Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/112

 the words from Latin roots, and thus creating the Romance language as the language of the court and of the educated classes. But the particular result is that, whenever two words have the same meaning, the one from a Teutonic root almost without exception denotes what is base and ignoble, and the one from the Latin root what is nobler and more distinguished.

65. This endemic disease of the whole Teutonic race, as it might be called, attacks the German in the mother-country too, if he is not armed against it by a high earnestness. Even in our ears it is easy for Latin to sound distinguished, even to our eyes Roman customs appear nobler and everything German on the contrary vulgar; and as we were not so fortunate as to acquire all this at first-hand, we take much pleasure in receiving it at second-hand through the medium of the neo-Latin nations. [Fichte adds this note here: In our opinion the decision as to the greater or less euphony of a language should not be based upon the direct impression, which depends on so many matters of chance. Even a judgment of this kind should be founded on definite principles. The merit of a language in this respect should undoubtedly be, first of all, that it exhausts and comprehensively presents the possibilities of the human organs of speech, and, secondly, that it combines the separate sounds in a natural and convenient unity. Hence it follows that nations who only half develop their organs of speech, and that in a one-sided fashion, who avoid certain sounds or combinations under the pretext of difficulty or cacophony, and who esteem euphonious only what they are accustomed to hear and can themselves pronounce—such nations have no say in an investigation of this kind.

This is not the place to deliver judgment according to those higher principles on the German language in this respect. Latin itself, the parent language, is pronounced by each neo-European nation in its own way, and it would not be easy to restore its true pronunciation. There remains, therefore, only this question, whether the German language when compared with neo-Latin languages sounds so bad, hard, and harsh as some are inclined to think.

Until this question is thoroughly decided, we may meanwhile at least explain how it happens that it does seem so to foreigners, and to Germans too, even when they are unprejudiced and free from preferences or hate. A people as yet uncultivated, with a very lively power of imagination, and at the same time childlike in mind and free from national vanity (the Teutons seem to have had all these qualities) is attracted by what is far away, and likes to make remote countries and distant islands the habitation for the objects of its desires and the glories of which it dreams. Such a people develops a sense of romance (the word explains itself and no more suitable one could be invented). Sounds and tones from those regions touch this sense and awaken its whole world of wonders; hence they are pleasing.

This may be the reason why our countrymen who emigrated gave up their own language for a foreign one so easily, and also why we, their kindred so very far removed, find even now such wondrous pleasure in these tones.] So long as we are German we appear to