Angus (The Exceptional State) and I share a love of languages, and this conversation goes deep into language-nerdery.
This episode does not fall into the typical structure of anything I have posted previously—but who knows, it might be the start of a deeper study-in-public of language.
We loosely structured the discussion around GA 299, which is a 1919-1920 lecture series from Rudolf Steiner called The Genius of Language.
Living and Dead Languages, the language forming Genius
In traditional linguistic terminology, a dying language is one that is declining in speakership.
In Steiner’s anthroposophical terminology, living and dead are used to describe a subtle understanding that extends to things and states that are not typically understood as “alive” or “dead.”
Genius, in this context, can be understood as at the spirit or intelligence of the language.
Evolution of Consciousness as evidenced by Language. Pronouns, pronoun shifts, and I-consciousness
We are not discussing pronouns in the way the term has been used of late in English to describe gender sense or fluidity—this is a discussion of the linguistic aspect of pronouns as they emerge across language families.
There are verbal-primary languages (Arabic, Russian, some European languages) and there are subject-(or pronoun) primary languages—such as English and Swedish.
Angus brought in a great insight about Ancient Greek: in Pre-Socratic writings the subject experienced the gods acting through various parts of their bodies, and did not experience themselves as individual selves in any degree of the clarity to which we now do.
Large Language Models, AI, and language study
LLMs (a.k.a. AIs) and what they bring forward about language; the indications on ahrimanic intelligence, and the indications about the mystery of how we incorporate technology into human life with wisdom.
Strengthening the Emotional Life
Angus references a section of Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom around 1:11, and the actual quote is below:
The farther we descend into the depths of our own life and let our feelings sound along with our experiences of the outer world, the more we separate ourselves from universal existence. A true individuality will be the one who reaches up the farthest with his feelings into the region of the ideal. There are people with whom even the most general ideas that settle in their heads still bear that particular coloring which shows them to be unmistakably connected with their bearer. Other people exist whose concepts approach us without any trace of individual character, as though they had not sprung forth at all from a person of flesh and blood.
Some timestamps for major parts of the discussion:
14:09 Adding life back to language
25:20 Is English dead?
40:06 Dialect as at the living form of language? (comparison Arabic and Hebrew)
48:21 How languages freeze in time when isolated
1:00:00 Forgiveness in Russian, German, and Swedish
1:11:00 Strengthening the emotional life
1:15:00 Pronouns (linguistic)
1:17:43 Pre-Socratic Greek consciousness
1:35:51 LLMs (AIs)
2:07:52 “Intelligence” meaning “to read between”
