Pronunciation, the musicality of a language, is something that isn't
brought in to this question much, I guess. I have to somehow make this
comment with a number of provisos, since it could easily be taken as
xenophobic, superficial, etc. But it seems to me that phonically German is
a very strife-ridden language. I get the impression that the gutteral,
consonant sound somehow matches Heidegger's mood, or perhaps he works, in
some way, perhaps on only a minute level, to acheive a musical-poetic
unity with the wresting sound of the langauge, its unrest. Its sonority
visualized appears to me to be cavernous, plunging, conjures images of
mountains, jutting rocks, vowels standing forth amidst the rough, storm
hewn rocks of consonants, etc. I don't get this from Italian or French.
This is a side of the poetic which Heidegger omits. Speaking of a musical
performace (a woman friend played a Schubert sonata for Heidegger and a
friend), Heidegger said something to the effect of "That is something that
we can't do."
But did I really provide any provisos? Maybe not. What would they be?
Well, I'm off to play a tarentella and then some Faure...
Ciao,
Tom B.
On Tue, 6 Aug 1996, chris rickey wrote:
>
> > I find Heidegger's conviction that Greek and German are the most
> >philosophical of languages one of the places where love of one's own
> >leads him to simply assert something as true-he offers no argument to
> >support this assertion in An Introduction to Metaphysics. His assertion
> >has whatever plausibility it can appeal to because of the existence of
> >Greek and German philosophy.
>
> In defense of Heidegger, the belief that there is a special connection
> between Greek and German is fairly widespread in Germany. My roommate
> there, certainly no Nazi nor even a particular enthusiast of things German,
> quite unselfconsciously asserted the same thing (he even claimed that the
> Germans pronounced Greek like the ancients did, like anyone would know).
> This leads me to believe that it is a general cultural assumption among
> educated Germans, sort of like Americans belief in their unique destiny
> (for good or bad).
>
> I don't know enough about linguistics to know the veracity of this claim.
> Nor do I know whether German is better able than any romance language to
> express Greek grammar, which underlies his attempts to recover the Greek
> understanding of being as presencing. Of course, that presumes they
> thought of being in this manner...
>
> Chris
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> I just can't stop
> When my spark gets hot
>
>
>
>
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>
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