Counter-Currents
Mouthful of History: Thoughts on Længuage and White Nationalism
Tobias Langdon
Front left detail of the Franks Casket, featuring Weyland the Smith and Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic writing
2,197 words
If you want a mouthful of history, just say “mouthful of history.” It’s a hybrid phrase, Germanic and Greek, combining two great European traditions that met and mingled on the island of Britain. But there’s a local flavor to it too: the second consonant of “mouthful” is distinctively English. That’s why we once had a good way to write that second consonant: in Old English, “mouth” was muð, pronounced “mooth.”
Rootlessness recognized
Then came the Norman Conquest and the Great Vowel Shift. Our language changed, as languages always do, but white nationalists won’t need telling that change isn’t always for the better. We would be better off if English had retained its two distinct single letters — Þ and ð — for what are called the dental fricatives: the “th” of “thing” and “then.” They’re single sounds, after all, and they’re important sounds. However, the sounds don’t occur in French and the letters were lost when Norman scribes imposed an alien orthography on a conquered people.
How many native speakers of English know that? Not many, because not many know anything about Old English. That’s wrong, because it means we’re cut off from the roots of our own language. I felt that rootlessness myself when I looked at Old English for the first time. I learned I’d been wandering all my previous life in a linguistic landscape — a tongue-scape — whose features I didn’t understand and couldn’t explain. For example, why do some English words undergo such strange transformations? There’s “write, wrote, written” and “sing, sang, sung.” There’s “tooth, teeth” and “mouse, mice.” If you look at Old English, you’ll understand why those things happen.
Change your brain
You’ll also learn what richness we’ve lost. We’ve lost those beautiful old letters Þ and ð (called “thorn” and “eth”); [1] and that curious little letter æ (called “ash”) for the distinctive English vowel of “man” and “hat.” And we’ve lost thousands of rich and beautiful words, both simple and complex: simple words like æÞele, meaning “noble,” and wuldor, meaning “glory”; and complex words like æÞelborennes, “nobility of birth,” and wuldorgesteald, “glorious dwellings.” And something changes inside your head when you meet an Old English word like tungolcræft for the first time. It means “astronomy,” but it isn’t dry and otherish like that word from far-off Greek. Tungolcræft is literally “star-craft” (tungol, “star,” is another lost word).
That’s how English once worked: we didn’t import words from Latin and Greek to express the concepts of scholarship and science. We built words on the spot from home-grown wood, as it were. Here are two more examples: stæfcræft, stave-craft, was “grammar,” and efenðrôwung, equal-suffering, was “compassion.” Unless you know some Greek and Latin, “grammar” and “compassion” are opaque words. Too many of us know what they mean, but don’t know why. And even when you know that compassion is Latin for “with-suffering,” words like that don’t speak to your blood.
Efenðrōwung does speak to your blood. And compare the Old English blōstmfrēols, “blossom-freedom,” with the Latinate “floral festival.” Indeed, compare the Old English wiðmetan, “measure against,” with the Latinate “compare.” We didn’t need to import so much Latin, Greek and French. We gained something, but we may have lost even more. The process deracinated our language — unrooted our tongue.
Words as walls
German didn’t unroot itself like that. The standard German word for compassion is Mitleid, “with-suffering.” And where English imports Greek sympathy, German has home-built Mitgefühl, “with-feeling.” What is opaque in English is transparent in German, where much greater use of native elements in the vocabulary of philosophy and science may have profound psychological effects. German has shown much more resistance to what you could call linguistic globalization. And even when our sister-tongue has succumbed to globalization, it often kicks against the prick. German uses Latin Globus, meaning “globe,” but also Erdball, meaning “earth-ball.” Reading Collin Cleary’s fascinating essays on Heidegger at Counter-Currents, I’ve wondered how important the German language was for enabling Heidegger’s ideas and informing his resistance to modernity. Could Heidegger, Wagner, and other German-speaking giants have been gigantic in the same way if they’d been native speakers of English?
I don’t think so. And one very good reason for learning Old English is that, in some ways, it’s the best way for a native speaker of English to approach German. So much of what you’ll find in Old English is still there in German, like the three grammatical genders and greater use of inflection to mark grammatical cases like the accusative and dative. German isn’t as alien as it might appear. In fact, in some ways, it’s truer to the spirit of English than English is. We can find there so much of what we’ve lost here.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.
A strange neighbor
But one thing we haven’t lost here, I’m glad to say, are the sounds, at least, of the dental fricatives: the Þ (called “thorn”) and ð (called “eth”) of “thing” and “then.” I’d call them earthy sounds: they root us in history and in a unique folk-way in Europe. We might now write them in a clumsy, Frenchified way (t + h), but we still say them as our forebears did so many centuries ago. And as the speakers of another sister-tongue still do. Oddly enough, although it’s spoken right next door to England, it’s much further from English than German is. Then again, it’s a very odd language from an English speaker’s point of view, and learning it might be the biggest linguistic adventure of your life.
What is it? It’s Welsh, which uses dental fricatives in words like cath, “cat,” and blwyddyn, “year.” It also has a lateral fricative, the hissing double-l of llefrith, “milk,” and llwyd, “gray.” And a voiceless trill, the sighing rh of rhosyn, “rose,” and rhaw, “spade.”
And with strange sounds goes strange grammar. Tad is Welsh for “father” and brawd is Welsh for “brother.” They sound a lot like English, don’t they? But “my father” in Welsh is fy nhad and “your brother” is dy frawd (with f pronounced as v). That’s a small sample of what’s called mutation, where the initial consonants of Welsh words transform or even disappear entirely in certain grammatical contexts. Welsh is weird. But also beautiful. It’s a great pity that Plaid Cymru, the Leftist Welsh party that promotes Welsh in its very name (“Party of Wales”), would be as bad for Wales as, in the rest of Britain, the Labour party has been for the white working-class. Plaid Cymru would happily flood Wales with Somalis, Pakistanis, and Nigerians. That would be disastrous for the Welsh language and Welsh culture. But therein is a sure sign of Leftism: it harms most where it claims to care most.
A world-spinner’s works
Fortunately, you can learn Welsh without accepting the Leftism of far too many of its modern enthusiasts. After all, if you learn Welsh, you’ll be following in the linguistic footsteps of one of the greatest of traditionalist heroes: J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1873). His passion for languages like Welsh, Old English, and Finnish inspired world-spinning, and world-spanning, works like The Lord of the Rings (1954-5) and The Silmarillion (1977). Among much else, he was trying to give England a mythology to match those of the Celts and the Teutons. One good reason to learn Welsh — and another good reason to learn Old English — is that it will give you deeper insights into Tolkien’s writing, ideas, and aims. His invented language Elvish, with words like Caras Galadhon, “City of the Trees,” and Rhosgobel, “Brown Village,” is an homage to Welsh. And why are the walking-and-talking trees in The Lord of the Rings called “ents”? Because ent was the Old English for “giant.”
Tolkien was also steeped in the poetry of Old English classics like Beowulf and tried to reproduce some of their flavor in his books. As I said above: something changes in your head when you first meet the Old English word tungolcræft, “star-craft,” meaning astronomy. Something also changes in your head when you first meet the Old English word hwælweg, “whale-way.” It was a poetic way of saying “sea.” And look at some of the synonyms Old English poetry had for “ship”: lagumearg, merehengest, sǣflota, sundwudu, wǣgbord. The first two mean literally “sea-horse,” the others mean “sea-floater,” “sea-wood” and “wave-board.” Tolkien knew all those and the ancient language-spirit that inspired them. There was a richness and creativity in Old English, a readiness to combine and re-combine native roots, that we lost after the Norman Conquest and that Tolkien tried to tap into.
Eyefuls of history
But there had been earlier attempts to re-connect modern English with its ancient roots. The linguistic and cultural movement called Saxonism tried to popularize words like folkwain for “bus” and farspeaker for “telephone” (compare Fernsprecher, the standard German word for “telephone”). Saxonism failed, but it could be tried again. And it could, under Tolkien’s inspiration, go even further. If English should find home-grown ways to say “compassion” and “telephone,” why shouldn’t it find a home-grown way to write them? Tolkien invented new scripts for his new languages: if speech is flesh, then writing is clothing. But English isn’t now clad in its own garments: it wears hand-me-downs tattered by millennia of use. “Mouthful of history” is an eyeful of history when it’s written down. And in some ways, it’s an ugly eyeful. I don’t find the standard Roman alphabet attractive. And it’s phonetically impoverished for English, with too few symbols for our treasury of sounds. This isn’t surprising, because our alphabet isn’t truly ours: it uses letters originally devised for Semitic languages, then filtered through Greek, Etruscan, and Latin.
And the Roman alphabet is a globalizing force: it unites almost all the languages of Europe, but it also drains something from each of them. How wonderful it would be if each European language had its own unique script, tailored precisely to its phonetics, grammar, and what German calls its Sprachgeist, or “language-spirit.” Tolkien showed the way with his Elvish script and dwarf-runes. But I wouldn’t want to see English re-adopt the ancient Runic script that inspired Tolkien’s dwarf-runes. For one thing, runes are often ugly and angular. They have their charms and could have their uses in a white nationalist society. But I think it would be better to use Tolkien’s Elvish script. And better still to create entirely new alphabets for English and Welsh and the other languages of Europe. Beautiful alphabets, to inspire those who speak them and help them better resist the forces of globalism and homogeneity.
Words are weapons
Alphabets too must have profound psychological effects on those who use them. And we could do much better than the alphabet English currently uses, both for our own brains and for the sum of beauty in the world. But thorough alphabetic reform is something for the future — perhaps the far future. In the meantime, white nationalists should remember that words are weapons. And you sharpen your word-weapons by knowing more about words and language. The great German writer Goethe once said this: Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen — “Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.” That’s true, but it also applies to earlier forms of your own language.
If English is your mother tongue, it’s a very good idea to learn something about Old English and the Middle English of Chaucer’s teeming and tumultuous Canterbury Tales (14th century). But if your forebears weren’t speaking English a few generations back, it’s also a good idea to learn something about whatever language or languages they were: German or Gaelic or Polish or French or Spanish or Greek. The relationships between language and genetics are still disputed, but one thing remains sure: you anchor yourself more firmly in history by learning about your fore-tongues — your ancestral languages. Your roots go deeper and your mind becomes stronger.
It will take more than words to defeat the Left and the hostile elite, but words are midmost to earth-kinnish wist — central to human existence. English and every other language become ugly and unrooted in the mouths of the Left. In answer, we can do what Tolkien did: re-root and enrich our tongue-lorish moodseve — our linguistic imagination.
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
Notes
[1] “Eth,” the name of ð, is pronounced with the “th” of “then.” It’s ridiculous that there’s no widely known way to distinguish between the two “th” sounds in modern English (Tolkien used “dh” for ð and “th” for þ). And how can we unambiguously write the vowel in “good,” “could” and “sugar”? We can’t.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
14 comments
This essay has entirely turned my head around as well as the focus of my meagre intellectual enquiries at this late stage in my life. I realize that it is no longer a concern to fight the modern political battles which are being waged against us – racism, leftist diatribe, et al. — but to fight to regain our very reason for being, which is firmly rooted in our ancestry. This has been made crystal clear to me.
I’m not sharp enough to learn a whole new language, but I can certainly work to find a way to engage our children and youth into seeing the need for the cohesiveness of our several northern European languages being learned and appreciated as the building blocks of our civilization — the civilization that underpins all the progress of the world. That cannot be denied, though the Left is doing all it can to bury this idea and spit on its grave. We need to regroup and rebuild reorient our objectives. Perhaps we can build our own academies of learning, which would include our history exclusively and certainly all of our northern European languages — as well as the STEM courses, of course, at which we excel — we still need to make a living. Also, I understand that European languages are being ‘dropped’ from the curricula of many mainstream universities, which are now being run under ‘woke’ philosophies, and we need to turn that around as best we can.
For myself, I will add books to my library on this subject — reaching much further back into the history of our earliest times, and our earlies languages — rather than buying every new book scrapping over the horrors of the intentional displacement and replacement of the White race which rules our lives today. We fight by becoming stronger in our own way of being, and our history, culture and language are our strongest weapons. And hopefully, we can begin getting together in small groups to make this happen. Greg Johnson has created a ‘brain trust’ for CC, and maybe we need to do the same within our own lives. I am sure there are linguistic scholars out there who are being run out of contemporary colleges who would appreciate finding a new audience. Begin seeking sources of strength.
In what sense was Wagner opposed to modernity? Surely he was, and saw himself as, a member of the artistic vanguard. He may have been inspired by Greek drama but his creation, the Gesamtkunstwerk, was an innovation. As Collin Cleary points out in his excellent new book, Wagner’s Ring and the Germanic Tradition, the libretto to the Ring is not a slavishly “authentic” rendering of the Nibelunglied but a new and much improved work. Most importantly, accepts and extends to the breaking point the harmonic innovations of Western European music. If he had been a “traditionalist” he would have stuck with the most primitive sort of Germanic folk music he could find, or tried his own imitations of it; or, recognizing that the tradition was long dead, contented himself with “historically correct” performances of it. (See my essays here critiquing Wagner from a Traditionalist viewpoint, such as “My Wagner Problem — and Ours”)
The response to the Traditionalist is that even if something was lost, something was gained; equal temperament lost the purity of intervals but made modulation easier, thus allowing composers to create works on a vastly larger scale; the performance of an Indian raga may actually last as long as one of Wagner’s operas, but unlike those, it goes nowhere. We moderns can reap the benefits of both methods as long as we resist the lure of purism.
I’d like to comment on another issue mentioned in your very interesting article, but thought that readability would improve by separating it.
Regarding alphabets; this is an ever popular hobby horse, but usually of progressives (e.g. G. B. Shaw’s revision). As with my remarks about Wagner, something is lost and something is gained. A truly phonetic alphabet would require both standardized pronunciation (and there goes your “rootedness”, lost in a single national tongue) and an immensely larger character set.
On the first point, your example of the “correct” way to spell ‘hat’ assumes, of course, a particular way to pronounce it, likely the way it would be heard in New York rather than say, Boston or the Orkney Islands. A standard example is the ‘pin/pen’ distinction; in some dialects they sound the same, in others not. Which is it?
On the second point, consider Devanagari, composed of 47 primary characters including 14 vowels and 33 consonants, which renders Sanskrit in a perfectly phonetic fashion. It even addresses another issue: even within dialects, words are usually not pronounced separately, in dictionary fashion, but with considerable modification. So in addition to 47 primary characters, there are dozens more used to phonetically represent the actual phonetic combinations. Thus, “Don’t be stupid” is rendered “Domeby stupid”; there goes your idea of rendering roots at a glance (actually, you can see them, but only by retro-engineering on the basis of the rules, in case you need to look up the word in a dictionary).
So, things can be simple, or phonetic, but not both. Each alphabet reflects some historical decisions on the optimum formula; and, as Chesterton said about the fence in the field, we should assume there’s a good reason for it — that would seem to be the truly “conservative” approach.
True. Macedonian, like many other south Slavic languages has a phonetic Cyrillic alphabet, consisting of 31 letters, each purportedly corresponding to a sound of the Macedonian language, but in fact, the Macedonian language has something close to 40 distinct sounds, more if we factor in the various dialects, probably some number close to 44, which was the number of letters in the original Glagolitic alphabet. Standardization poses a serious danger to these dialects.
And one more point if I may: all this was possible with Sanskrit because it was not so much a “dead” language as a “learned” language used for scholarship, like Latin in the mediaeval period (or Newspeak in 1984). Pronunciation and grammar were permanently fixed, as was vocabulary (“Sanskrit” actually means “perfected”). English and German, of course, are “living languages.”
And that raises this point: arguing about the virtues of “rootedness” in languages seem to ignore the benefits of a kind of cross-pollination (or mongrelization if you prefer). Roots are less obvious in English because English operates with two or more levels of vocabulary, such as the alternation of French and Anglo-Saxon; the latter, for historical reasons (1066 and all that) produces two modes of discourse, high/official and low/common (“intercourse”/”fuck”, “land”/”real estate”). Case endings were lost precisely because several Germanic languages were on the ground, and the easiest way to communicate was to drop them (as any student of German or Icelandic knows: you reach a point where you shout “I don’t care about -en or -es or -e, it’s a hund, you know what I’m saying, dammit”); this allowed words to be borrowed from every language on Earth, resulting in the largest vocabulary of any modern language. Surely that’s a good thing?
Anyway, having access to “Sauerstoff ” in lieu of “oxygen” hardly made the German scientists any more “anti-modern” than the English.
All this reminds me of the Fraktur/Antiqua wars in 19th/20th century Germany. Germans had been printing native works in Fraktur and those in other languages in Antiqua (see any Counter-Currents book), and folkists began to insist on using Fraktur as a sign of, well, rootedness. Der Fuhrer, however, eventually banned it. The official reason was that it was a “Jewish font” fit only for Yiddish; the actual reasons were two: Hitler was a voracious reader (see G. Durocher’s essay on Hitler’s library) and found Fraktur tiresome; and, he anticipated Germany would control a European empire, and needed to use a font everyone could read., and which didn’t scream “German!” As Collin Cleary says in Wagner’s Ring, Wagner’s “nationalism often went hand and hand with an Enlightenment cosmopolitanism”, and, I would add, so did Der Fuhrer’s nationalism. As with languages and fonts, there is something to be said for eclecticism.
James J. O’Meara: Excellent comment. I recognize English is not a ‘pure’ language, but appreciate it’s numerous borrowings and bastardized roots and treasure of Latin and Greek higher vocabulary. To me, this epitomizes the arc of Western Civilization. I enjoy having my choice of numerous synonyms and a rich word bank. With all due respect, Tobias Langdon’s recommendation of creating our ‘own’ words disregards that the English were and are more than purely a Danish/Germanic people. Let’s leave that sort of language policing to the French Academy, please.
While Tolkien’s Elvish script is beautiful, each language utilizing its own individual set of characters seems to me to be going a bit too far. Some earlier English scripts were quite lovely; but let’s focus on ensuring White children learn at least basic modern cursive before we begin to specialize. While I believe in nationalism for each ethnicity, there need not be total linguistic and cultural isolation.
What I can wholeheartedly concur with is the study of any other language, and Welsh in particular. My own study of that lovely language was a bit limited (evening bus travel to reach the language teacher’s house along the same route where the Yorkshire Ripper had just killed another victim became inadvisable) but I still have my modern Welsh textbook, along with my book of Middle Welsh grammar and the Mabinogion in Welsh. I’ve also retained my paper analog Welsh clockface, so happy Pum munud ar hugain after five, and dinner duties await.
Avoid the Dyn Du
Cleverly done!
I tend to agree with 3g4me on this.
I enjoyed Langdon’s language class first thing in the morning.
I’m neutral on fonts except when trying to annoy font snobs, in which case I use comic sans.
Ha!
Here here!
The footnote links to the main page for some reason.
Seems kind of odd in 2021 for anyone to speak of mediæval Anglo-Saxon tribe from Continental Europe who temporarily conquered Britannia—like Romans before them and Normans after—as “we”. Battle of Hastings and Norman conquest of England were nearly 1,000 years ago, and population size then was tiny by modern standards; vast majority of modern ‘indigenous’ English people are descended from Norman “conquerors”, many can trace family trees back to genetically prolific King William the Conqueror himself.
True, indeed over course of evolution from Old English to Middle English to Early Modern English (King James Bible) to Modern English, it came to be to that despite technically being a Germanic language, ~2/3 of English vocabulary is of Classical origin (~60% Latin+7% Greek) either directly or via Old French/Anglo-Norman or other Romance intermediary. But this was long celebrated as a sign of cultural superiority of civilized England—Rule Britannia!—vs. uncouth barbarian Germans. (Until recently, a Classical education in Latin and Greek themselves was considered essential for every educated Englishman, practice carried over to America where all Founding Fathers were classically educated, oft made Græco-Roman allusions, adopted Classical architecture ideal, wrote under Latin pseudonyms. While some studied Anglo-Saxon as personal hobby, this was never considered essential to an English schoolboy’s education.)
Anyway, to follow extreme purity standards set out: Germanic Europe—perhaps all Europe—would have no indigenous alphabets at all. Runic alphabets originated in Italy with Old Italic alphabets, like Latin—likely derived from Hellenic, and ultimately Phœnician origins—as is the case of the Elder Fuþark runic alphabet whence Old English letter /Þ/ (“thorn”).
Even far less “pure” Anglo-Saxon: letter /ð/ (“eth”) is actually a relatively late mediæval typographical modification borrowing of standard Roman letter /d/.
/ð/ does survive in Icelandic—and the International Phonetic Alphabet: Voiceless Dental Fricative [θ] (from Greek “theta”) of “thin” complements Voiced Dental Fricative [ð] of “this”. Anglophones know the correct allophone to use for phonemic unit /th/; having too many letters (especially in age of typography, from block printing press to typewriter, when you had to maximize efficiency in use you could get from a limited, finite number of symbols) is not necessarily a good thing, particularly letters that can be redundant and confusing.
For example, if you study Modern Greek, chances are you will have spelling errors, since Greeks kept full Classical Euclidean Greek alphabet to express significantly altered smaller set of Modern Greek sounds, rather than merge and drop letters.
The vowel /o/ in Ancient Greek was split into a short, high/close [o] spelled /ο/ (“omicron”, small o) and a long, low/open [ɔː] spelled /ω/ (“omega”, big o). In Modern Greek, vowel length is lost; vowel height merged: Modern /ο/ and /ω/ both represent short mid [o̞]. But the distinct spellings confusingly endure.
Most confusing of all, Greek “iotacism”: process by which nine Ancient Greek phonemes, (letters/diphthongs representing 9 distinct sounds: /η/ [ɛː], /ῃ/ [ɛːi̯], /ει/ [ei̯~eː], short /ῐ/ [i], long /ῑ/ [iː], /οι/ [oi̯], short /ῠ/ [y], long /ῡ/ [yː], /υι/ [yi̯])…in Modern Greek all phonetically merged to represent one simple sound /ι/ (“iota”) [i].
Educated native Greek speakers and writers may have spelling memorized from young age (but still make mistakes)—word spellings preserved as relics from classical etymology—but to foreign learners it can be an endless source of frustration: why is this word spelled with omega+eta rather than omicron+iota, pronounced exactly the same? Why not drop all these redundant letters and merge to one consistent logical spelling..? Sometimes there is value in phonemic frugality, to make language work best for its primary purpose of communication, even at sentimental cost of dropping some letters (save for deliberately poetic, literary, historical contexts)…
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment