2.
Thesis of autonomous invention.
Sometimes a word is invented by analogy with a foreign term, sometimes by metaphor. Then each language invents its own terms and does so following quite different criteria.

3.
Thesis of original iconism.
A language does not invent words; it finds them already made, in accord with nature. (No proofs follow.)

4.
Thesis of evident and multiple borrowing.
One language borrows words from different languages, for the widest variety of reasons.

This is how, without a break, four mutually incompatible theses are affirmed.

[
Thesis of obscure borrowing
] Perhaps you will remember that in that country French
son
(in Latin
furfur
) is called
Bren.
On the other side of the Alps an owl is called
Sava.
If someone were to ask you why the two peoples have chosen these two arrangements of sound to express these two ideas, you would have been tempted to reply:
Because they judged it appropriate; things of this sort are arbitrary
. However you would have been in error; for the first of those two words is English and the second is Slavic; and from Ragusa to Kamchatka the word is used to signify in the beautiful Russian language what it signifies eight hundred leagues from here in a purely local dialect. You will not be tempted, I hope, to tell me that men deliberating on the Thames, on the Rhine, on the Obi, or on the Po, would by chance come across the same sounds to express the same ideas. Therefore the two words already pre-existed in the two languages that presented them to the two dialects. Would you like to think that the four peoples received them from some previous people? I know nothing of it, but I admit, it: in the first place it is the consequence of the fact that these two immense families, the Teutonic and the Slavic, did not arbitrarily invent these two words, but that they received them. Then the question begins again with respect to earlier nations. Where did they get them? One must answer in the same way, they received them;
and so one goes back to the origin of things
. (54–55)