But Being can be thought of without waking-consciousness, whereas the reverse is not the case--i.e., there are race-beings without language, but no languages without race. All that is of race, therefore, possesses its proper expression, independent of any kind of waking-consciousness and common to plant and animal. This expression--not to be confounded with the expression-_language_ which consists in an _active alteration_ of the expression--is not meant for witnesses, but is simply there; it is physiognomy. Not that it stops at the plant; in every living language, too (and how significant the word “living”!) we can detect, besides the Taboo side that is learnable, an entirely untransferable quality of race that the old vessels of the language cannot pass on to alien successors; it lies in melody, rhythm, stress; in colour, ring, and tempo of the expression; in idiom, in accompanying gesture. On this account it is necessary to distinguish between language and speaking, the first being in itself a dead stock of signs, and the second the activity that operates with the signs.[163] When we cease to be able to hear and see directly how a language is spoken, thenceforward it is only its ossature and not its flesh that we can know. This is so with Sumerian, Gothic, Sanskrit, and all other languages that we have merely deciphered from texts and inscriptions, and we are right in calling these languages dead, for the human communities that were formed by them have vanished. We know the Egyptian tongue, but not the tongues of the Egyptians. Of Augustan Latin we know approximately the sound-values of the letters and the meaning of the words, but we do not know how the oration of Cicero sounded from the rostra and still less how Hesiod and Sappho spoke their verses, or what a conversation in the Athenian market-place was really like. If in the Gothic age Latin came into actual speech again, it was as a new language; this Gothic Latin did not take long to pass from the formation of rhythms and sounds characteristic of itself (but which our imagination to-day cannot recapture, any more than those of old Latin) to encroachments upon the word-meanings and the syntax as well. But the anti-Gothic Latin of the Humanists, too, which was meant to be Ciceronian, was anything but a revival. The whole significance of the race-element in language can be measured by comparing the German of Nietzsche and of Mommsen, the French of Diderot and of Napoleon, and observing that in idiom Voltaire and Lessing are much closer together than Lessing and Hölderlin.