2 The Spirit of a Language
In fact, the spirit of each language can be reached in a number of ways. More than one way may be needed to supply the proper knowledge of it. Since the spirit of a language is accessible to children who live in the environment, and who learn their mother tongue by hearing it first and using it later, it seems a good guess that something of its spirit lies in its melody. This means the particular effect of the flow of words upon one’s flesh through the ears, the brain and the muscles. Once the melody is acquired, the process is reversed and utterance is through the conjunction of muscles, brain and flesh in general, checked by the ears as censors. It is of interest here to mention the relationship of our flesh to music being heard. The true listener yields to the complexes that we call music and is actually affected by it to the point where all parts of his body can indicate its presence.* The listener who interferes by his imagery, his thoughts or by closing his sensitivity does not show the presence of the music in his flesh. Since babies learn to talk their mother tongue first by yielding to its “music,” I think that we can trace the first elements of the spirit of a language to the unconscious surrender of our sensitivity to what is conveyed by the background of noise in each language. This background obviously includes the silences, the pauses, the flow, the linkages of words, the duration of each breath required to utter connected chunks of the language, the *
cf. Un nouveau phénomène psychosomatique, C. Gattegno and A. Gay, Delachaux et Niestle, 1952, Neuchâtel and Paris.
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