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 sufficiently 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 perfected words, the most meaningful, the most philosophical, in the fullest sense of the word, occurs unfailingly in periods of ignorance and simplicity. … The “onomathurgical” talent is invariably disappearing as we descend toward the civilized and scientific eras. In all the writings that appear in our time on this most interesting subject, there is nothing but an invocation of a “philosophical language” without knowing, indeed without even suspecting, that the most philosophical language is that in which philosophy is least mingled.
The latter lacks two little faculties necessary to create words: intelligence to invent them and authority to have them adopted. Does philosophy see a new object? It will go and leaf through its dictionaries to find an ancient or foreign term, and almost always the enterprise comes to a bad end. Montgolfière, for example, which is used throughout the country, is correct, at least in one sense, and I prefer it to areòstate, which is a scientific term but suggests nothing: you could just as well call a ship a hydrostate. Observe the invasion of new words borrowed from the Greek over the last twenty years, gradually, as crimes or madness demanded them: more or less all of them are formed erroneously, they are self-contradictory.
Theophilanthropist, for example, is a term more foolish than the thing in itself, which is saying plenty; a simple English or German scholar would have been led to say, on the contrary, Theanthpophile. You will reply that this word was invented by wretches in a wretched age, and yet the terminology of chemistry, which was surely created by enlightened men, begins precisely with the lowest sort of solecism—oxygen—when they should say instead oxygon. I am not a chemist, but I have excellent reasons to believe that all this terminology is destined to vanish; the fact remains, in any case, that from a philological and grammatical point of view, it would be the most unhappy imaginable, if the prize for barbarism were not contested and wrested away by the metric vocabulary. (138–140)
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:
What can be said of the surprising analogies to be found among languages distant from one another in time and space, thus guaranteeing that any possible contact between them is impossible?
(i) Bear in mind that I do not refer to the simple resemblances found among words that the language has acquired simply through contacts or communications.
(ii) I speak only of the similarity of ideas, proved by words that are synonyms as to meaning, but different inform: thus excluding any idea of borrowing [emphasis mine]. I will confine myself to pointing out a quite singular case: when it was a question of expressing some idea that in its natural expression could have proved indelicate, the French were often able to find the same paraphrases already used by the Greeks in their day to avoid indecent words, which may seem even more extraordinary if you reflect that, in this respect, the French acted on their own, seeking nothing from their usual intermediaries, the Latins. (127–129)
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 our century has not succeeded in discovering the truth about the origin of language, as about many other questions, the reason is that it was mortally afraid of discovering it. Languages had a beginning, but the word, never, not even with man. It necessarily preceded languages; words, in fact, derive directly from The WORD. Every language is born, like an animal, through an explosion and a development, without man’s ever having passed from a state of “aphony” to the use of the word. Man has always spoken, and if the Jews defined man as “speaking animal,” they did so for a sublime reason.
(131–132)
But then, immediately afterward, and without a break, thesis 1, rejected in the first paragraph, is reproposed:
When a new language is formed, it is born in the bosom of a society that already has a complete mastery of language, and the action or principle that presides over this formation cannot arbitrarily invent any word; it uses only those that it finds around itself or that it summons from farther off [emphasis mine]; it feeds on them, grinds them, digests them, and never adopts them without having altered them, greatly or slightly.
(132)
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: “There has been much talk of arbitrary signs in a century in which people have grown passionate about every coarse expression that would exclude order and intelligence, but arbitrary signs do not exist, and every word has its own reason” (132–133). 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- Thesis of original iconism. A language does not invent words; it finds them already made, in accord with nature. (No proofs follow.)
- 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] You recall perhaps that in this country bran (in Latin furfur) is called Bren. On the other side of the Alps the civet owl is called Saca. If you were asked why the two peoples chose these two phonetic expressions to express the two ideas, you might perhaps be tempted to reply: “Because they felt like it; these are arbitrary choices.” And you would be mistaken: in fact, the first of those two words is English and the second Slavic, and from Ragusa to the Kamchatka it retains, in the beautiful Russian language, the same meaning it has eight hundred leagues from here, in a
