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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