152. The Fatal Sound Shift: The Underground History
of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Fatal Sound Shift
During the sixteenth century, a studious Italian
merchant living in India pointed out to his wealthy friends some striking similarities between ancient
Sanskrit and Italian: deva/dio for
God, sarpa/serpe for snake, etc. All the
Sanskrit numbers seemed related to
the numbers of
Italian. What could this mean? This early intuition came and went without much of a stir.
Then in 1786, during
the early British occupation of India, the subject was addressed anew. In his speech to the
Bengal-Oriental Society that year, Sir William Jones announced he believed a family connection existed between
Sanskrit and English. It was
tantamount to the University of Rome splitting the atom. Sir William
declared Latin, Greek, and
Sanskrit sprang "from some common source which perhaps no longer
exists." Among English and
Sanskrit he showed evidence for "a stronger affinity than could possibly have been produced by
accident."
What common source
might be the parent of Western civilization? Jones could not say, but only thirteen years later Sharon
Turner's two-volume work, The History of the Anglo- Saxons, claimed to provide clues. There, replete with
thousands of illustrations, was a
record of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes out of ancient Germania as it had
been preserved in song and story,
Beowulf raised to a haunting power. Hundreds of cognates between modern English custom and ancient
prototypes had been tracked by Turner; there seemed to be a stirring continuity between what Tacitus said about
Germania and what upper- class
English/ American eyes saw when they looked into their modern mirrors.
The favorite occupations in antiquity
were war, the chase, rough and tumble sports, wenching, and drinking, not unlike the preferences of
contemporary Englishmen. When not
thus engaged, men often lay idly about leaving all work for women to do.
Gambling was common and every free
man was expected to bear arms. Could the English be the mighty Aryans of prehistory?
In 1808, Karl Wilhelm Frederick von
Schlegel, founder and editor of the Athenaeum, chief voice of German romanticism, wrote a scientific study
of Sanskrit which maintained that
the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Germany, Italy, and England were connected by common descent from an
extinct tongue. Schlegel proposed the name Indo- Germanic for the vanished dialect. We are forced, he said,
to believe all these widely
separate nations are descendants of a single primitive people's
influence. Oddly enough, Schlegel
learned Sanskrit himself at the hands of Alexander Hamilton, his close
friend and a close friend to the
Prussian government. Schlegel was highly esteemed by both Hamilton and the Prussia regime.
To put yourself in touch with this
exciting moment in recent history requires only a visit to a neighborhood library. The language
and customs of this ancient Aryan people are caught in Vedic literature — the story of an invading people
who forced themselves on the
Indian subcontinent. As Americans had forced themselves on North
American natives, a resonant
parallel. Aryan literature was exclusively a literature of battle and
unyielding hostility, the Vedas
stirring hymns of a people surrounded by strangers alien in race and religion.
There could be no peace with such
strangers; their destruction was a duty owed to God. Full of vigor, the Vedas breathe the attitudes of an
invading race bent on conquest, a cultural prescription with which to meet
the challenges of modern times. If only a way could be found to link this warrior people with the elites
of England and America.
In 1816, the brilliant young Danish
scholar Rasmus Rask not only accepted the
relationship of Germanic, Hellenic, Italic, Baltic, and Indo-Iranian,
but went further and found the
missing connection. Rask had seen something no one else had noticed:
between some Germanic streams of language
and the others a regular sound-shift had occurred transforming the sounds of B, D, and G into those of P, T,
and K. It meant an absolute
identification could be established between England and ancient
Germania. Rask wasn't prominent
enough to promote this theory very far, but the man who stole it from him was — Jacob Grimm of fairy-tale fame.
In the second edition of Deutsche Grammatik (1822), Grimm claimed the sound shift discovery which to
this day is called "Grimm's
Law." Salons on both sides of the Atlantic buzzed with the exciting
news.
Our Manifest Destiny
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