The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ladies and gentlemen;¹ dear children! In the name of my company, the Waldorf-Astoria, I extend a cordial welcome to all of you who have come here to take part in this simple little opening ceremony for our Waldorf School. I would especially like to heartily welcome our honored guests. I want to thank them for putting in an appearance here today and for the interest in our undertaking that this demonstrates.

Ladies and gentlemen! Founding the Waldorf School was not something that sprang from the mere quirk of an individual. Rather, the idea was born out of insight into the needs of our present time. I simply felt the need to truly call the first so-called “comprehensive school” into existence and thereby to alleviate a social need, so that in future not only the sons and daughters of the affluent but also the children of simple workers will be in a position to acquire the education that is needed nowadays to ascend to a higher level of culture. In this sense, it is a deep personal satisfaction to me that it has been possible to call this institution into existence. But today it is not enough to simply create a facility; it is also necessary to fill it with a new spirit. And anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is our guarantee that a spirit of this sort will fill this facility. I feel a deep inner responsibility at this point to express heartfelt thanks to the one who has conveyed this spiritual science to us, our beloved Dr. Rudolf Steiner. But I also thank the authorities who have made it possible for us to bring this facility into existence, so that we are in the fortunate position today of really turning our thoughts into deeds.

But now I turn especially to you, dear staff and managers of the Waldorf-Astoria Company: Let us be clear that by calling such a thing into existence, we also take on a great responsibility. Let us be clear on this, and let us solemnly swear and promise today to show ourselves worthy to be the first in the German Empire to have the possibility of enacting this idea of the comprehensive school, which has been spoken about so much, right here in our city of Stuttgart. Let us show the world that we are not only idealists, but also people of practical deeds, and that our children, strengthened by this school, will in future be able to cope with daily life in a better and fuller manner.

It is in this sense that we send you, dear children, to this Waldorf School, so that when you leave this place you may draw from it the strength to cope, as whole human beings, with the difficult life that awaits you. But there are also joys that await you in this school. I was privileged to take part in the course that Dr. Steiner gave for the teachers, and so I became very aware of how much we ourselves missed out on in our youth, and how difficult it is later on in life to make up for what we missed back then. It is truly a matter dear to my heart to say that since we ourselves were not in a position to enjoy this blessing in earlier times, we must at least thank our destiny that we can make it available for others today. And thus I can say to you children who are entering this new school that there are pleasures waiting for you. And those who were privileged to take the course that Dr.Steiner gave for the new teachers know that this new method means that learning will no longer be a pain for you as it was for us older ones; for you, it will be a joy and a pleasure. So be glad, children, that you will be allowed to enjoy this school. You may not be able to understand this today in all its implications, but when you graduate from this place of education, show that you are a match for life and its challenges, show the world the wonderful fruits of this new method of education that will teach you to be purposeful individuals able to cope with life.

We also realize, however, that what we can create here is just a small beginning. The responsibility is great and the burden rests heavily on those who have accepted this task, and as time passes the attacks that come from all sides may also be great, but there is one thing we can already say today: The will within us will be so strong and the thoughts so mighty and the courage so great that we will also be able to overcome all the things that may try to hinder us, because we know what a lofty goal we are striving for, and because we are always aware of the responsibility that we have taken on.

And you, dear teachers who have taken up this work, who have yourselves been introduced to the spirit that is to ensoul this school, you know what a great responsibility has been laid upon you, and I address this request to all of you who will participate as faculty in the Waldorf School—may you all, along with me, be aware of the extraordinary gravity of this responsibility, and may you never cease to feel this responsibility as deeply as I do at all times.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, in handing over this institute to the staff and management of the Waldorf-Astoria company, and thus also to the public, I wish from the bottom of my heart that the spirit that brought us a Goethe, a Schiller, a Herder and whatever their names may be, all those great cultural heroes of the past, that this spirit may reign here again, so that through the school of the future this spirit can once again enter our German fatherland. If this is the case, then all of us who carry the responsibility for it will be aware that we are the servants of these spiritual forces. Then a day will dawn when our poor fatherland can begin to ascend from the depths of its great need, both of body and of soul, and we may hope that then there will be more people who can help to lead our people upward to the heights where our cultural heroes, a Goethe and a Schiller and so forth, once stood, and further still.

And in once again expressing my wish that this undertaking of ours may happily thrive, I do solemnly swear and promise in the name of the Waldorf staff, in the name of our school, in the name of our children, that this school will become a garden and a fountain of everything that is good, beautiful and true.

• 1. This address was published in the Waldorf-Nachrichten [Waldorf News], vol.1, no.19, October 1919.

Several weeks ago, when we all came to this school for the first time, I visited you more often. Then there were a few weeks when I had to be quite far away from here, but each morning when I got up and went to work, I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children and their teachers doing now?” This thought came to me often during the day. And now, in the festive Christmas season, I have had the privilege of being able to visit you again. I went into all your classes and asked many of you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you see, you answered me warmly, just like that. And then I said to you, “That is an especially nice Christmas gift for me!”

And it is a nice Christmas gift for me. You see, dear children, I have to think about how you have been spending your days since Herr Molt gave us the gift of this Waldorf School. After resting from evening until morning in the divine spirit that watches over your souls from the time you go to sleep until the time you wake up, and after you have washed and dressed and gotten all ready, you come up here to this beautiful schoolhouse. And I believe that many of you, maybe even all of you, look forward to everything that will be here for you in this beautiful schoolhouse. [“Yes!” shout the children.]

Dear children, you have reason to look forward to it. You see, while I was away from you I thought of you often, and in my thoughts I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children doing?” And I also said to myself, “They will be doing just fine, because they have nice capable teachers, and these nice capable teachers approach them with real love and are working very hard so that something good will come of the children.” And then I had to think of how you look forward to coming up here and of the love you show for your teachers. These teachers have to work long and hard to be able to teach you all the good and beautiful things that will make good and capable people out of you.

And you know, my dear children, I was especially pleased when I was in the classes and some children would come in playing the part of Ruprecht¹ or of little angels, and they sang and talked about the child Jesus, about the holy Christ Child. It was beautiful and grand that you could speak about the Christ with such love, and that you could listen with such love.

And do you know where your teachers get all the strength and ability they need so that they can teach you to grow up to be good and capable people? They get it from the Christ, whom we think about at Christmas. We think about how He came into the world to bring joy to all people, and you gave some beautiful presentations about Him today.

You see, my dear children, there are beings on earth that are not like human beings—for example, the animals around us—and we might often think that we should envy these animals. You can look up and see the birds flying, and perhaps then you might say, “Oh, if only we could fly, too! Then we would be able to soar into the air.” We human beings cannot fly like the birds because we have no wings. However, dear children, we can fly into the element of the spiritual, and we have two wings to fly there. The wing on the left is called “hard work,” and the other wing on the right is called “paying attention.” We cannot see them, but these two wings—hard work and paying attention—make it possible for us to fly into life and become people who are really ready for life. If we work hard and pay attention as children, and if we have teachers that are as good and capable as yours, then what makes us fit for life will come to us, and on the wings of hard work and paying attention we will be able to fly into life, where the love of our teachers carries us.

You know, you can sometimes think that there are things that are more fun than learning. But that is not really true; there is no greater joy than learning. You see, when you enjoy something that lets you be inattentive and does not make you work hard, then the joy is over immediately. You enjoy it, and then the joy is gone. But when you enjoy what you can learn, when you are flying on the wings of hard work and paying attention, then my dear children, something stays behind in your souls. (Later on you will know what the soul is.) Something stays in your soul, and you can enjoy that over and over again. When we have learned something good and proper, it comes back again and again; we enjoy it again and again with a joy that never stops. But the other fun things, the ones that come only from inattentiveness and laziness, they come to an end.

You see, because many of you—all of you, I would like to believe—want to work hard and pay attention to what your nice teachers are giving you, I was so glad to see your love for your teachers streaming out of your eyes when I saw you again. And so that you do not forget it, I would like to ask you again, “Don't you all sincerely love your teachers?” [“Yes, we do!” shout the children.] Now, that is what you should always say. That is what you should always feel, and then the spirit whose earthly life and birth we remember at Christmas time, the Christ spirit, will take joy in you.

Now, my dear children, when you have felt your teachers' love all day long up here, then you can go home again and tell your parents about what you have learned, and your parents will be glad and say to themselves, “Well, our children are going to grow up to be good and capable people.”

Make sure to write that in your souls, for now is a good time to do that. When we think of the great festival that reminds us that the Christ entered our world to bring comfort and joy to all human beings who turn their hearts and souls toward Him, then we can also inscribe in our souls the intention to become good human beings. Because the power of Christ is helping you, you will become what you write in your souls today, what you seriously intend to become. And when I come again and see that you have made even more progress, when I come again and see that you can once again show me that you have taken love for your teachers into your hearts and kept it there, then I will again be very glad. My warmest Christmas wish for you today is that this love will grow ever more perfect in you, and that you may continue to unfold the left wing of the human soul, which is hard work, and the right wing, which is paying attention.

And now that I have spoken to the children, let me still say a few words to those who have accompanied them here. What I just said to the children flows from a deeply satisfied heart, because I really have received the most beautiful Christmas greeting from them. When I came into the school, what wafted toward me was something I would like to call the good spirit of this school. It was the really good spirit, the good and unifying spirit, that brings teachers and children together here.

You see, in these days a Christmas mood was resting on all the serious teaching that was taking place, and it was deeply satisfying to perceive this Christmas mood, into which the revelation of Christ speaks, if I may put it like that, in all the corridors and especially in the classrooms. This was no mere supplement to the regular lessons. You could feel that our faculty managed to warm and enlighten everything that was being presented to the children's souls and hearts and understanding with the real, true spirit of Christ. Here, in accordance with the wishes of the divine spirit, we do not speak the name of Christ after every sentence—for “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!”—but it is nonetheless true that this spirit of Christ is with us in all our individual subjects and in every teaching activity. This is something that can readily be felt, especially at this time of year. Perhaps you too have been able to feel it in what came to meet you out of this Christmas assembly.

And finally, to conclude my Christmas greeting, I would like to appeal to the children whom you have sent here. I hope their progress pleases you.

Children, when you enter these rooms with the other boys and girls, recall that you are meant to love each other warmly, to love each and every other one. If love prevails among you, you will thrive under the car e of your teachers, and your parents at home will have no concerns and will have loving thoughts of how you are spending your time here.

There is something we may say today, ladies and gentlemen, which should resound, as the spirit of this school, from every word and glance the children bring home to you who have sent them here, as an echo of what is meant to permeate all of our human journeying on earth since the mystery of Golgotha took place, to permeate all human work and activity, and especially all activity in which the spirit has work to do. May the words that ring in our souls today weave through everything that human beings do out of self-understanding, weave like a warming breath of air or beam of sunlight:

The revelation of the divine from heavenly heights,
And peace to human beings on earth who are of good Will!

Luke 2:14

Our great ideal is to cultivate this good will in the children of the Waldorf School. Our concern must be to find the governance of the spirit of the world in our work, in everything we do. May the Christmas message, “The revelation of the spirit of God from the heavenly heights, and peace to human beings on earth who are of good will,” trickle down into all the work of the Waldorf School as well. May the school's working strength be governed by brotherly love and by the peace that inspires and supports all work! That, dear ladies and gentlemen, is my Christmas greeting to you today.

• 1. Ruprecht: in the European tradition, the Moorish helper of St. Nicholas, who carries a black sack and administers symbolic punishments to children who have been bad during the past year.

Dear children!

Last time I was able to be here, I told you how gladI am when our dear friend Herr Molt comes to pick me up in Dornach, where the school for big people, for grown-ups, is being built.¹ Then I can be with you again for a little while and see what you are doing.

And why am I so glad when Herr Molt comes to bring me here? Because it makes me think, “Now I am going to the school that was founded for our dear children”—that is, for you who are here because you long to become capable people who are ready for life.

Because I have only been here for a short time, I have not been able to see much yet—just the tiny little folks in the first grade, and the eighth grade—but what I did see gave me great pleasure. I saw how patiently and lovingly the first grade teacher had helped the children make some progress, and I was privileged to spend a very nice lesson with the eighth grade students. They were hearing about what human history tells us of how human beings on earth are involved in an evolution, an ongoing progress, that is driven by the spirit: Something that lives in human history gives us the desire to work on into the future, the spirit in which this was being conveyed to the souls of our dear young friends in the eighth grade was very beautiful. I am looking forward to seeing all the other classes, too. I am always pleased when I see how what our friend Herr Molt planted here is beginning to develop.

You entered this school when the fall was approaching. At that time we tried to think about what we would experience here and what we wanted to foster—love for each other, love for our teachers, love for God, who speaks to us from everything. And now, while you have been enjoying what your teachers presented to you each morning, you have also been experiencing what comes up out of the earth, what the spring draws out of it. You have seen the trees growing green. And now we remember what we hear when we go out into the woods. We hear the songbirds, and we are glad.

But today we have also heard something else, something for which I am especially thankful. We have heard you, under the direction of your teachers, express something that comes from inside of you. We can hear the birds singing out in the woods, and we can also hear what you have expressed to us, but there is a difference between them.

We are glad when we hear the little birds singing. But we know that something else is present when we hear what you perform for us. This is something that we call the human soul. It is your human souls that speak to us and sing to us. This is what human beings make out of what speaks to them out there in nature. In the woods, we hear the birds, but when you sing many other things that are heard come toward us out from the human soul.

But there are also other things out there in nature. You see how the plants grow and the trees turn green. All of this is called forth by the light. Light floods the entire universe. Light and warmth are what call everything up out of the earth, all those things that delight your eyes and hearts. What sounds in your ears, brought to you through the patience and persistence of your teachers, what travels through the world as light and then enters your eyes—we hear all of this resounding from you, not only when you sing and dance, but also when you tell what you have learned to calculate and what you have learned about everything that is human. In your souls, this turns to light. And just think what the plants would be without the sun. They would not be able to come out of the ground. They would always remain roots that would not be able to develop flowers, and it would be dark. This is what it would be like for you if you went through the world without ever finding a school where you could learn something. You would be like a plant that never finds the sun. The soul finds its sun in people from whom it can learn something.

This is why we are so glad that a school like this has been founded as a result of Herr Molt's insight, and why you are so glad to be able to be in a school that you love. Seek the light of the soul, just as the plants seek the light and warmth of the sun!

I do not want to always say the same things to you, because I also do not want to always hear the same things when I come, but there is one thing that I want to hear from you again and again. You must answer me; this is what I am most curious about. And so I ask you, children, do you still love your teachers? [“Yes!” shout the children.] That is what I want to hear from the majority of you. This is what you are meant to take up into your souls. Love for your teachers will support you as you go out into life. Again and again, each time I come here, I would like to experience that you have made progress in learning, but I would also like you to show me that you have continued to love your teachers. You can be sure that in the great building that is being built for grown-ups in Dornach, where big people are meant to learn something, we all think about the Waldorf School here, and we think of it with love and joy. There are a lot of people who are thinking of the Waldorf School with love today, and they are thinking, “How good and capable these people will grow up to be, since as children they were filled with love for their teachers.”

Oh, there is something I must tell you—Frau Steiner sends her greetings, since she cannot be here today.

There is a spirit that is always meant to prevail here, a spirit that your teachers bring to this place. From the spirit of the cosmos, they learn to bring this spirit here to you; they take in what St. Paul said with all of their souls. The spirit of Christ prevails throughout our school; whether we are doing arithmetic, reading, writing, or whatever we do, we do it with the attitude that the Christ awakened in us:

“I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Matthew 28:20.

This is the spirit that is meant to prevail here, and it will do so through what your teachers bring to you with love, patience and endurance. May it prevail through what lives in your souls!

Be with this spirit when you are in your class, and think of it when you leave. Be glad in your souls that you are coming back to the Waldorf School where the sun is lit for you, the sun that people need for life.

If there is someone among you who does not pay attention, there should be one of you who can go to that person and lovingly say, “Hey, hard work and paying attention get us up the mountain of life. Upward, friend! You should always be going up the mountain of life.”² This is how each of you should help the friend who falters a little—all of you for each one, all for one, one for all, lovingly. Love needs to be present among you, for each other and for your teachers. This is something we want to cultivate as part of the good spirit of the Waldorf School.

• 1. The wooden building of the Goetheanum, the Free School of Spiritual Science, was under construction from 1913–1921.
• 2. In the original German, this is a reference to a song sung by the students at the beginning of the assembly.

My dear children!

Today, now that we are at the end of our first school year here in our dear Waldorf School, let us inscribe on our souls something of why we are actually in this school. What does it mean that our dear friend Herr Molt, together with Frau Molt, founded this Waldorf School for you, my dear children, and for humankind? What does it mean that you come here every morning in order to learn something good? What does it mean, above all, that there are people who are taking great pains to guide you into life so that you will grow up to be good and capable people?

You know, my dear children, that I have often come here during this school year, and in each class I always asked you a question, a question that comes straight from my heart. I often asked you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you know, you always answered me as warmly as you just did today.

Now there will be weeks in which you do not see your teachers for a while, and so now I want to say something different to you. I hope your hearts will often answer this question during vacation. Now I would like to say to you, “Now that you are not going to see your teachers, learn to be grateful to them.” In the same way that you have learned, tried hard to learn to love your teachers, now learn to feel firmly in your heart that you are grateful to your teachers, so that when you ask yourselves, “Am I grateful to my teachers?” you can honestly and heartily say, “Yes, I am grateful.”

Now there is something else I want to say to you. You see, my dear children, here with us it should not happen that as Waldorf School students you say, “Hey, school is over now; if s vacation. When we're in school, we have to work hard and learn, but now we can be lazy. We don't have to do anything. We're glad that we can be lazy.” You know that is not what we want to say. We should say something else; we should say, “Yes, it's a beautiful day. During the day we experience many beautiful things along with some that are sad and painful, but what would human beings be if they could not experience through their senses everything that divine spirituality has put into the world, everything that is so great and beautiful and true.”

But unless we can also sleep and rest, we cannot use our ears and eyes properly to hear and see all the beautiful things divine spirituality has put into the world. Think about how after enjoying the day, you have to rest at night, and then in the morning you are strengthened again. Your eyes see better and your ears hear better. If you had to stay awake all the time, you would surely not be able to enjoy and learn about life in all its truth and beauty the way divine spirituality made it. This is also how it is in life as a whole. You should not think, “Now that it's vacation we can be lazy;” you should think, “All of what we received from our dear teachers, everything that humankind has learned so that individuals can know it—we received all this, and now we need a little rest, so that when we have rested, we can go back into our classes and be fresher and more lively. In fact, we will each go into the next grade; with new forces we will once again take into our hearts what our teachers will give us through their love and hard work, what humanity has learned in service to humanity.” This is how we should think of it—that we are resting during the vacation to get strong again for the whole new school year.

Then, my dear children, I would like to tell you a little about what it means that this Waldorf School of ours exists, and what it means that we are here in this school. You see, the person you are going to grow up to be, this person has a physical body, a soul and a spirit. You each have a body, a soul, and a spirit. And when a person is very little and is born into the world, this body and soul and spirit are all very incomplete. In you, they are still incomplete, but they are supposed to become more complete. Herein the Waldorf School your body will be shaped to become skilled at everything a person has to do in life. Your teachers have worked hard at this on your behalf; you have been introduced to eurythmy, for example, which works to make your body very skillful in life, and many other things have been brought to you so that you will become people who are skillful and capable and strong in their bodies. When you are small, you are fairly clumsy. You have to become more skillful. It is the same with the soul which is in each one of you. But it has to be developed so that it can send out threads in all directions for life. This is like unwinding the strands from a tangled ball of yarn—the threads for your life have to be untangled from your soul. This is how the soul develops, and this happens for you so that you become good and capable with regard to your forces for life. Good strong forces for life have to be fetched up out of your souls. And your spirit—yes, my dear children, if we did not educate the spirit, we would not be human beings at all. The spirit must be educated so that we become very good and capable human beings.

Now you see, when a person has worked all day or when a child has played and learned well and then sleeps, sometimes dreams come to them from their sleep. Most of you have experienced dreams. Sometimes they are very beautiful dreams, sometimes ugly dreams. And now you are going to go rest during vacation. Then something will come to you that can be compared to a dream. You see, during vacation, when you think back to when you were in school, it may be that you think, “Oh, I had nice teachers, I learned a lot, I was glad to be able to go to school.” And when you think that, those are beautiful dreams during your vacation. And when you think, “Oh, I should have been less lazy; I didn't like to go to school,” and so forth, then you are having bad dreams during vacation. Think back often during this vacation to when you were in school; for example, think like this: “My thoughts are drawn back to the Waldorf School, where my body is shaped for skillful activity, where my soul is developed to be strong in life, where my spirit develops so that I can be truly human.” When you think often like this about how your body is being shaped, your soul developed and your spirit educated, you will send yourself a good dream for your time of rest, and then your vacation time will also contribute something to making you a good and capable person in life.

You know, when I came today, one of your good little fellow students gave me something. Let⁷s see what it is. Look, this is what he gave me—a washcloth and a flower! Now I guess I must wash myself and dry my hands, and perhaps the flower is meant to say that your lessons are something that blooms as beautifully as this nice little white flower. [Rudolf Steiner holds up the washcloth.] And perhaps this could remind us that what we learn here is also something we can use to wash away everything in our souls that is incomplete, all bad thoughts and feelings that want to make us be lazy and not pay attention. I would like to give you each a little spiritual cloth so you can wash away all the laziness and lack of hard work and inattentiveness, and so on. So I am very glad that you have given me this little symbol and that I can show you how to use it to wash away a whole lot of what should not be in your souls.

And look at this little flower! You have learned many things here that you needed to learn, and what you learned is so many little flowers like this in your soul. Think about this when you remind yourselves that your thoughts are hurrying back to the Waldorf School where your bodies are trained to be skillful, your soul is developed to be strong for life, and your spirit unfolds so that you can be properly human—and think about how flowers like this are being cultivated in your soul day after day, and how grateful you should be for that. Everything in life can be of service to us and help us think about what is right. That, dear children, is what I wanted to say to you.

Think about each other, too! You have gotten to know each other and also, I hope, learned to love each other. Think about each other very, very often, and think about how good it was that you came together so that your teachers could help you grow into good and capable people. Don't think, “Now we can be lazy,” but think, “We need to rest, and when we have rested we will come back and be fresh and ready to receive what our dear teachers bring to us.”

Arid now, although you will not yet be able to understand it, I would like to say a few words in your presence to your dear teachers, who have now put all the diligent work of the Waldorf School behind them, and I would like to shake their hands. First of all, I would like to shake hands with Herr Molt and Frau Molt for having created this Waldorf School for us so that we can try to do something for humanity in its dire straits. My dear friends—as I said, I am speaking to the teachers, but you children can also hear it and can remember it later—the years behind us have been bitter ones for humanity, years in which people beat and bloodied and shot each other. There are still other bitter things in front of us, for the times still look very bad. But then the Waldorf teachers were the first to find the courage to appear here and to start to believe something that I am convinced that people today must start to believe above all else. The Waldorf teachers came here and said, “Yes, we have to work on the children so that when we are old, something will have happened to the children that can prevent unhappiness and bitterness of this sort from overcoming people.” This requires a certain courage and it requires hard work, but above all it requires something that awakens in human hearts the possibility of not sleeping, but of staying awake. That, dear Waldorf teachers, is why I want to shake your hands so warmly. If many people would wake up and look at the decision you have come to instead of sleeping through it, if what happens here would find successors, then you would realize that you were the first to work at something that is so very necessary for our future as human beings.

Dear children, when your teachers came into school each morning, they were people who clearly grasped the task of our times and devoted themselves diligently to what was required of them. And it was always a warm moment for me when I asked you, “Do you love your teachers?” and you so heartily answered, “Yes!” During the vacation I will also wonder whether you are grateful to your teachers. But you, dear Waldorf teachers, let me warmly shake your hands. I thank you in the name of the spirit of humanity which we are trying to cultivate throughout our spiritual movement. In this spirit, I shake your hands for everything you have accomplished on behalf of the future ideals of humanity. Today is the day for us to be able to remember these things, and it is the day when you children should feel how grateful you ought to be to these teachers of yours.

There is still something I would like to say today. Alongside everything we have learned here, which the individual teachers have demonstrated so beautifully, there is something else present, something that I would like to call the spirit of the Waldorf School. It is meant to lead us to true piety again. Basically, it is the spirit of Christianity that wafts through all our rooms, that comes from every teacher and goes out to every child, even when it seems that something very far from religion is being taught, such as arithmetic, for example. Here it is always the spirit of Christ that comes from the teacher and is to enter the hearts of the children—this spirit that is imbued with love, real human love. This is why I want you children to feel that not only have you learned something here, you have also gradually learned to feel what it is for one person to love another. And so now as you are going on vacation, I would like you to think of all your schoolmates with a warmhearted “Until we meet again! Until we meet again, when we comeback strengthened into these rooms, when we can once again work with our teachers on what will make us into good and capable people.”

You see, dear children, you must consider how life here in this school is connected to the whole of human life. When people get old, they are seventy or eighty years old. Life brings joy and sorrow, beauty and ugliness. When we get old, we are seventy or eighty, as I said. We can compare our life to a day with twenty-four hours. If this day represents our life, then a year that we spend in this day of life would be about twenty minutes long, and your eight years in primary school would be something like two to three hours out of your whole life. So the time that you spend in the Waldorf School makes up two or three hours out of your whole life. And when we go through the other twenty hours we have for living, for working, for becoming aware of the spirit, for doing things with other people so that something good can happen in the world—when we go through these hours, it can be a real comfort for our hearts, a real strength for our lives, if we are able to realize that the two or three hours of life we spent in primary school gave us something for our whole life, gave us strength and spirit and the ability to work.

Let us say this to ourselves, my dear children, now on this last day of our first school year in the Waldorf School, but during the vacation, let us remember something else again and again. I would like to write it in your souls so that it blooms there like this cute little flower, so that you think of it often: “Let my thoughts hurry back to my dear Waldorf School, where my body is trained to work and to do good, where my soul is developed to be strong for life, where my spirit is awakened to be truly good and human.” We want you all to become such good and capable people someday, when you are grown up and out there in life.

I wanted to speak to you from heart to heart today. I wanted to say this to you out of love, and I say it to you so that you can take note of it. Once again, think of your thoughts hurrying back to your dear Waldorf School, where your body is shaped to work capably in life, where your soul is developed for strength in life, where your spirit is awakened to true humanity. That is how it should be. And so now we will leave each other, and when we come back, we will go on as we have done before.

Afterwards you will receive your reports.¹ Whoever gets a good report should not take it as an indication that it is now all right to be lazy, and whoever gets a bad report need not immediately start to cry, but should think about trying harder next year.

Out of the spirit of the Waldorf School, shake your teachers' hands and say to each other, “We will be back in fall to learn to do good work, to develop our souls to be strong for life, and to awaken our spirit to true humanity.”

And so, until we meet again!

• 1. At the end of the school year, instead of receiving grades, the children received brief characterizations of their behavior and of how they worked.

The following are three addresses given to the children of the first Waldorf school at school assemblies in 1919 and 1920. In the Christmas assembly address Steiner also spoke to the parents who were in attendance. Steiner had previously assisted the industrialist Emil Molt in establishing the school for the children of the factory workers of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany. He made frequent visits, traveling from Switzerland, to work with the faculty of the school and to view the students' progress. (A chapter from Molt's autobiography describing the opening of the school appeared in Issue No. 2 of The Threefold Review.)

What is most revealing in these addresses is how open and straightforward Steiner was concerning the Christian basis of the school. Even though Christ is central to Anthroposophy, the world view based on spiritual-scientific research and inaugurated by Steiner, Anthroposophy is open to everyone regardless of religious background. Waldorf schools, which are based on Anthroposophy, are also open to families of any religious background.

A universal approach to Christianity is elaborated by Steiner in the following passages:

“Would a Buddhist be justified in saying that he may not acknowledge Christ because nothing is said to this effect in his scriptures? Is anything essential at stake when a truth is not found in particular writings or scriptures? Would it be right for a Buddhist to say that it is against the principles of Buddhism to believe in the truth of the Copernican theory of the universe, for no mention of it is made in his books? What applies to the Copernican theory applies equally to the findings of modern spiritual-scientific research concerning the Christ-being, namely, that because He has nothing to do with any particular denomination, the Christ can be accepted by a Hindu or an adherent of any other religion. Those who reject what spiritual science has to say about the Christ impulse in relation to the religious denominations simply do not understand what the true attitude to religion should be.

“Perhaps some day the time will come when it will be realized that what we have to say about the nature of the Christ impulse and its relation to all religious denominations and world-conceptions speaks directly to the heart and soul, as well as [endeavors] to deal consistently with particular phases of the subject. It is not easy for everyone to realize what efforts are made to bring together things that can lead to the true understanding of the Christ impulse needed by man in the present cycle of existence. Avowal of the belief in Christ has nothing fundamentally to do with any particular religion or religious system. A true Christian is simply one who is accustomed to regard every human being as bearing the Christ principle in himself, who looks for the Christ in a Chinese, a Hindu, or whoever he may be. In a man who avows his belief in Christ is founded the realization that the Christ impulse is not confined to one part of the earth. To imagine it as confined would be a complete fallacy. The reality is that since the mystery of Golgotha, Paul's proclamation to the region with which he was connected has been true—Christ died also for the heathen. Humanity must learn to understand that Christ did not come for one particular people, one particular epoch, but for all the peoples of the earth, for all of them! Christ has sown His spirit-seed in every human soul, and progress consists in the souls of men becoming conscious of this.”¹

• 1. Life Between Death and Rebirth (Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, N.Y.,1968), pp. 50–51.

Some of our friends have asked me to speak about language while I am here in Stuttgart. At such short notice and with our limited time, this will have to be rather sketchy, certainly more so than with our scientific course. And you will have to have even more forbearance than you did for my remarks on “light,” because what I say about language will simply be improvised. All I can do is to give you a few useful suggestions for your teaching here in the Waldorf School and also for teaching in general.

Perhaps we can find what we're after by first looking at some elements of language from an historical standpoint. Whatever I can bring together somewhat loosely today will be an introduction to further discussion during the rest of the time.

We can see especially in German how the development of a people’s language expresses also the development of its soul life. We must keep clearly in mind, however, that the relationship of individuals to their own language varies from century to century. The further we go back in the history of a people, the more life we find in everything pertaining to language, within the forces of the human soul as well as in the pliant forces of the human body. I have often been aware of this; you will find as you go through my books a quite conscious attempt to use terms of Germanic derivation, even in philosophical matters.¹ This is frowned upon by many of my detractors, who condemn exactly what has been done very consciously with languages in my books. It is extremely difficult nowadays to find in German the inner, living forces able to continue forming the language. It is particularly difficult to find semantic correspondences by picking up some little-used word or extending the forms of a common one, as for instance I tried to do with the word kraften [The German noun Kraft ‘force, strength’ has only its corresponding adjective kraftig ‘strong, robust’. Rudolf Steiner invented the corresponding verb kraften ‘to work actively, forcefully’ and the verbal noun das Kraften ‘actively working force or strength’.] I tried with this to put action into what is usually expressed more passively. Other words I have also attempted, but—only one century since Goethe—it is already difficult to coin the far-reaching new words that will express precisely what we are trying to incorporate into our age as a new kind of thinking. We can hardly remember that the word Bildung ‘education, training, formation’ goes back no further than the time of Goethe (1749–1832). Before that, there existed no educated (gebildete) people in Germany. That is, we did not speak of someone as ein gebildeter Mensch ‘a person of culture, well-educated’. Even in the second half of the eighteenth century the German language had still kept a strong, sculptural vitality, so that it was possible to form such words as Bildung or even Weltanschauung ‘world view’, a term that also appeared after Goethe’s time. One is indeed very fortunate to live in a language milieu that permits such new formations. This good fortune is evident when one’s books are translated into French, English, and other languages and one hears about the difficulties. Translators are working by the sweat of their brow as best they can, but always, when a person finishes something, another finds it horrible and no one else finds it any good. When you go into the matter more closely, it's clear that many things in my books simply can't be said in the same way in another language. I tell people: In German everything and anything is right; you can put the subject first or in the middle or at the end of the sentence—it will be more or less correct. The pedantic, dogmatic rule that something absolutely can't be said in a certain way does not yet exist in German as it does in the western languages. Imagine what we have come to when we're limited to stereotyped expressions! People cannot yet think as individuals but only in a sort of group spirit about the things they want to communicate to others. That is pre-eminently the case with the people of the western civilizations: They think in stereotyped phrases.

Actually, the German language in particular shows that what I would like to call the GENIUS OF LANGUAGE has gradually become rigid, and that German in our time is also approaching the state where we can't escape the stereotyped phrases. This was not so in Goethe’s time and even less so in earlier ages. It is part of the picture of the whole language development in Central Europe.

Not so long ago this Central Europe, stretching far to the East, was still inhabited by a primitive people with great spiritual gifts but with a relatively simple outward culture, one that evolved substantially from trade and the economic life. Then roundabout, by way of the East Germanic tribes at first, much of the spiritual culture of Greece was absorbed. Through this, a great many Greek words entered the Germanic languages of Central Europe that later became modern German. During the centuries when Christianity spread from the South to the North, its concepts, ideas, and images brought along an enormous quantity of vocabulary, because the Germanic tribes had no available expressions in their own languages for such things.

The word segnen ‘to bless’, for instance, is one of the words that came with Christianity. The specific concept of “blessing” did not exist in northern Germanic heathendom. There were indeed magic charms and they contained a magic power, but this was not of the same nature as a blessing. Segnen, the verb from the noun Segen, was taken into the language under the influence of Christianity; the word brought northward was signum, a ‘sign’. Do observe what the genius of language still possessed at that time: language-forming strength! Nowadays we are no longer able to reconstruct and rework an adopted word in such a way that signum could become Segen, a blessing. We would treat the adopted word as an unchanged import, because the force and vitality that once transformed and created from the innermost depths simply do not well up any more.

Many words we take as completely German are in fact intruders; they appeared with Christianity. Look at the word predigen ‘preach’. It is none other than the Latin praedicare, which also means ‘to preach’. It was still possible to reconstruct this word from inside out. We never had a genuinely German word for this Christian activity of preaching. You see, if we want to get to know the actual force in German that transforms the language, we must first pour it through a sieve to sift out everything that entered our Central European culture from other cultural streams. In many of our words you will hardly notice it. You speak about the Christmas festival, feeling a strong attachment to it. Weihnacht ‘Holy Night, Christmas’ is a genuine German word, but Fest festival’ is Roman, a Latin word that long ago became a German word. Fest goes back to the time when, along with Christianity, the most foreign elements found their way into the language, but at the same time were so transformed that we do not have at all the feeling today that they are imports. Who in the world remembers now that verdammen ‘condemn, damn’ is a Latin word that has become good German? We have to sift a great deal if we want to get to what is really the German language proper.

Many things came in with Christianity; others have entered because out of Christianity the whole system of education developed. The subject matter for educating was taken over in exactly the form it had in the South in the Greco-Latin culture. And there were no Germanic words for what had to be communicated. Along with the concepts, the vocabulary had to be imported. This happened first in the “Latin school” (high school), then it moved down into the lower school, and so today the basis of our education, the Schule ‘school’, itself is an imported word. Schule is no more a German word than scholasticism. Klasse ‘class’ is obviously a foreign word. Wherever you look: Tafel ‘blackboard’; cognate, table from tabula, schreiben ‘to write’; cognate, scribe are imports. Everything pertaining to school entered our language from outside; it came—with education itself—with Latin or the Romance languages from the South.

All this is one stratum that we have to sift off if we want to study the character of the German language proper. Almost all the specifically foreign words must be lifted off, because they do not express what comes out of the German folk soul but have been poured over its real being, forming a kind of varnish on its surface. We have to look for what lies underneath the surface. For instance, if we look beneath the varnish for things pertaining to education; we find relatively little, but that much is distinctive: Lehrer ‘teacher’, for one, a genuinely original German word, as is the word Buchstabe ‘letter of the alphabet'—Buch ‘book’ is derived from it. It takes us back to the staves or sticks thrown down in ancient times to form the letters or runes that made up the runic words. They were beechwood sticks (Buche = ‘beech’). From this then came the zusammenlesen ‘gathering together’, from which comes lesen ‘to pick up’, as well as ‘to read’ and then the Leser ‘reader’, which became Lehrer ‘teacher’. These are ancient Germanic formulations, but you see that they have a totally different character, leading us back everywhere to the soul life of that time in Central Europe. The old heathen ways and the Christian ways collided, and with them the two elements of language, the northern and the southern. You can imagine what a strong power of interpenetration must have existed within the German language during the first millennium after the Mystery of Golgotha, that it could accept Christianity as strongly as it did and be at the same time able to accept the words that expressed the most essential mysteries of Christianity.

With this import, however, only one layer has been described, leading us back into the very early times connected with the great Germanic migrations, when the first Romance language stratum worked its way into the German language. Later the Romance languages were again to exert their influence. We can observe a second stratum originating from the Romance languages through various occurrences but this time coming from the West. Beginning in the twelfth century and continuing into the eighteenth, French words were taken over continually, French words for which there existed concepts and feelings, but by means of which the concepts and feelings were also modified. I have jotted down a number of these words but cannot claim any sort of completeness, for these lectures are being improvised from memory. I have tried to take words that seem truly German: for instance, the word fein ‘fine’. You won't find this word before the twelfth century; it came by way of fin from the French. Here you can see how the language-forming power in the thirteenth century was still strong enough to transform a word so well that it is felt today to be a genuine German word. Even a word like Kumpan ‘fellow, companion’, which has become very popular, is only an adaptation of compagnon, and a word we often hear nowadays, Partei ‘political party’ also immigrated at that time, as well as Tanz ‘dance’. All these words have been in the German language only since the second invasion of the twelfth century, which I would like to call French: Schach ‘chess’, Matt ‘checkmate’, Karte ‘card’, Ass ‘ace’, kaputt ‘broken’, and so forth. It is quite remarkable how many words came into Germany from the West, from France, during the twelfth and through the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, all of them contributing to the language an element of lightness, of easiness, where the German had a more ponderous quality. Before this time what had been spoken in German areas had a fuller, more rounded character. In it one couldn't very well have expressed playfulness. It would have been quite easy to say, Du bist ein kühner Held “You are a bold hero'—the German language could have managed that—but not, Du bist ein feiner Kerl 'You're a fine fellow’. That could not have been said earlier, for one needed the word fein. Other things would have been just as impossible without the invasion of the French elements.

From Italy, remarkably little reached the more northern areas until, at the time of the Renaissance, some words relating to music came; that was all. However, a third kind of invasion, though not so pervasive, came later by way of a detour through southern Germany and Austria, bringing such words as bizarr ‘odd, eccentric’, lila ‘purple’, [obviously related to lilac] which had not existed earlier in German, Neger ‘negro’, Tomate ‘tomato’, all imported from Spain. Now the introduction of foreign elements enters a new phase; it is obvious that the genius of language is no longer as flexible as it had been. These later words are much more similar to their originals. And finally, when the Germans reached the stage of admitting English words, things had become most unfavorable; this was actually not until the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Words came into the language that related mostly to outer affairs, but they remained practically the same as in English. The German language genius had by then lost its capacity to adapt and completely absorb into itself something new.

I have tried to point out how in early times the ability to accept and transform language was extraordinarily strong, especially within the Germanic languages and early German. Take, for instance, (and I want to emphasize this in particular) a word that is so German that even a person very sensitive to dialects can really not doubt its authenticity: Riegelwand for Fachwerkwand ‘half-timbered wall’. Riegel ... truly German, as the tongue tastes and pronounces it! And yet this word was not part of the German language until the time when Latin-Italian trained architects used the kind of materials that could construct the Riegelwände. Who is aware today that this word Riegel, so typically German, is nothing other than Regel, regula Latin: ‘rule’. We would not be capable of such changes in our present language. We also think Keller ‘cellar’ is an original German word, but no! It is nothing but an adapted loan-word from the Latin cellarium. I can give you another totally German-looking word to show you how difficult it would have been if people had begun to weed out and eliminate all the foreign words, as certain movements some time ago wanted to do. If that had happened, Riegel would have fallen by the wayside, Keller would have fallen—but do you know what other word would have had to go? Schuster ‘shoemaker’! As a matter of fact, Schuster came into the German language because people from the South taught the Germans to sew their foot-coverings instead of tying them together. The Latin sutor (cf. English: suture) refers to the sewing of footwear and has been assimilated into Schuster; an all-out foreign word.

You can see from this that we really have to sift vigorously to arrive at words of true German origin. We can not just accept what is floating nowadays on the surface of language, for this follows totally different laws. When we want to go back to the true speech-creating forces out of the genius of language, we must first of all sift off what is extraneous. The forming of language takes its course in a peculiar sort of way. You can see this very well by observing how things can still be introduced into a language—I would like to call it, through a certain kind of tyranny, from the bottom up—even when the language-forming genius no longer possesses its full strength. Not so many years ago, for instance, the following took place in Central Europe. Close to Raab there is a small town called Kocsi [now Kocs in Hungary]. I believe it was in the sixteenth century that an inventive fellow in this small place near Raab got the idea of building practical wagons that became very popular for people to drive and ride in. They made the little town well known. And just as Frankfurt sausages are known as ‘frankfurters’, these wagons were called kocsi. Just think how much carrying force was alive in this word, which grew into Kutsche ‘coach’; it traveled to France and even reached the proud English! Yet this word is not especially old; it has moved in relatively recent times with a certain dynamic power in all directions from the wagonmaker in Kocs.

So let us understand this clearly: When we deal with a language already formed, we must remove many outer layers in order to reach the kernel proper. If we do reach this innermost part, we have to say: This kernel shows us without a doubt that it could develop with inner, language-forming strength only at the time when thoughts were much deeper and more substantive than they are, for instance, in German culture today. For this to happen, thoughts must be much more inherent in the whole human being. At the present time we can no longer feel that the force we perceive in our thoughts is also present in our words.

Sometimes we feel this force when we go back to the dialects that are to be found at a deeper, earlier stage of the language. At present, to express quickness we say Blitz ‘lightning’. In certain southern German dialects the word is still Himmlizer. When you say that, you have the whole Blitzform ‘shape of the lightning’ in it: [Himmel is ‘heaven’;—lizer reminds one of licht, ‘light’]. In this word there is a visualization of what takes on form in nature. In short, dialects still reach back to word-forms within which there is an echo of the happenings outside us in nature. This is always the case in the inmost kernel of a language, where the conceptual or ideational element is much closer to the element of sound. Through the history of the German language in particular we can observe how in earlier times, before language became abstract, it was still a matter of course that the meaning of words was imbedded in their sound. I would like to call it a penetration of sense into sound. A sensitive person can still feel it in such words as Tag 'day’; Anglo-Saxon, daeg, a truly original, ancient German word—can feel it in the /t/ and /a:/ (/ah/) sounds, especially through the help of eurythmy. Words that came later were formed out of abstract ideas. Look at the rather modern given name Leberecht ‘liveright’. Parents endow a child with such a name in order to guide him or her with certainty along a virtuous path in life. There’s also Traugott ‘trust-God’. When such words came about, a certain language-forming element still existed but it was abstract, did not arise from a genuine inner source.

I wanted to say all this today as a preparation, so that we can proceed toward more concrete concepts and examples of language.

• 1. In German, we find two words for many things, as in English: will and testament, send and transmit, etc., one Germanic (Anglo-Saxon), the other Greco-Latin. In academic writing, the latter is usually preferred.

I would like to repeat what I told you yesterday: Please don't expect too much content from this very brief language study. I will make only a few remarks about the development of language in this improvised course. However, it is certainly worthwhile to stir up some thoughts on the subject, and perhaps from the way I present things, you will discover guidelines. I won't go into the usual facts, but I will try to show you a number of important ways to look at the life of language with a view to its organic evolving.

In my first lecture I referred to the development of our German language through “invasions” into its word-stock. We pointed to the significant one, which coincided with the streaming in of Christianity into northern cultures, and its consequences. Christianity did not simply bring in its own content; it brought this content in the form of word images. Considered outwardly, the folk religions of the northern and central European peoples were not at all similar to what came to them as a new religion; nor was it possible for them to grasp the content of Christianity with the words and sounds of northern and central Europe. Therefore, those who brought Christian concepts and Christian perceptions also brought their “word clothing.” We have cited a group of such words that were carried northward, we can say, on the wings of Christianity. In the same way, everything connected with schooling streamed northward, too, words like Schule ‘school' itself, Tafel ‘blackboard’, and so forth, with the exception of a few like Lesen, Buchstabe, Lehrer (see Lecture 1, pages 19-20). The former are of Latin origin, but have been integrated into the German language organization so thoroughly that no one today would recognize them as loan-words. I also described how later, beginning in the twelfth century, a new invasion arrived from the West, bringing in many language elements. After that came a Spanish wave and finally one from England, as late as the nineteenth century.

These examples will be elaborated on later, but they indicate that during the time Christianity and everything related to it were making their way northward, the genius of the language was still able to accept and transform it inwardly by means of the folk sensitivity in that region. I illustrated this unique fact not by a word pertaining to Christianity but by the connection of the word Schuster ‘shoemaker’, which seems so truly Germanic, with sutor: it is one and the same word (page 22-23). There was still so much speech-forming strength in the genius of the Germanic folk that it was possible to transform a word like sutor that belongs to the earliest invasion. The further we proceed from this to the next invasion, which was concerned with education, the more we find the sound of the word in German closer to the sound in Latin. And so it continued. Languages flowing in later found the German language spirit ever less capable of transforming whatever came toward it. Let us keep this in mind. It remains to be seen whether, in due time, such phrases as five o'clock tea will be changed; that is, whether the German language genius can develop over a relatively long span of time the power of more rapid transformation it possessed in early times. We will have to wait and see. At the moment, it is not important.

We must ask ourselves what significance it has for a people that its language-forming power is decreasing, at least temporarily; that in fact it no longer exists as it once was. You do find it more strongly today in dialects. For instance, we could search for the origin of a very strange word in the Austrian dialect: pakschierli or bakschierli. The Austrians sitting here certainly know it. You can quickly sense what pakschierli means: ‘a cunning little girl who bobs and curtseys when presented to strangers, a ‘charming little girl—that’s pakschierli—or a ‘funny little thing made of marzipan' that doesn't exactly make you laugh, but causes an inward state of being ready, if the impression you get grows a little, to burst out in a loud laugh. ‘A funny little thing made of marzipan'—that’s pakschierli Now what is this word? It is not really connected with the rest of the Austrian dialect, for it is none other than the German word possierlich ‘funny, cunning, cute’, a word that has been transformed.

In a way, then, this language-forming power can be studied in the dialects. It is also a good approach to the active, creative folk soul, and an understanding of the folk soul would contribute immeasurably toward an understanding of the cultural life of a country. It would lead back to what I referred to in The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity,¹ which was ridiculed by such minds as the all-too well-known Professor Dessoir.² Spiritual science makes it possible to determine clearly what I described there: that the formation of consonant sounds in language is connected to an imitation of something externally perceptible. Consonants express for us what we have experienced inwardly of outside events. To put it more graphically: If you are setting in a fence post, you can feel this action inwardly by bearing down (aufstemmen, as ‘stem’ for skiers) on your foot. This is the perception of your own act of will. We no longer feel this inner act of will in the sound [št, pronounced sht] of aufstemmen, but in the early age of language development, you did feel in your acts of will an imitation of what was happening outside yourself. The consonant element has thus become the imitation of events outside the human being, while the vowel element expresses what is truly an inner feeling. ‘Ah!" is our astonishment, a standing back, in a sense. The relationship of the human being to the outer world is expressed in the vowels. It is necessary to go back a long way in time if one wants to penetrate to these things, but it is possible to do so; then one arrives at the insight that such theories as the “bow-wow” or “ding-dong” theories are horribly wrong. They are incorrect and superficial. An understanding of the human being, however, can lead us toward discovering inwardly how a speech sound is connected with whatever we want to reveal of soul and spirit. Let us consider this as a question to ask ourselves, in order to find answers during the course of this study. In order to look rightly at the many and varied links in the chain of language, I will try to find characteristic examples to help us reach what we are trying to understand.

Today I should like to take some examples to show how language proceeds slowly from the concrete to the abstract. If we really want to study actual facts, turning to dialect again will be helpful. Let me mention one small example:

When Austrian peasants get up in the morning, they will say something about their Nachtschlaf ‘night sleep’ but not at all as you are apt to speak about it. You think of it basically as something quite abstract, for you are educated people. Austrian peasants are close to nature. To them, all that surrounds them partakes of spirit and soul, and they have a strong awareness of it. Even for them this is dying out now, but in the seventies and eighties of the last century, it was still very much present for anyone who, like me, wished to observe it. Even though peasants may still perceive the elemental forces in everything around them, they will never express it in abstractions but always concretely. A peasant will say, ‘I have to wipe the night sleep (Nachtschlaf) out of my eyes To peasants the substance excreted from the eyes during the night that can be washed away, is the visible expression of sleep; they call it Nachtschlaf To understand language that was still quite alive a short time ago, there is this secret: a factual understanding is not at all hindered by finding spiritual elements linked up with it. Austrian peasants are in fact thinking of an elemental being, but they express this by describing its action, that it put an excretion into their eyes. Never would they take this word as the abstraction arrived at by an educated person. However, if peasants have gone to school a little while or have been exposed to the city, they have a way of addressing themselves to an invisible, concrete fact. They will still say, ‘T must wipe the night sleep out of my eyes,” but at the same time they will make a sort of gesture to imply that for them it is something really superficial and yet concrete.

We should be aware that such an observation leads us to realize that an abstract term always points back to something more concrete. Take the following example. In the Scandinavian countries you still find the word barn for ‘child’ [Scotland and northern England, bairn]; we no longer have it in German. What is its history? On one hand, it leads us back to the Gothic; we will find it in Ulfilas’s Bible translation,³ where we find the expression bairan, meaning ‘to bear’. If we know the law of consonant shift, discovered by Jakob Grimm,⁴ for the Germanic languages and for all those related to them [see lecture 3, page 41-42], we will go back from the Gothic bairan to pherō in Greek and fero in Latin, both meaning ‘to carry’ or ‘to bear’. A /b/ in Germanic appears in Greek and Latin as /f/ or /ph/. Bairan is simply a Germanic sound-shift from fero; the word widens out into a different direction. There exists the Old High German word beran, ‘to carry’ [beran is also the Anglo-Saxon forerunner of English ‘to bear’. The barrow of ‘wheelbarrow’ goes back to beran.]. Gradually the verbal aspect of the word receded; in modern German we no longer have the possibility of thinking back to the original, strongly felt, active meaning. Why is the child called barn in Scandinavia? Because it is being borne or carried before it comes into the world. A child is something that is carried: we look back at our origin. The only word left over from all this in modern German is gebären ‘to bear, give birth'.

But we do have something else—we have retained the suffix -bar. You will find that in fruchtbar ‘fertile’, kostbar ‘costly’, ‘precious’ and other words. What is kostbar?—that which carries a cost. What is fruchtbar?—that which bears fruit. It was expressed very graphically, not as an abstraction as it would be today, for the actual carrying, bearing was visualized.

You can imagine this quite vividly when you say something is becoming ruchbar ‘known’, ‘notorious’, not always in the most positive sense; literally, ‘smell bearing’. When a smell is being carried toward you, a matter is becoming ruchbar. For many words like this we should be able to find the clear, direct imagery that in ancient times characterized the language-forming genius.

I will write down for you a phrase from Ulfilas’s Bible translation:

jah witands Jêsus thôs mitônins izê qath

This means approximately, ‘And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, spoke thus.” [Note qath = Anglo-Saxon, cwaeth/ quoth.] The word mitonins means ‘thoughts’ and this takes us to miton, meaning roughly ‘to think’. In Old High German it grew into something different: mezzôn; related to this is the word mezzan which means messen ‘to measure’. Measuring, the outer visible act of measuring, experienced inwardly, simply becomes thinking. Thus an action carried out outside ourselves has provided the foundation for the word thinking ‘I am thinking’ actually means: ‘T am measuring something in my soul’. This in turn is related to the Latin word meditor and the Greek medomai, which have given us ‘meditate’.

Whenever we go back in time and observe the genius of language at work, we find this presence of imagery, but we must also try to observe it with inner understanding. You all know the term Hagesfolz ‘a confirmed bachelor’; you know its approximate meaning today. However, the connection of this word with what it meant formerly is very interesting. It goes back to the word Hagestalt, in which the word Stalt is embedded [modern German retained only the word Gestalt: ‘figure, form, stature’]. What is Stalt? It is a person who has been put, placed, or ‘stood’ somewhere. According to medieval custom, the oldest son inherited the farm; the younger son got only the hedged-in field, the Hag. The younger son, therefore, who only owned the Hag was placed or ‘stood’ in this fenced-in field, and was often not able to marry. The stalt is the owner. The ‘hedge’ owner is the Hagestalt. As awareness of the word stalt gradually disappeared, people turned stalt into stolz (proud). It has no connection with the modern word stolz (proud); there is simply a resemblance of sounds. But an awareness of this stalt ‘placed or stood’ can be found in other, older examples still in existence, for instance in the Oberufer Nativity Play.⁵ One of the innkeepers says I als ein Wirt von meiner G'stalt, hab in mei’ Haus und Losament G'walt [I, an innkeeper of my stature—or an innkeeper placed here—take full charge in my house]. People think he means physical stature, but what he really means is ‘Placed in this respected house, stood here...." With the words that follow, “Take full charge,” he means that he attracts his guests. There is still the consciousness in G'stalt of what originally was in Hagestalt. We should follow with our whole inner being the development of words and sounds in this way, in order to ponder inwardly the unusual and delicate effects of the genius of language.

In the New Testament, describing how the disciples were astonished at Christ’s healing of the man sick of the palsy, Ulfilas uses a word in his translation related to silda-leik = selt-sam-leich ‘seldom-like’. Considering the way Ulfilas uses this word in the context of his Bible translation, we discover that he means here—for what has been accomplished by Christ—das Seltsamgestaltete ‘that which has been formed miraculously'. It is the bodily-physical element that arouses astonishment at this point. This is expressed more objectively in silda-leik. In the word leik we must sense: it is the gestalt, the form, but as an image. If the word gestalt were used in the earlier sense, it would be to express ‘being placed’. The form (Gestalt today), as it earlier was felt, described the image of a thing and was expressed by leik. We have this word in leichnam ‘corpse’. A corpse is the image of what was once there. It is a subtle expression when you sense what lies in this Leich, how the Leich is not a human being but the ‘likeness’ of one.

There are further examples I can bring you for the development of terms springing from visual imagery to express a quality of soul. We learn from Ulfilas that in the Gothic language ‘bride’ is brûths. This bruths in the Bible translation is closely related to ‘brood’ (Brut), so that when a marriage is entered upon, the brood is being provided. The “bride” is the one who ensures the ‘brood’. Well then, what is the Bräutigam (the ‘bridegroom’)? Something is added to the bride; this is in Gothic guma, in Old High German gomo [in Anglo-Saxon, guma), derived by consonant shift from the Latin word homo, ‘man’, ‘the man of the bride’, the man who for his part provides for the brood [the addition of /r/ in the English groom is due to confusion with, or substitution of groom, servant]. You see, we have to look at the unassuming syllables sometimes if we really wish to follow the genius of language in its active forming of language.

Now it is remarkable that in Ulfilas’s translation the Gothic sa dumba ‘der Dumpfe’, ‘the dull one’, appears, denoting the man unable to speak, the dumb man whom the Christ heals (Matthew 9:32). With this, I would like to remind you that Goethe has told us how in his youth he existed in a certain kind of Dumpfheit ‘dullness’. “Dullness” is a state of being unable to see clearly through one’s surroundings, to live in shadows, in fogginess; this hinders, for one thing, the capacity for speech, renders mute. Later this word became dumm, took the meaning of ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’, so that this dumb means nothing more than ‘not able to look about freely’ or ‘to live in dullness’ or ‘in a fog.” It is truly extraordinary, my dear friends, how many changes and transformations of a word can exist.⁶ These changes and recastings show how the conscious and the unconscious are interwoven in the marvelous being called the genius of language that expresses itself through the totality of a folk, tribe, or people.

There is, for instance, the name of the Nordic god Fjögyn. This name appears in a clarifying light through Ulfilas’s use of the word fairguni as Gothic for ‘mountain’, in telling of Christ’s “going up into the mountain” with his disciples. Its meaning shifted a little but we still find the word in Old High German as forha, meaning ‘fir tree’ or ‘fir mountain’. Fjögyn is the elemental god or goddess who resides on the fir mountain. This in turn (and we can sense it in fairguni) is related to the Latin word quercus ‘oak tree’, which also names the tree.

I should like to point out how in earlier ages of languageforming there prevailed—though somewhat subconsciously—a connection between sound and meaning. Nowadays it is almost impossible for us with our abstract thinking to reach down to the speech sounds. We no longer have a feeling for the sound quality of words. People who know many languages are downright annoyed if they are expected to consider anything about speech sounds. Words in general have the most varied transitions of form and meaning, of course; translations following only the dictionary are artificial and pedantic. First of all, we should follow the genius of language, which really has something other in mind than what seems obvious at first glance.

In German we say Kopf ‘head’; in the Romance languages it is testa, tête. Why do we say Kopf? Simply because in German we have a sculptural language genius and we want to express the roundness of the head. Kopf is related to kugelig ‘spherical’, and whether we speak of Kohlkopf ‘cabbage head’ or human Kopf it has originated from the same language-molding process. Kopf expresses what is round. Testa, however, ‘head’ in Latin, denotes something in our inner being: testifying, ascertaining, determining. We always have to consider that things may be named from various points of view. One can still feel this—though it’s possible to miss the details—if we try to trace our way back to older forms from which the present word originated. Finally we arrive far back in time when the genius of language was able to sense the spiritual life within the sounds themselves.

Who can still sense that meinen ‘to mean’ and Gemeinde ‘community, parish’ belong together? Nowadays this is difficult to perceive. In Old High German Gemeinde is gimeinida. 1f you look at a further metamorphosis to mean as an English cognate [Anglo-Saxon, maenan, ‘to recite, to tell' and AngloSaxon, gemaene, ‘common, general’], it is evident that gemeinida expresses what is ‘meant’ or ‘arrived at’ by several people in common; it derives strength from the fact that several people are involved. And this act of receiving strength is expressed by adding such a prefix as gi- [related to Anglo-Saxon be-, in bedazzle, behold, and so forth. In modern German ge- is the prefix of most past participles.].

We have to reach back and try to find the element of feeling in the forming of speech. Today when we say taufen, an ancient German word, ‘to baptize’, we no longer have a feeling for what it really is. We get more of a picture when we go back to Old and Middle High German, where we find toufan, toufen, töufen and find this related to diups [who can resist finding a connection to dip, Anglo-Saxon, dyppan?], and in Ulfilass daupjan related to daupjands, the Baptist. We have in Old High German the close cognate tiof in Modern German tief ‘deep’'—so there we have the relationship taufen ... hineintiefen ... tauchen ‘dip in, dive in’. It is simply a dipping into the water.

These things should help us to look carefully at the language-forming genius. Observing changes of meaning is especially important. In the following example there is an interesting shift of meaning. ‘Bread” was in Gothic hlaifs Old High German leiba, Middle High German leip, Anglo-Saxon, hlaf modern German das Brot. Hlaifs/hlaf has not retained the meaning ‘bread’; it has changed into laib/loaf. It means now only the form in which bread is made; earlier it was the bread itself.

You can observe this change of meaning in the metamorphosis from Old English hlaford from the earlier hlafweard, ‘bread keeper or guard.” The hlaford was the person who wards or guards the bread, the one you had to ask if you wanted bread, who watched over the bread, had the right to plant the field, make the bread, give the bread to those who were not freemen. And by means of a gradual transformation—the /h/ is lost—the word lord developed; ‘lord’ is the old hlafweard.

The companion word is equally interesting. Whereas hlaifs becomes ‘loaf of bread’, another word appeared through metamorphosis: hlaefdige in Old English. The first part of the word is again ‘loaf of bread’; dige developed from an activity. If dough (Anglo-Saxon dag Modern German Teig is being kneaded, this activity is expressed in the word dige, digan, to knead dough. If you seek the person who carries out this activity, you will arrive at the wife of the lord. The lord was the bread-warden; his wife was the bread-kneader, bread-giver. The word ‘lady’ grew out of hlaefdjge. In a mysterious way, ‘lord’ and ‘lady’ are related to the loaf of bread and show their origin as ‘bread-warden’ and ‘bread-kneader’.

We must really try to grasp the difference between our modern abstract attitude toward language and one that was truly alive in earlier times. People felt then that speech-sounds carried in themselves the spirit qualities, the soul qualities, that human beings wanted to communicate.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1992.
• 2. Max Dessoir (1867-1947). Author, Von Jenseits der Seele: Die Geisteswissenschaft in kritischer Betrachtung (Stuttgart, 1917).
• 3. Ulfilas or Wulfila (Little Wolf) 331-383. Bishop of the Goths. He is said to have invented the alphabet he used in order to translate the Bible. It is our only remnant of the Gothic language, which became extinct in 400 A.D.
• 4. Jakob Grimm (1785--1863), German philologist and creator of Grimm's law. Interested principally in the relationship between the various Germanic languages, he was one of the great founders of comparative philology. He wrote German Grammar, German Mythology and—with his brother Wilhelm—the famous collection of German folk and household tales. The Brothers Grimm also planned and inaugurated the great German dictionary.
• 5. A.C. Harwood, Christmas Plays from Oberufer (Bristol, England: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1993).
• 6. See also Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Relations in the Human Organism, lecture 2 (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1984).

The experiences of life often lead to apparent contradictions. However, it is just when we carefully examine the contradictions that we discover deep and intrinsic relationships. If you ponder somewhat carefully what I explained in my first talk and restated in the second, and you compare this with my examples yesterday of the inner connections between European languages, you will find such a contradiction. Look at the two series of facts that were characterized. We find in modern German many linguistic “immigrants.” We can feel how many words accompanied Christianity from the South and were added to the original treasure house of the Germanic languages. These words came to us together with Christian concepts and Christian perceptions; they belong today very much to our language. I spoke, too, of other immigrant words as significant because they belong to the widened range of our language possibilities, those that came in from the western Romance languages in the twelfth century. At that time the genius of the German language still possessed the power of adaptation; it transformed in its own way what was received from Western Europe, not only as to sound but also as to meaning. Few people suspect, I said before, that the German word fein (fine) is really of French origin: fin, and that it entered our language only after the twelfth century.

I mentioned Spanish elements coming in at a later time, when German no longer had the same strength of transformation—and how this strength was totally at an end when English words entered the German language during the last part of the eighteenth but particularly during the nineteenth century. Thus we see words being continually taken over in Central Europe, from the Latin or from the Greek through Latin, or from the western Romance languages. Because of all this, we can say that our present vocabulary has absorbed foreign elements but also that our language in its very origin is related to the languages that gave it seemingly foreign components in later times.

We can easily establish the fact—not in the widest sense but through characteristic examples—that languages over far-flung areas of the earth have a common origin. Take naus for instance, the Sanskrit word for ‘ship’. In Greek it is also naus, in Latin navis. In areas of Celtic coloring you will find nau. In Old Norse and the older Scandinavian tongues you have nor: [In English there is nautical, nautilus, navy, navigate, and so forth]. It is unimportant that this word root has been thrown overboard [German has Schiff noun, and schiffen, verb, as English ship, noun and verb]. Despite this, we can observe that there exists a relationship encompassing an exceedingly large area across Europe and Asia.

Take the ancient East Indian word aritras. We find the word later as eretmón in Greek and then, with some consonants dropped, as remus in Latin. We find it in Celtic areas as rame and in Old High German as ruodar. We still have this word; it is our Ruder tudder’, ‘oar’. In this way one can name many, many words that exist in adaptations, in metamorphoses, across wide language sectors; the Gothic, the Norse, the Friesian, Low German, and High German—also in the Baltic tongues, the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Prussian. We can also find such words in the Slavic languages, in Armenian, Iranian, Indian, Greek, Latin, and Celtic. All across the regions where these languages were spoken, we discover that a primeval relationship exists; we can easily imagine that at a very ancient time the primordial origins of language-forming were similar right across these territories and only later became differentiated.

I did say at the beginning that the two series of facts contradict each other, but it is just by observing such contradictions that we can penetrate more deeply into certain areas of life. The appearance of such phenomena leads to our discovering that human evolution through the course of history has not at all taken place in a continuously even way, but rather in a kind of wave movement. How could you possibly imagine this whole process, expressed in two seemingly contradictory bodies of fact, without supposing that some relationship existed between the populations of these far-flung territories? We can imagine that these peoples kept themselves shut off at certain times, so that they developed their own unique language idioms, and that periods of isolation alternated with periods of influencing or being influenced by another folk. This is a somewhat rough and ready characterization, but only by looking at such rising and falling movements can we explain certain facts. Looking at the development of language in both directions, as I have just indicated, it is possible to gain deeper insights also into the essential nature of folk development.

Consider how certain elements of language develop—and this we will do now for the German language—when a country closes itself off from outside influences and at other times takes in foreign components that contribute their part to the spirit-soul elements expressed through language. We can already guess that these two alternating movements evoke quite different reactions in the spirit and soul life of the peoples.

On one hand it is most significant that a primordial and striking relationship exists between important words in Latin and in the older forms of the Central European languages—for instance, Latin verus ‘true’, German wahr ‘true’, Old High German wâr [in German /w/ is pronounced /v/. We have in English verity, very, from Old French veras]. If you take such obvious things as Latin, velle = wollen ‘will’ or even Latin, taceo ‘I am silent’ and the Gothic thahan [English tacit, taciturn, you realize that in ancient times there prevailed related, similar-sounding language elements over vast areas of Europe—and this could be proven also for Asia.

On the other hand, it is really remarkable that the inhabitants of Central Europe from whom the present German population originated, accepted foreign elements into their languages relatively early, even earlier than I have described it. There was a time when Europe was much more strongly pervaded by the Celtic element than in later historic times, but the Celts were subsequently crowded into the western areas of Europe; then the Germanic tribes moved into Central Europe, quite certainly coming from northern areas. The Germans accepted foreign word elements from the Celts, who were then their western neighbors, much as they later accepted them from the Romans coming from the South. This shows that the inhabitants of Central Europe, after their separate, more closed-off development, later accepted foreign language elements from the neighbors on their outer boundaries, whose languages had been originally closely related to their own.

If the external development of language could be traced back far enough—of course, it cant be—we would ultimately arrive at that primeval language-forming power of ancient times when language came about through what I described yesterday as a relationship to consonants and vowels, a relationship of sound and meaning. Languages start out with a primitive structure. What then brings about the differences in them? Variety is due, for instance, to whether a tribe lives in a mountainous area or perhaps on the plain. The larynx and its related organs wish to sound forth differently according to whether people live high up in the mountains or in a low-lying area, and so on, even though at the very beginning of speech, what emerges from the nature of the human being forms itself in the same way.

We note that as the word moves from one area to another, a transformation of the sound takes place. The corresponding step to German /z/ is in other languages a step to /th/.

This is by no means off-base theorizing. To describe the process in detail we should have to collect many examples, yet this sequence corresponds to Grimm’s Law in the metamorphosis of language.¹Take, for instance, the Greek word thyra, ‘door’. If we take it as an early step, arrested at the first stage, we must expect the next step to use a /d/, and sure enough, we find it in English: door: The final change would arrive clockwise at /t/, and there it is: modern German Tür, ‘door’.

Therefore we can find, if we look, the oldest “language-geological stratum,” where the metamorphosing word stands on any one of these steps. The next change will stand on the following step, and then on the final step as modern German.

If the step expressed in Latin or Greek contains /t/, English (which has remained behind) will have the /th/, and modern German (which has progressed beyond English) will have a /d/ [cf. Latin tu, Anglo-Saxon thu ‘thou’, German du ‘you'].

When modern German has /z/ (corresponding to English /th/ the previous step would have been /t/, and the original GrecoLatin word would have had a /d/. This can be discovered.

We would then expect, following a word with a /t/ in Gothic, to find as the second step a /z/. Take the word Zimmer ‘room’, for the relationship of modern German to the next lower, earlier step in the Gothic or in Old Saxon, both of which stand on the same level: Zimmer has come from timbar. From /z/ we have to think back to /t/. This is merely the principle; you yourselves can find all this in the dictionary.²

There are many other lively language metamorphoses; as a parallel to the just-mentioned sequence, there is also this one: if an earlier word has a /b/, this becomes on the next step a /p/, followed on the third step by /f/, /ph/, or /pf/ [Latin labi ‘slip’, Anglo-Saxon, hleapan ‘leap’, German laufen ‘run’].

In the same way the connection /g/—/k/—/h/ or /ch/ exists. You will find corresponding examples [cf. Latin ego, Anglo-Saxon ic, Dutch ik German ich]. We can sum up as follows: Greek and Latin have retained language elements at an early stage of metamorphosis. Whatever then became Gothic advanced to a later stage and this second stage still exists today, for instance in Dutch and in English. A last shift of consonants took place finally around the sixth century A.D., when language advanced one stage further to the level of modern German. We can assume that the first stage will probably be found spread far into Europe, in time perhaps only up to about 1500 B.C. Then we find the second stage reigning over vast areas, with the exception of the southern lands where the oldest stage still remained. And finally there crystallizes in the sixth century A.D. the modern German stage. While English and Dutch remain back in the earlier second stage, modern German crystallizes out.

I urge you now to take into account the following: The relationship that people have to their surroundings is expressed by the consonants forming their speech, completely out of a feeling for the word-sound character. And this can only happen once—that is, only once in such a way that word and outer surroundings are in complete attunement. Centuries ago, if the forerunners of the Central European languages used, let’s say, a /z/ on the first step to form certain words, they had the feeling that the consonant character must be in harmony with the outside phenomena. They formed the /z/ according to the outer world.

The next stage of change can no longer be brought about according to the outside world. The word now exists; the next stages are being formed internally, within human beings themselves and no longer in harmony with their surroundings. The reshaping is in a way the independent achievement of the folk soul. Speech is first formed in attunement with the outer world, but then the following stages would be experienced only inwardly. An attuning to the external does not take place again.

Therefore we can say that Greek and Latin have remained at a stage where in many respects a sensitive attunement of the language-forming element to the outer surroundings has been brought to expression. The next stage, forming Gothic, Old High German, Old English, and so forth, has proceeded beyond this immediate correspondence and has undergone a change to the element of soul. These languages have therefore a far more soul-filled character. We see that the first change that occurs gives language an inner soul coloring. Everything that enters our sensing of language on reaching this second stage gives inwardness to our speech and language. Slowly and gradually this has come about since 1500 B.Cc. This kind of inwardness is characteristic of certain ancient epochs. Carried over into later ages, however, it changed into a simpler, more primitive quality. Where it still exists today, in Dutch and English, it has passed over into a more elemental feeling for words and sounds.

Around the sixth century A.D. modern German reached the third stage.³ Now the distancing from the original close attunement to the outside proceeds still further. Through a strong inward process the form of modern German proceeds out of its earlier stage. It had reached the second stage of its development and moved into the realm of soul; the third stage takes the language a good distance away from ordinary life. Hence the peculiar, often remote, abstract element in the German language today, something that presses down on the German soul and that many other people in the rest of Europe cannot understand at all. Where the High German element has been wielded to a special degree, by Goethe and Hegel for instance, it really can't be translated into English or into the Romance languages. What comes out are merely pseudo-translations. People have to make the attempt, of course, since it is better to reproduce things somehow or other rather than not at all. Works that belong permanently to this German organism are penetrated by a strong quality of spirit, not merely a quality of soul. And spirit cannot be taken over easily into other languages, for they simply have no expressions for it.

The ascent of a language to the second step, then, is not only the ensouling of the language, but also the ensouling of the folk-group’s inwardness through the language. The ascent to the third step that you can study especially in modern German [and especially in written German], is more a distancing from life, so that by means of its words such abstract heights can be reached as were reached, for instance, by Hegel, or also, in certain cases, by Goethe and Schiller. That is very much dependent on this reaching-the-third-step. Here German becomes an example. The language-forming, the language-development frees itself from attuning to the external world. It becomes an internal, independent process. Through this the human-individual soul element progresses which, in a sense, develops independently of nature.

Thus the Central European language structure passed through stages where from a beginning step of instinctive, animal-like attuning to the outer world, it acquired soul qualities and then became spiritual. Other languages, such as Greek and Latin, developed differently in their other circumstances. As we study these two ancient languages primarily from the standpoint of word formation, we have to conclude that their word and sound structures are very much attuned to their surroundings. But the peoples who spoke these languages did not stop with this primitive attunement to the world around them. Through a variety of foreign influences, from Egypt and from Asia, whose effects were different from those in Europe, Greek and Latin became the mere outer garment for an alien culture introduced to them from outside, essentially a mystery culture. The mysteries of Africa and Asia were carried over to the Greeks and to a certain degree to the Romans; there was enough power in them to clothe the Asian mysteries and the Egyptian mysteries with the Greek and Latin languages. They became the outer garments of a spiritual content flowing into them drop by drop. This was a process that the languages of central and northern Europe did not participate in. Instead, theirs was the course of development I have already described: On the first step they did not simply take in the spiritual as the Greeks had done but first formed the second stage; they were about to reach the third stage when Christianity with its new vocabulary entered as a foreign, spiritual element. Evidently, too, the second stage had been reached when the Celtic element made its way in, as I described earlier. With this we see that the spiritual influence made its entrance only after an inner transforming of the Germanic languages had taken place. In Greek and Latin there was no transforming of this kind but rather an influx of spirituality into the first stage.

To determine the character of a single people, we have to study concrete situations or events, in order to discover the changes in its language and its relationship to spiritual life. Thus we find in modern German a language that, on reaching its third stage, removed itself a good distance from ordinary life. Yet there are in German so many words that entered it through those various channels: Christianity from the South, scholasticism from the South, French and Spanish influences from the West. All these influences came later, flowing together now in modern German from many different sources.

Whatever has been accepted as a foreign element from another language cannot cause in us as sensitive a response as a word, a sound combination, that has been formed out of our own folk-cultural relationship to nature or to the world around us. What do we feel when we utter the word Quelle ‘spring’, ‘source’, ‘fountain’; ‘cognate, well? We can sense that this word is so attuned to the being of what it describes, we can hardly imagine calling it anything else if with all our sensitivity we were asked to name it. The word expresses everything we feel about a Quelle. This was the way speech sounds and words were originally formed: consonants and vowels conformed totally to the surrounding world. [English speakers can feel the same certainty about spring. Anglo-Saxon springan. Arnold Wadler has pointed out the particularly lively quality of all spr- words, such as sprout, sprig, sprite, spray, sprinkle, surprise, even sport—and of course spirit.] But now listen to such words as Essenz ‘essence’ or Kategorie ‘category’ or Rhetorik ‘rhetoric’. Can you feel equally the relationship to what the word meant at its beginning? No! As members of a folk-group we have taken in a particular word-sound, but we have to make an effort to reach the concept carried on the wings of those sounds. We are not at all able to repeat that inner experience of harmony between word-sound and concept or feeling. Deep wisdom lies in the fact that a people accepted from other peoples such words in either their ascending or descending development, words it has not formed from the beginning, words in which the sound is experienced but not its relationship to what is meant. For the more a people accepts such words, the more it needs to call upon very special qualities in its own soul life in order to come to terms with such words at all. Just think: In our expletives and exclamations we are still able today to experience this attuning of the language-forming power to what is happening in our surroundings. Pfui! ‘pooh! ugh!’, Tratsch! ‘stupid nonsense!’, Tralle walle! [probably an Austrian dialect term. English examples: ‘Ow!’, ‘Damn!’, ‘Hah!’, ‘Drat it!']. How close we come to what we want to express with such words! And what a difference you find when you're in school and take up a subject—it needn't even be logic or philosophy—but simply a modern science course. You will immediately be confronted with words that arouse soul forces quite different from those that let you sense, for instance, the feeling you get from Moo! that echoes in a “word” the forming of sounds you hear from a cow. When you say the word Moo, the experience of the cow is still resounding in you.

When you hear a word in a foreign language, a very different kind of inner activity is demanded than when you merely hear from the sound of the word what you are supposed to hear. You have to use your power of abstraction, the pure power of conceptualizing. You have to learn to visualize an idea. Hence a people that has so strongly taken up foreign language elements, as have the Central Europeans, will have educated in itself—by accepting these foreign elements—its capacity for thinking in ideas.

Two things come together in Central Europe when we look at modern German: on the one hand the singular inwardness, actually an inner estrangement from life, that results from moving into the third stage of language development; on the other hand, everything connected with the continuous takingin of foreign elements. Because these two factors have come together, the most powerful ability to form ideas has developed in the German language; there is the possibility to rise up to completely clear concepts and to move about freely within them. Through these two streams of language development, a prodigious education came about for Central Europe, the education of INNER WORDLESS THINKING, where we truly can proceed to a thinking without words. This was brought about in abundant measure by means of the phenomena just described.

These are the things that have evolved; we will not understand the nature of modern German at all if we don't take them into account. We should observe carefully the sound-metamorphoses and word-metamorphoses that occur through the appropriation of foreign words at the various stages of development.

This is what I wanted to present to you today, in order to characterize the Central European languages.

• 1. Jakob Grimm in his book on Germanic grammar codified this consonant shift so that it is known as Grimm’s Law. See lecture 2, pp. 29-30.
• 2. See also Rudolf Steiner, The Realm of Language and Arnold Wadler, One Language.
• 3. “Starting most probably in the southernmost reaches of the German-speaking lands, some time in the fifth century, a series of sound changes gradually resulted in restructuring the phonetic systems of all the southern and many of the midland dialects, resulting in High German”—John T. Waterman, A History of the German Language (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966).

You have seen that the most important concern of this course is to show how the history of language-forming originates in human soul qualities. Indeed, it is impossible to arrive at an understanding of the vocabulary of any modern language without understanding its inner soul nature. So I would like to add today some examples to show you how the phenomena of language are related to the development of the folk souls.

First let me call your attention to two words that belong together: Zuber ‘tub’ and Eimer ‘pail’. They are old German words; when you use them today, you are aware that an Eimer is a vessel with a single handle fastened on top in which something can be carried; Zuber has two handles. That is what they are today when we use the two words, Zuber and Eimer. To investigate the word Eimerwe have to go back a thousand years and find it in Old High German as the word ein-bar. You remember that I introduced you to the sound group bar (lecture 2), related to beran, ‘to carry’. Through the contraction of ein-bar ‘one carry’, Eimer ‘pail’ came about. We have it clearly expressed, transparently visible in the old form: the carrying with one handle, for bar is simply something to carry with. Zuber in Old High German is Zwei-bar ‘two-carry’, a vessel carried by two handles, a tub. [The origin of tub from Middle High German tubbe surely has to do also with ‘two’.] You see how words today are contractions of what in the older form were separate pieces or phrases that we no longer distinguish.

There are many such examples; we can put our minds to a few typical ones. Take the word Messer 'knife’. It goes back to Old High German mezzi-sahs. Mezzi is related to ezzan, the old form of essen, ‘to eat’, with an introductory /m/. As for sahs (sax is another pronunciation of the same word), we need to remember that when Christianity spread across southern Germany, the monks encountered the worship of three ancient divinities, one of whom was Sachsnot or Ziu, the God of War [still present in English Tuesday ‘Mars-day’]. Sachsnot means ‘the living sword’; sahs has the same sound configuration. Therefore in the word Messer you have the composite ‘eating sword,” the sword with which you eat.

Interesting, too, is the word Wimper [‘eyelash’ today, but seems to describe eyebrow], which goes back to wint-bra. Bra is the ‘brow’ and wint is something that ‘winds itself around’. You can picture it: the ‘curving brow’. In the contraction Wimper we no longer distinguish the single parts.

Another word that characterizes such contractions, where originally the relationships were felt perceptively, you know as the fairly common German word Schulze ‘Mayor’. When we look back at Old High German we find sculd-heizo. That was the man in the village to whom one had to go to find out what one’s debt (Schuld) was. He told a fellow who had been up to some kind of mischief what his fine would be. The person who had to decide, to say (heissen) what debt or fine was due was the Sculd-heisso, Schuld-heisser ‘debt namer’. This became Schulze. I am giving you these examples so that you can follow me as we trace the course of language development.

Something else can be observed in this direction, something that still often happens in dialects. In Vienna, for instance, a great deal of dialect has been retained in a purer state than in northern Germany, where abstractness came about quite early. The Austrian dialect goes back to a primitive culture, as far back as the tenth century. The language-forming genius with its lively image quality was still active in southern German areas but did not enter the northern German culture. There is a picturesque word in Vienna: Hallodri. That's ‘a rascal, a rowdy’, who likes to raise a ruckus, who's a trouble-maker, who's possibly guilty of a few minor offences. The Hallo in the word points to how a person shouts [like English Hello! with a touch of holler]. The ri has to do with the shouting person’s behavior; it is a dialect holdover from the Old High German ari, which became aeri in Middle High German, finally becoming weakened in modern German to the suffix -er [This corresponds exactly to -er in English, as in baker, farmer, storyteller] If you take the Old High German word wahtari, there at the end of it is the syllable you encountered in the Austrian dialect word Hallodri. It means somehow or other ‘being active in life'—that is the syllable ari; waht is ‘to watch'. The person who takes on the office of watching is the wahtari In Middle High German it became wachtaere, still with the complete suffix. Now in Modern German it is Wächter ‘watcher, watchman, guard’. The ari has become the syllable -er; in which you perceive very little of the original meaning: handling or managing something. This you should feel in words with the suffix -er; retained from ancient times, for example: The person who handles or manages the garden is the gartenaere, the gardener: It is an illustration of the way language today makes an effort to adapt sound qualities—everything I would call musical—slowly into abstractness, where the full sense of the sound can no longer be perceived, especially not in the full sense of the concept or its feeling quality.

The following is an interesting example. You know the prefix -ur ‘original, archetypal’ in the words Ursache ‘first cause, original cause’, Urwald ‘primeval forest, jungle’, Urgrossvater ‘great-grandfather, ancestor’, and so on. If we go back almost two thousand years in the history of our language, we find this same syllable in Gothic as uz In Old High German, about the year 1000 A.D. we find the same syllable as ar; ir; or ur. Seven hundred years ago it was ur and so it remains today, having changed rather early. As a prefix to verbs it has become weak. We say, for instance, to express something being announced, Kunde ‘message’; if we want to designate the first message, the original, the one from which the other messages arise, we say Urkunde ‘document, charter’. In verbs the ur is weakened to er. To augment the verb kennen ‘to know’; (cognate: ken) we do not say—as might have been possible—Urkennen, but rather erkennen ‘to understand, recognize’. Er has exactly the same level of meaning in such a word as ur does in urkunde. If I make it possible for someone to do a certain thing, I erlaube ‘allow’” him something. If I change this into a noun, in a certain situation, it becomes Urlaub ‘vacation’, something I give a person through my act of ‘allowing’. Another word formation related to all this is exceedingly interesting—you know the expression “to make land urbar" ‘arable’. Urbar is also related to beran (‘to bear’; see lecture 2). Urbaris the ‘primordial cause inducing the land to bear’. There is an analogous meaning in the word ertragen ur-bear, to yield, endure’. If you say nowadays something about the Ertrag des Ackers ‘the yield of one’s land’, you are using the same word as in urbar machen des Ackers ‘making the field yield its first crop’. Originally the word urbar was also used to say ‘work the land so that it bears enough, for instance, to pay its taxes or rent’. [Note: English acre has become a measurement, whereas Acker is the land itself. Arnold Wadler in his One Language takes this word back to Agros (Greek, ‘soil’), further back to Ikker (Hebrew, ‘peasant’), and finally to A-K-R (Egyptian, ‘earth-god’) to show how ancient words with a spiritual meaning descend through the ages to a sense that is more and more physical and abstract. ‘God’—‘human being’—‘land’—‘measurement’. A similar change occurs from Agni, Hindu god of fire, to Ignis (Latin, ‘fire’) and finally ignition, ‘part of an internal-combustion engine’.]

To study the prefixes and suffixes of a language is in every sense most interesting! For instance, there is the prefix ge- in numerous words. This goes back to the Gothic ga, in which one truly felt the gathering. [Here the best example is offered in English: Anglo-Saxon gaed, ‘fellowship’, related to gador in ‘together’.] Ga- carries the feeling of assembling, pushing together. In Old High German it became gi, and in modern German ge [Wadler once described the consonant as the musical instrument on which the vowel-melody is played, hence the ever-changing vowels in epochs of time and in comparable languages.]| When you put ge in front of the word salle or selle ‘room, hall’, you come to Geselle ‘fellow, journeyman’ a person who shares a room with another or sleeps in the same lodging with him. Genosse ‘comrade’ is a person who geniesst ‘enjoys’ something together with another.

I want to call your attention to what is characteristic in these examples. Someone who experiences within the sounds of a word the immediate feeling for its meaning surely has a different relationship to the word than does a person without that feeling. If you simply say Geselle because you've known what it means since childhood, it is a different thing than if you have a feeling for the room and the connection within the room of two or more people. This element of feeling is being thrown off; the result is the possibility of abstractness.

Another example is part of many of our words, the suffix - lich (English -ly) as in göttlich ‘divine, godly, and freundlich ‘friendly’. If you look for it two thousand years ago, you will find it in Gothic as leiks. It became lich in Old High German, related originally to leich and also leib ‘body’. I told you (see lecture 2, pages 32-33) that leich/leib expresses the form' (Gestald left behind when a person dies. Leichnam ‘corpse’ is really a somewhat redundant expression, a structure such as a child creates when it combines two similar sounding words like bow-wow or quack-quack, where the meaning arises through repetition. Dissimilar sounding words, however, may also be combined in this way, and such a combination is the word Leichnam. Leich, as we said, is the form that remains after the soul has left the body. Nam, in turn, derives from ham and ham is the word still preserved in Hemd ‘shirt’, meaning shroud or sheath, Hülle. Leichnam means therefore the form-shroud’ that we cast off after death. Hence there is a combination of two similar things, form’ and—somewhat altered—‘sheath’, put together like bow-wow.

Out of this leiks/leich our suffix -lich has developed. When we use the word göttlich ‘godly’, it points toward a form’ with its - lich, which is leiks ‘form’: a form that is godly or divine, ‘of the shape or form of God'. This is particularly interesting in the Old High German word anagilih, which still contains ana from the Gothic; ana means ‘nearly’, ‘almost’. Gilihis the form. Today’s word ähnlich ‘similar, analogous’ means what ‘almost has the form'.

This is a good example for studying not so much the history as more particularly the psychology of language. It still shows how nuances of feeling, in earlier times, were vividly alive in the words people used. Later this feeling, this emotional quality slowly separated from any language experience, so that whatever unites a mental picture with speech sounds has become a totally abstract element. I have just spoken about the prefix ge-, Gothic ga-. Imagine that the ‘gathering together’ of ga-, which is now ge-, could still be felt and were now applied to the element of form’, to the leich, then according to what we could feel historically, it could mean ‘agreement of form'. This meaning lives in the word like an open secret. Geleich = gleich means ‘forms that agree’, forms that act together’: gleich ‘very similar, identical, equal’.

Consider for a moment a word that unveils many secrets. Today we will look at it from only one point of view. It is Ungetüm ‘monster’. [In German the two dots over an /ä/, /ö/ or /ü/, called an Umlaut, change the quality and sound of the vowel.¹ ] The /ü/ in Ungetüm was originally /u/ and this tum, if looked at separately, goes back to Old High German fuom, which is related to the verb tun ‘to do, bring about, achieve, bring into a relationship’. In every word containing the suffix -tum, the relationship of things working together can still be felt—as in Königtum ‘kingdomy', Herzogtum ‘dukedom, duchy'. The Ungetüm is a creature with whom no real working together is possible. Un, the prefix, denotes the ‘negative’; getum could be the ‘working together’.

We have numerous words, as you know, with the suffix -ig (English -y), such as feurig ‘fiery’, gelehrig ‘docile, teachable’, [cf. saucy; bony, earthy] and so on. This goes back to Old High German -ac or -ic and to Middle High German -ag or -ig. It signifies approximately what we describe with the adjective eigen ‘own, one’s own'. Hence, where the suffix -ig appears, it points to a kind of ownership. Feurig is feuereigen, something whose property is fiery’. I have told you that it is possible to observe how the genius of a language undergoes increasing abstractness, which is the result of this sort of contracting and what comes about then as the assimilation of sound elements, such as feurig from feuer-eigen.

It could be expressed like this: In very ancient stages of a people’s language development, the feelings were guided totally by the speech sounds. One could say language was made up only of differentiated, complicated images through the consonant sounds, picturing outer processes, and of vowel elements, interjections, expressions of feeling occurring within those consonant formations. The language-forming process then moves forward. Human beings pull themselves out, more or less, of this direct experience, the direct sensing of sound language. What are they actually doing as they pull themselves out and away? Well, they are still speaking but as they do so, they are pushing their speech down into a much more unconscious region than the one where mental pictures and feelings were closely connected with the forming of the sounds. Speech itself is being pushed down into an unconscious region, while the upper consciousness tries to catch the thought. Look closely at what is going on as soul-event. By letting the sound associations fall into unconsciousness, human beings have raised their consciousness to mental pictures (Vorstellen) and perceptions that no longer are immersed in language sounds and sound associations. Now people have to try to capture the meaning, a meaning somehow still indicated by the sounds but no longer as intimately connected with them as it had been. We can observe this process even after the original separating-out of the sound associations has taken place; just as people previously had related to the sounds, now they had to make a connection to words. By that time there had come into existence words with sound associations no one finds any relationship to; they are words connected through memory to the conceptual. There, on a higher level, words pass through the same process that sounds and syllables underwent earlier.

Suppose you want to say something about the people of a certain area, but you don't want to sound completely abstract. You wouldn't want to say “the human beings of Württemberg" [the German state where the lecture was being given]; that would be too abstract. And you probably wouldn't want to reach top level abstraction with “the inhabitants of Württemberg.” If you want to catch something more concrete than “human beings,” you might think of “the city and country people of Württemberg” (die Bürger und Bauern). This would denote not actually city people nor country people but something that hovers in between. In order to catch that hovering something, both words are used. This becomes especially clear and interesting when the two words, used to express a concept, approach from two sides and are quite far apart from each other, for instance when you say Land und Leute ‘land and people’. [Something similar in English: the world and his wife]. When you use such a phrase, what you want to express is something hanging between the two words that you are trying to approach. Take Wind und Wetter ‘wind and weather’: when you say it, you can't use just one word; you mean neither wind nor weather, but something that lies between, put into a kind of framework. [In English we have many similar double phrases from earliest times: might and main; time and tide; rack and ruin; part and parcel; top to toe; neither chick nor child—and many of them are alliterative, that is, repeating the same consonant at the beginning of both words.].

It is interesting to note that as language develops, such double phrases use alliteration, assonance, or the like. This means that the feeling for tone and sound is still playing its part; people who have a lively sense for language are still able, even today, to continue using such phrases and with them are able to capture a mental image or idea for which one specific word is not immediately available.

Suppose I want to describe how a person acts, what his habits are, what his essential nature is. I will probably hesitate to use just one word that would make him out to be a living person but passive—for I don't want to characterize him as living essentially a passive life nor on the other hand an active life; I want to deduce his activity out of his intrinsic nature. I can't say, his soul lebt ‘exists’; that would be too passive. Nor can I say, his soul webt ‘is actively in motion, weaves, wafts’; that would be too active. I need something in between, and today we can still say, Die Seele lebt und webt ‘Just as he lives and breathes'.

Numerous examples of this kind proceed from the language-forming genius. If you want to express what is neither Sang ‘song’ nor Klang ‘sound’, we say Sang und Klang ‘with drums drumming and pipes piping’. Or you might want to describe a medieval poet creating both the melody and the words of a song—people often wanted to say that the Minnesingers did both. One couldn't say Sie ziehen herum und singen ‘they wander about and sing’ but rather, Sie ziehen herum und singen und sagen ‘they wander about singing and telling’. What they did was a concept for which no single word existed. You see, such things are only what I would call latecomers or substitutes for the sound combinations we no longer quite understand. Today we form contractions of such phrases as Sang und Klang, singen und sagen, sound-phrases which in earlier times retained the connection between sound-content and the conceptual feeling element.

To take something very characteristic in this respect, look at the following example. When the ancient Germans convened to hold a court of justice, they called such a day tageding ‘daything’. What they did on that day was a ding We still use the expression Ding drehen, literally, ‘to turn a thing’; slang, ‘to plan something fishy'. A ding is what took place when the ancient Germans got together to make legal decisions. They called it a tageding. Now take the prefix ver-: it always points to the fact that something is beginning to develop (Anglo-Saxon for- used in forbear, forget, forgive, and so forth). Hence, the occurrences at the fageding began to develop further and one could say, they were being vertagedingt. And this word has slowly become our verteidigen ‘to defend, to vindicate’, with a small change of meaning. You see how the sound combination vertageding began to undergo the same process as the word combinations do later.

Thus we find that little by little the conceptual life digresses ever further from the pure life of language sounds. Consider the example of the Old High German word alawari. All-wahr, ganz wahr ‘completely true, altogether true’ was the original meaning, but it has become today's word albern ‘foolish’. Just think what shallowness of the folk soul you are looking into when you see that something with the original meaning of ‘altogether true’ has become ‘foolish’, as we hear and feel the word today. The alawari must have been used by tribes, I would say, who considered the appearance of human all-truth as something stupid and who favored the belief that a clever person is not alawari. Hence the feeling that ‘one who is completely honest is not very clever’, ie., albern ‘silly, foolish, weak-minded’. It has carried us over to something for which originally we had a quite different feeling.

When studying such shifts of meaning, we are able to gaze deeply into the language-forming genius in its connection with qualities of soul. Take our word Quecksilber ‘quicksilver, mercury’, for instance, a lively, fluid metal. Queck is the same word as Quecke ‘couch grass’, also called quick, quitch, twitch, or witch grass’, which has to do with movement, the same word as quick contained in the verb erquicken ‘to refresh, revive’; cognate, to quicken, ‘the quick and the dead’. This sound combination queck and quick, with the small shift to keck ‘bold, saucy’ originally meant ‘to be mobile’. If I said five hundred years ago 'er ist ein kecker Mensch’, I would have meant that he is a ‘lively person’, not one to loaf around, to let the grass grow under his feet, one who ‘likes work and gets going’. Through a shift of meaning, this keck has become ‘bold, saucy'. The path inward toward a soul characteristic led at the same time to an important change of meaning.

Another word frech originally meant kühn im Kampfe ‘bold in battle’. Only two hundred years ago frech ‘fresh, impudent, insolent’ meant a courageous person, someone not afraid to stand his man in a fight. Note the shift of meaning. Such shifts allow us to look deeply into the life and development of the human soul.

Take the Old High German word diomuoti. Deo/dio always meant ‘man-servant’; muoti is related to our word Mut ‘courage’; cognate, mood, but formerly it had a different meaning, to be explained today by attitude, the way we are attuned to the world or to other people. We can say that dio muoti actually signified the attitude of a servant, the mood a servant should have toward his master. Then Christianity found its way north. The monks wanted to tell the people something of what their attitude should be toward God and toward spiritual beings. What they wanted to express in this regard they could only do in relation to the feeling they already had for the ‘servant’s attitude’. And so diomuoti gradually became Demut ‘humility’. The religious feeling of humility derives from the attitude of a servant in ancient Germanic times; this is how shifts of meaning occur.

To study this process it is especially interesting to look at words, or rather the sound- and syllable-combinations where the shift of meaning arose through the introduction of Christianity. When the Roman clergy brought their religion to the northern regions of Europe, changes occurred whose fundamental significance can be outwardly understood only by looking at the shifts of meaning in the language. In earlier times before the advent of Christianity, there existed a well-defined master/servant relationship. About a person who had been captured in battle, put into service, and made submissive, his master—wishing to imply Der ist mir nützlich ‘he is useful to me'—would say Der ist fromm, das ist ein frommer Mensch ‘he is a pious man'. Only a last remnant of this word fromm exists today where, to put it a bit jokingly, it is only somewhat reminiscent of its original meaning in the phrase zu Nutz und Frommen ‘for use and profit’, that is, ‘for the greater good'. The verb frommen is combined here with ‘usefulness’, which originally was its identical meaning, but the idea of finding something useful is pointed out with tongue in cheek. The servant who was fromm was a most useful one. The Roman clergy did find that some people were more useful to them than others and these they called fromm ‘pious’. And so this word has come about in a peculiar way through the immigration of Christianity from Rome. With such words as Demut ‘humility’ and Frommsein ‘piety’ you can study some of the special impulses carried by Christianity from south to north.

To understand language and its development you have to pay attention to its soul element, to the inner experience that belongs to it. There exists in the forming of words what I characterized as the consonantal element on the one hand, the imitation of external processes, and on the other hand, the element of feeling and sensing, for instance, as interjections., when perceptions are expressed in their relationship to the external world. (See also expletives, lecture 3, p 48)

Let us consider a distinctly consonantal effect one can experience in one’s feeling for language, quite far along in its development.

Suppose that someone is looking at this form I am drawing here. A simple person long ago would have had two kinds of feeling about it. Looking at the form from below, that person perceived it as something pressed inward; the feeling itself slowly grew into the sound formation we have in our word Bogen ‘bow, as in rainbow’. However, looking at the form from above downward and perhaps bending it out as much as possible (drawing it), what I see now, looking down, comes into speech as Bausch ‘hump, bunch, ball’. From below it is a Bogen; from above, it is a Bausch. The two words still contain something of our perceptive feeling. When you want to express what is contained in both words together but is no longer attached to our perception, and goes outward to describe the whole process, you may say in Bausch und Bogen, ‘in bump and bow’ [lock, stock and barrel’ is a similar English idiomatic phrase]. In Bausch und Bogen would be an imaginative phrase for this (pointing to the drawing), seen from above and below. You can apply these two points of view also in the moral or social realm, in closing a business deal with someone, so that the final outcome is considered from both inside and outside. Looking at it from within, the result is profit; from outside there is the corresponding loss. When you close a business deal, whether for profit or loss, you can say it's done in Bausch und Bogen; you don't have to pay attention to either of the single components (as in the English phrase for better or for worse).

With all this I have wanted to explain to you that by following the development of speech sound elements as well as words and phrases, pictures will arise of the folk soul development as such. You will be able to discover many things if you trace along these lines the movement from the concrete life of speech sounds to the abstract life of ideas. You need only to open an ordinary dictionary or pick up words from the talk going on around you, and then trace the words as we have done. Especially for our teachers I want to mention that it is extraordinarily stimulating to point out such bits of language history occasionally to the children right in the middle of your lesson; at times it can truly enlighten a subject and also stimulate more lively thinking. But you must remember that it’s easy to get off on the wrong track; one must be exceedingly careful, for—as we've seen—words pass through a great variety of metamorphoses. It is very important to proceed conscientiously and not seize on superficial resemblances in order to form some theory or other.

You will see from the following example how necessary it is to proceed cautiously. Beiwacht ‘keeping watch together’ was originally an honest German word, like Zusammenwacht ‘together watch’, used to describe people sitting together and keeping watch. It is one of the words that did not wander from France into Germany as so many others did, but it somehow managed to wander into France, as did the word guerre (French, ‘war’) from the German Wirren ‘disorder, confusion’. In early times Beiwacht got to France and there became bivouac. And then it wandered back again, in one of the numerous treks of western words moving toward German regions after the twelfth century. When it returned, it became Biwak ‘an encampment for a short stay’. Thus an original German word wandered into France and then returned. In between it was used very little. Such things can happen, you see: Words emigrate, then it gets too stuffy for them in the foreign atmosphere—and back home they come again. There are many sorts of relationships like this that you can discover.

• 1. See discussion of the umlaut in lecture 6, page 90.

On the basis of what I have given you in these lectures and in order to reaffirm it strongly, I want to start out today with this remark: It is notably in philology that the consequences of a materialistic approach are the saddest, but perhaps also the most obvious. We can say that materialistic methods probably do more harm, for instance, in physics, because there it is less obvious—but it is most saddening in connection with language. Just here this could have been most easily avoided; just here it would have been possible to see how spirit and soul are actually at work in the language-forming genius. Now with this insight, our task will be to approach the earlier periods of language-forming by observing first of all what happens in later times. It is easier to survey the more recent happenings; you can follow language changes by noting how they shine through the accompanying changes in the feelings and perceptions of the folk soul. The language of the German people around the time of the Minnesingers—historians call it the age of chivalry—lies relatively far back but not so far that one can't trace literary matters easily enough to clarify this or that shift of meaning. By that time you don' find as many uncomplimentary phrases and epithets as in Homer, whose heroes applied names to each other that we would call insulting. Today we would hardly call each other ‘goat stomachs’ or ‘donkeys’. In those ancient times, however, a donkey was held in such esteem that a hero could be called a donkey. Animals then, it is evident from the Homeric epics, were by no means the object of such nuances of feeling as they are today.

We can come to some understanding of these things if we look for characteristic examples from a time close to ours. In the Middle Ages we find the figure of speech: Sie klebten wie ein Pech an ihrer Feinde Scharen ‘“They stuck like pitch to the ranks of the enemy’. It sounds laughable today to say of a person who perseveres bravely in battle, ‘He sticks like pitch’, but this expression was definitely used in the age of the Minnesingers.

In Wolfram von Eschenbach¹ you will find a characteristic figure of speech, showing us first of all what was considered important at the time: description through vivid images, and secondly, various nuances of feeling for things or processes that would today seem rather contemptuous. When von Eschenbach describes in a serious manner a duchess coming toward a gentleman, he says, Her appearance penetrated his eye and entered his heart, wie eine Nieswurz durch die Nase ‘like a sneezewort through the nose’. This is a vivid metaphor, for the scent of sneezewort penetrates one’s nose in a very lively way, one could even say ruchbar ‘smellable’ (see lecture 2, page 30), but we would certainly not use the phrase today. It shows how the world of feeling has changed, and this change in the world of feeling must be studied in order to get at the science of language in a nonmaterialistic way.

A more recent poet,² as you know, was still able to say of a dignified woman, Sie blickte wie ein Vollmond drein ‘Her glance was like the full moon'’. But this figure of speech, quite usual in the Middle Ages, would be inexcusable today. If you were prompted by a similar emotion to exclaim in this way to a lady, it would hardly be polite. In the Middle Ages, however, the loveliness and gentleness of the moon were transcendent in the hearts of the people. It was from this point of view that the association came about of the full moon with the beloved qualities of a lady’s glance and countenance.

Gottfried von Strassburg speaks in his Tristan³ quite seriously about geleimte Liebe ‘glued love’ as something that had come apart and then found its way together again. He spoke too about klebenbleiben ‘staying glued down' of wounded men on the battlefield. This would sound insulting today. When people in the Middle Ages described the kaiserlichen Beine ‘imperial legs’ of a person in order to express his stateliness, or die kaiserliche Magd Maria ‘the imperial maid Mary’, it points up essential aspects of change within the world of feeling.

In bringing you these examples, I want you to become observant as to how these subtle changes of feeling show up in obscure areas. For instance, one could speak in those early ages of krankem Schilfrohr ‘sick reeds’. What are sick reeds? Krank, ‘sick’, is here only a descriptive adjective for an exceedingly long, thin reed, and it is not at all far back in time when krank had no other meaning than ‘slim’. In those days when you called a person krank, you would have meant that he was ‘tall and slim’, certainly not that he was ‘ill’, in the present sense of the word. Had you wished to express sick, you would have used the term süchtig, von einer Sucht befallen, in modern usage, ‘chronically ill' or ‘addicted’. To be krank was to be ‘thin'—just think what has happened to this word! Gradually the feeling developed that it is ‘not quite human'’ to be ‘thin’. The notion has been adopted that a normal human being should be a little more substantial. With this detour came about the linking of the sound-connection Arank with the meaning ‘sick’ and the idea of a not-quite normal organism. We see how a word with one distinct shade of meaning can take on a clearly different one.

Not very long ago an innkeeper could do a good business by advertising elenden ‘miserable’ wine. He could trumpet forth in his village: “In my inn you get elenden wine!” It is exactly the same word that means ‘miserable’ today. Now, however, only in a dialect will you still find an echo of the old shade of meaning, where certain villages lying far out toward the border of the land are called the Elend villages. Even in my time in Styria in southern Austria, someone saying Der Mann ist aus dem Elend (the man is from the Elend) meant that he came from a village on the border. Certain villages have kept the name Elend up to the present day. This term has actually moved in from farther away, for elender wine meant ausländischer wine ‘foreign’, ‘outlandish’; Elend is the Ausland ‘foreign country’. So the innkeeper would have done good business, at least up to 1914, by advertising, say, French wines as elender wine. We see a shift of meaning similar to the one in Krank.

The poet Geiler von Kaisersberg⁴ speaks most peculiarly of a hübschen ‘pretty’ God. We couldn't say this today, but if you look it up in his works, you will find it more understandable. He meant with this a ‘benevolent’ God. Hübsch at that time carried the same shade of feeling as ‘kind’. [An English example: when James II (1633-1701) first saw St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, he called it amusing, awful, and artificial. He meant that it was ‘pleasing to look at’; ‘meriting awe’; and ‘full of skilful artifice’.] You will still find occasionally today surviving figures of speech, such as the phrase ein ungehobelter Mensch ‘an uncouth person’, literally ‘unplaned’ surface not smoothed with a Hobel, a carpenter’s plane. You will understand this word on meeting it in Martin Luther’s writing, that people are gehobelt ‘planed smooth’ by the prophets, that is, they are being put to rights, put in order, straightened up by the prophets. We find there the visual imagery of the act of planing with the ‘making straight’ in a moral sense.

After these examples from so far back in time, we can look at something closer to us. Lessing⁵ who lived more recently, wanted to describe the many things for which we rightfully develop great sympathy but which nevertheless cannot be called beautiful or be thought of as objects of art. By the way he phrased this, it can easily be misunderstood today: “Much of the Anzüglichsten, (‘offensive, suggestive, lewd’ in today's meaning) cannot be an object of art.” [Modern German uses another form of the verb anziehen, ‘to draw or pull’: anziehend = ‘attractive’.] Lessing means that many things of the most attractive nature cannot rightfully be called objects of art; in this word we have a real change on how the word is felt. We use the term nowadays for something essentially different.

It is interesting to trace the complicated way such shifts of meaning take place. Consider how the word krank, meaning ‘slim’ at an earlier time, might also be applied to a reed. A reed is krank when it is slim, less useful than a short, thick one. This shade of meaning gradually changed then to its present sense of ‘sick’, though somewhat modified once again. Adelung,⁶ living halfway between that time and ours, speaks about gekränkte ships that need repair [gekränkte, the past participle of the verb kränken, introduces still another shade of meaning. Today it is used to mean ‘hurt’, in the sense of hurt feelings.] It strikes us as a little comic or at least it characterizes the speaker as a joker when someone talks about a ‘hurt clock’, but in those years the sense of the word was perfectly clear, with its changed meaning, when applied to inorganic objects. Krank originally referred to the shape or form; the present meaning ‘sick’ crept in only gradually. While the earlier meaning ‘sim’ was cast aside altogether and the totally new one took over, we are still reminded of the original meaning by the term ‘hurt ships’. The immediate sensing of the emotional, perceptive quality within words disappeared more and more.

Even Goethe still had a clear feeling about words; he found feelings in words that nowadays leave us cold, for in many respects he went back to the power of the language-forming genius. The word bitter ‘bitter’, for instance, has become for us a purely subjective tasting experience; usually we don't connect it in our feeling with what in earlier times was clearly visualized as beissen ‘to bite’, from which it originates. The relationship is there: whatever tastes bitter really ‘bites us’. Goethe still felt this and writes about “the bitter scissors of the Fates"⁷—they are the biting scissors of the Fates! People nowadays are such abstract creatures that they think this is “mere poetic license.” But it is not poetic license at all; it arose directly out of inner experience. True, Goethe did not yet live in a time when ninety-nine percent of poetic writing is superfluous. We should keep in mind while reading his work how within language he felt a much greater aliveness, a more inward life, than we are able to feel today as products of modern education. You can sense this, too, from Goethe’s words, Ein Ecce Homo gefiel mir wegen seiner erbarmlichen Darstellung, ‘An Ecce Homo painting pleased me particularly because of its miserable portrayal’. No one today seems to feel that there is anything more in Goethe’s phrase than the meaning of a poor sort of representation. But Goethe wants to suggest that our deepest pity is aroused through this particular portrayal. We would say, “Ein Ecce Homo gefiel mir wegen seiner Erbarmen heransfordernden Darstellung” ‘An Ecce Homo painting pleased me particularly because the portrayal aroused compassion’. Goethe was still able to put it ‘... because of its miserable portrayal’.

Not so very long ago it was possible to say of a person who liked to speak with children or poor people on the street, who was not snobbish or conceited, for whom one wished to show one’s approval, “Du bist ein niederträchtiger Mensch!” Present meaning: ‘You are a low-thinking person, low-minded, vile'. This was possible until the middle of the eighteenth century. Ein niederträchtiger Mensch was until that time an ‘affable, amiable’ person. He was being praised, given the highest praise from a certain point of view. Again, I do not believe that many people can still derive the right meaning from reading in eighteenth century literature about an ungefährliche Zahl a ‘harmless number’; ungefähr now means ‘approximate’ not ‘undangerous’. We would say today: ‘a number that is approximately correct’. An ungefährliche number was simply an ‘approximate’ one.

Further, what would modern minds connect with the common eighteenth century expression, unartige Pflaumen ‘naughty plums’. Un = ‘not’; Art = ‘type, sort, variety'. Unartige plums are those that do not show the specially typical marks of their kind, because they are an unusual variation.

Only when we acquire a feeling for the fact that such changes take place will we understand other changes that are not so obvious. For instance, our word schwierjg ‘difficult—you know the shade of feeling with which it is spoken. It was formerly used only with the conscious intention of expressing full of Schwären, full of Geschwüre ‘swellings, abscesses’. Therefore if you found something schwierig you wished to express the feeling that this would ‘result in abscesses’. A very pictorial, vigorous expression to connect with our word schwierig.

Such things fall totally outside our modern nuances of feeling; they prove how wrong it is to judge language in a pedantic way without recognizing the reality of language metamorphosis, something also evident in dialects. Today, when offering a guest a meal with many courses, you might tell him not to eat too much of this or that because other dishes are coming for which he should save some appetite; you might say, “Please don' eat too much—there’s a good dessert coming.” But in one region of the German-speaking lands, it is possible to put it, “Iss von dieser Speise nicht zuviel, es gibt noch etwas hintenauf’ ‘Don't eat too much of this; there’s still something coming in the rear’. [Etwas hintenauf in modern German carries the connotation that a ‘spanking is in the offing’.]

In another dialect it is possible to say, “Oh, these are good children; die schlachten sich” ‘they slaughter each other’. This meant that they take after their good parents, are cast in the same mold [vom gleichen Schlag sein). 1t is exactly this kind of example that points up the living interchange between inner sensitivity and the external image in our feeling for language.

Sometimes this shows up in extremely important matters. For instance, you will find a statement of Goethe, made in his later years, characterizing his work on Faust. It has played a most significant role with the Faust commentators. In Goethe’s last letter [March 17, 1832] addressed to Wilhelm von Humboldt, he characterized his work on Faust as remarkable wenn seit über 60 Jahren die Konzeption des “Faust” bei ihm jugendlich von vorne herein klar, die ganze Reihenfolge hin weniger ausführlich vorlag (... when for more than sixty years the conception of Faust has been clear to me from the beginning, first as a young person; the whole sequence, however, less fully developed). Many Faust commentators concluded from this that Goethe already as a young man had a plan for the complete Faust that he had conceived clearly from the beginning (von vorn herein) and that the later work was merely a kind of working out the details. And much that is unnecessary and untrue in their characterization of his work on Faust has originated from this interpretation of the passage, for only since Fresenius⁸ published his findings about the significance for Goethe of the phrase von vorne herein ‘in from the front’, that is, ‘at the outset’ has it been possible to understand Goethe’s words. All this had special meaning for me because I worked with Fresenius.⁹ When he had found something of importance, it often took decades before he did anything about it. Therefore I pressed him to publish this, for what he had to say was extremely important. You can put together all the passages of Goethe using the phrase von vorne herein and you will find that he never uses it in any but a spatial sense. If he said he had read a book von vorne herein, he meant that he had read only the beginning pages. It can be clearly shown that he had in his youth a clear conception of the first scenes of Faust Here then simply a correct understanding of word usage explains Goethe’s work; from this phrase you can see that what he could visualize spatially has for us become abstract. Von vorne herein he always used visually, spatially. Much of Goethe’s charm and attraction for us is founded on his going back to the original qualities of the language-creating genius. You can start out from Goethe’s language and from there search your way into Goethe’s soul, instead of proceeding only materialistically as modern investigators do, and you will find there important criteria for freeing philology from rationalistic materialism. It is good to look for help from such sources also.

In many ways there no longer exists such language that expresses a combination of shades of feeling and sound. We can still find this sometimes in dialects, which also have it in themselves to bring the visual to expression. For instance, you will find here and there in dialect—more often than in educated speech—the phrase unter den Arm greifen ‘to help someone’; literally ‘to reach under his arm’. This simply means to come to the aid of a person who needs help. Why? Because a young person in offering a hand to someone elderly, who can't get about so easily any more, reaches under the other’s arm to give support. This active image was transferred then to any helpful act. Exactly as it was with the expression (Lecture 2) “to wipe the night-sleep out of our eyes,” so it is with the act of giving help, a single specific procedure chosen to express visually a more abstract generality. Sometimes the genius of language was no longer able to retain the visual element; then also from time to time imagery was retained in one instance, cast off in the other.

There still exists today the word lauschen ‘listen with inner attentiveness’ for a certain kind of listening. The Austrian dialect also has a word related to lauschen: losen. We not only say in Austria when we want to make a person listen, Hör einmal ‘listen’, but also Los amol! ‘harken!’. Losen is a weaker but still active listening. Educated colloquial German has retained lauschen. Losen is a cognate with the feeling of a somewhat weak activity, even with a certain sneakiness, pointing to a secret kind of listening. In a sense losen has taken on the meaning of forbidden listening. For instance, when a person puts his ear to the keyhole or listens in when two are discussing something not meant for his hearing, then the word losen is used ‘harken'.

Only after becoming sensitive to the feeling element in such sound sequences can one proceed to develop a sense for the basic sounds, the vowels and consonants. In the Austrian dialect there is a word Ahnl for grandmother. Do you perhaps know the word Ahnl? A more general term is Ahnfrau (der Ahn, die Ahne, male and female grandparents/progenitors). In Ahnl you have Ahne combined with an /l/. If you want to understand what is happening there in the realm of speech, you must swing up to a heightened feeling of /l/ as a consonant. Feel the /l/ in the suffix -lich (‘-ly’, as in friendly See lecture 2 and lecture 4), in which I have explained that it originated from leik. It is somehow related to the feeling that something is moving about, that this moving about has to be imitated in the language. An Ahnl is a person who is clearly old but who makes the impression of being lively and mobile; you hardly notice the wrinkles in her face! You see the character of /l/ as it is used here.

Take the word schwinden ‘dwindle, fade: to go away, to make a thing go away so that it can't be seen any more. Now figure that I don't really want to make it go away, but I want to cheat a little in seeming to make it go away. I want to effect something that is not a true, honest disappearance—but I would also feel a moving around, an /l/ as in the Ahnl—and there is the word schwindeln ‘to swindle’. The /I/ makes the difference. You can feel exactly the subtly nuanced value of /I/ by going from schwinden to schwindeln. [Parallels in English would be tramp-trample, side-sidle, tread-treadle.]

If you dwell on these thoughts, eurythmy¹⁰ will become completely natural. You will feel that eurythmy springs from our ancient, original relationship to the sound elements of words, which without the sound elements only movement can bring to expression. If you can feel such a thing, then you will be able to sense precisely how, for instance, in the vowel /u/ (ooh) there is an element of moving close together, snuggling close together. Look at how you do the /u/ in eurythmy [Arms and hands are brought close and parallel to each other, as in the written letter]. You have the moving together, the closeness of the gesture, so that you can say, in the word Mutter ‘mother—someone you usually come close to—it would be impossible to have an /a/ (ah) or /e/ (ay) as the strong vowel in the word. [The /o/ of ‘mother’ is a gesture of affection.] You can't imagine saying Metter or Matter. Mater shows that the language in which it occurs, Latin, was already a weakened one; the original word was Mutter.

I have shown you, with all this, the path of the genius of language, a path on which a barrier was erected, I have said, between the sound element of a word and its meaning. They were originally closely united with each other in subjective human perception. They have separated. The sound-content descends into the subconscious; the mental picture ascends into our consciousness [see lecture 4, page 59, 60]. Much has been cast off that can be perceived just there where human beings originally lived closely connected with the things and activities around them. When we go back to earlier times in language development, we find the altogether remarkable fact that the original forms of language take us completely out into factual reality, that there exists on the primitive levels of language formation a fine sense for actual facts, and that the people who live at this level live closely connected with things and with everything that goes on with things. The moment this living connection is broken, the sense for reality becomes hazy and people live in an unreality that expresses itself in abstract language.

In the original Indo-European language there were three genders, as in Latin. We still have three genders in German. You can feel three different qualities expressed as masculine, feminine, and neuter. In French there are only two genders left, in English only one. This shows us that the English language has divested itself with a grand gesture, one could say, of the sense for reality, that it now merely hovers over things but no longer lives in actualities. On that early step of human development when the gender of words was being formed, there still existed a primitive clairvoyance; a living, spiritual quality was perceived within things. Der Sonne ‘sun’, masculine and die Mond ‘moon’, feminine which later were reversed to die Sonne and der Mond [in modern German sun is feminine, moon is masculine] could never have come about in the older IndoEuropean languages had the elemental beings living in the sun and moon not been experienced as brothers and sisters. In antiquity the sun was felt to be the brother, the moon the sister. Today in German it has been turned around. The day was perceived as the son and the night as the daughter of the giant Norwi. This definitely originates from primitive clairvoyant vision. The feeling for the earth at that time was very different from the geologists' perception of it today, when they would actually have good reason to use the neuter gender and speak of das Erde [the correct form in modern German is die Erde feminine]. People nowadays no longer sense that the earth in fact is Gaia, for whom the masculine god is Uranos. People still had a perception of this in the areas where the Germanic language was originally formed.

In any case there were shades of feeling arising out of the close connection with the world outside and these were the source for determining gender, for deciding characteristic gender. The elephant (der Elefant) was considered strong, the mouse (die Maus) weak. Since a man was perceived as strong and a woman weak, the elephant was given the masculine gender, the mouse the feminine. The trees of the forest are usually feminine because for the original perception, they were the dwelling places of female divinities. Of immense importance because it points to a deep aspect of the language genius is the fact that alongside the masculine and feminine genders there exists a neuter gender. We say der Mann ‘the man', die Frau ‘the woman', das Kind ‘the child’. The child’s gender or sex [the German language uses the same word Geschlecht for both] is not yet articulated, has not yet reached complete definition, is in the process of becoming. When the neuter gender arose, it came up out of a certain mood in the folk-genius, a feeling that anything given a neuter gender would only later become what it was to be. Gold does not yet have the special characteristic it will have someday. It is still young in the cosmos; it is not yet what it is destined to be. Hence it is not der Gold or die Gold but das Gold.

On the other hand we can look at what comes about when the visualizing power that could characterize gender disappears. We say today die Mitgift (dowry, literally ‘with-gift’), which shows a clear connection to an earlier word die Gift. We also say today der Abscheu (‘aversion’, literally ‘away-shyness’) which is clear evidence of an earlier word der Scheu. Both these deductions are correct. Der Scheu and die Gift have gone through a subtle change in connotation. Die Gift in early times simply meant ‘the non-committal act of giving’. But because of what some people have given and what was, also in Faust’s opinion, harmful to others, the word has changed its meaning and has been applied to gifts that are objectionable, losing the connection with the original gender characteristic. The result is das Gift ‘poison’, neuter gender. When a person once was called scheu, he was considered as having strong feelings, as being firm in himself. When the word became weak, it became die Scheu ‘shyness’, feminine.

That our language has become more abstract, that it has released itself from its interweaving with outer reality, can best be understood from the fact that the ancient Indo-European languages had eight cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, ablative, locative, and instrumental [German has retained the first four. English has one case form for nouns, except for possessives—usually adding /s/—and two forms you, your or three forms they, them, their for pronouns]. This means that not only was the position of a thing expressed as it is done today with the first four cases, but people were also able to follow other relationships with their feelings. For instance, to do a thing at a certain time, we can express as diesen Tag ‘on this day’, accusative, or dieses Tages ‘of this day’, genitive. No longer do we experience the active helpfulness of the day, of the time of day, or of a special day in particular. No longer do we have the experience that whatever is done on the second of January, 1920, for instance, could not be accomplished later, that time is a helpful element, that time is involved in something that helps us. There existed a sense for all this in earlier ages when the instrumental case was used, hiu tagu. We would have to say something like durch diesen Tag ‘through this day’, vermittelst dieses Tages ‘by means of this day’. Hiu tagu has become the word heute ‘today’; the old instrumental case is buried in the word, just as hiu jaru has become heuer ‘this year’. But German has retained only four cases and cast off the others. You will understand from this how continuously language becomes more and more abstract, and how the capacity for abstract thought with its definite lack of a sense for reality has been taking the place of an earlier connection with the real world. This is what language reveals.

• 1. Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170–1220), German epic poet and knight. Most famous work: Parzival.
• 2. Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862) in “Des Sangers Fluch.”
• 3. Tristan and Isolde, ca. AD. 1210.
• 4. Geiler von Kaisersberg (1445-1510), famous preacher.
• 5. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), critic and dramatist. The quotation is from his play Emilia Galotti, Act 1, Scene 4.
• 6. Johann Christoph Adelung, (1732-1806), German philologist and grammarian. Court librarian at Dresden.
• 7. In his poem “Harzreise im Winter ”(Winter Journey in the Harz).
• 8. August Fresenius (b. 1850). See Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1951), pp. 221-223 .
• 9. From 1890 to 1897 in the Goethe-Schiller Archives in Weimar as editor of Goethe’s Scientific Writings.
• 10. See Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmy as Visible Speech, GA 279, lecture 4 (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1931).