Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/97

 things into esteem among us, use was made of the respect we have for antiquity and foreign countries to introduce the same words into the German language. It was done so quietly that no one was fully aware of what was actually intended. The purpose and the result of all admixture has ever been this: first of all to remove the hearer from the immediate comprehensibility and definiteness which are the inherent qualities of every primitive language; then, when he has been prepared to accept such words in blind faith, to supply him with the explanation that he needs; and, finally, in this explanation to mix vice and virtue together in such a way that it is no easy matter to separate them again. Now, if the true meaning of those three foreign words, provided they have a meaning, had been expressed to the German in his own words and within his own circle of verbal images, in this way: Menschenfreundlichkeit (friendliness to man), Leutseligkeit (condescension or affability), and Edelmut (noble-mindedness), he would have understood us; but the base associations we have mentioned could never have been slipped into those designations. Within the range of German speech such a wrapping-up in incomprehensibility and darkness arises either from clumsiness or evil design; it is to be avoided, and the means always ready to hand is to translate into right and true German. But in the neo-Latin languages this incomprehensibility is of their very nature and origin, and there is no means of avoiding it, for they do not possess any living language by which they might examine the dead one; indeed, when one looks at the matter closely, they are entirely without a mother-tongue.

54. This single example will serve to demonstrate what could with ease be followed up throughout the whole range of the language and found present everywhere.