The group of Western Culture-languages appeared in the tenth century. The available bodies of language--namely, the Germanic and Romance dialects (monkish Latin included)--were developed into script-languages under a single spiritual influence. It is _impossible_ that there should not be a common character in the development of German, English, Italian, French, and Spanish from 900 to 1900, as also in the history of the Hellenic and Italic (Etruscan included) between 1100 and the Empire. But what is it that, irrespective of the area of extension of language-families or races, acquires specific unity from the landscape-limit of the Culture alone? What modifications have Hellenistic and Latin in common after 300--in pronunciation and idiom, metrically, grammatically, and stylistically? What is present in German and Italian after 1000, but not in Italian and Rumanian? These and similar questions have never yet been systematically investigated. Every Culture at its awakening finds itself in the presence of _peasant-languages_, speeches of the cityless countryside, “everlasting,” and almost unconcerned with the great events of history, which have gone on through late Culture and Civilization as unwritten dialects and slowly undergone imperceptible changes. On the top of this now the language of the two primary Estates raises itself as the first manifestation of a waking relation that _has_ Culture, that _is_ Culture. Here, in the ring of nobility and priesthood, languages become Culture-languages, and, more particularly, _talk belongs with the castle, and speech to the cathedral_. And thus on the very threshold of evolution the plantlike separates itself from the animal, the destiny of the living from the destiny of the dead, that of the organic side from that of the mechanical side of understanding. For the Totem side affirms and the Taboo side denies, blood and Time. Everywhere we meet, and very early indeed, rigid cult-languages whose sanctity is guaranteed by their inalterability, systems long dead, or alien to life and artificially fettered, which have the strict vocabulary that the formulation of eternal truths requires. Old Vedic stiffened as a religious language, and with it Sanskrit as a savant-language. The Egyptian of the Old Kingdom was perpetuated as priests’ language, so that in the New Empire sacred formulæ were no more understandable than the _Carmen Saliare_ and the hymn of the Fratres Arvales in Augustan times.[213] In the Arabian pre-Cultural period Babylonian, Hebrew, and Avestan simultaneously went out of use as workaday languages--probably in the second century before Christ--indeed on that very account Jews and Persians used them in their Scriptures as in opposition to Aramaic and Pehlevi. The same significance attached to Gothic Latin for the Church, Humanists’ Latin for the learning of the Baroque, Church Slavonic in Russia, and no doubt Sumerian in Babylonia.