Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/89

81 A few years later—in 1919—Khlebnikov would publish a much-elaborated and refined version of this table of consonants in an article entitled "Artists of the World". Here it would be categorically asserted that the consonant-meanings which he had "discovered" applied to all the languages of the world. His consonant-table was an "all-human alphabet“, or a “short dictionary of the world of space". The value of this table was that it allowed the world's artists to recover the lost unity of the world's languages and re-unite the human race. For, as Khlebnikov would explain in this article:


 * Languages have betrayed their glorious past. Once, when words dispelled enmity and made the future transparent and calm, languages united people in gradual steps (1: caves, : villages, 3: tribes, blood-unions, 4: states) to form a single rational world, a unity of rational values exchanged against identical exchange-sounds. Savage understood savage and put the blind weapon aside. But now, having betrayed their past, languages serve the cause of enmity. As incompatible exchange-sounds for commerce in mental merchandize, they have divided up multi-tongued

humanity into trade—warring camps-a series of verbal markets each with a boundary allowing no escape for its particular language. Each layer of sonorous coinage now claims supremacy over the others. In this way languages as such have served to disunite mankind and introduce spectral wars, But let a single written language accompany man to his most distant destinies-—and, gathered in a new embracing whirlwind, a new assembly of the human race will appear. The silent, graphic signs will reconcile language's multi-tongues. It was an answer to the Biblical condemnation of humanity: the destruction of the Tower of Babel and the confusion of all tongues.

In the same article, Khlebnikov conceded that the task of constructing the required new language had only just been begun. "But", he added,


 * the general form of the world language of the future is given. It will be a "transrational" language.