X. B (ii) (d), ANNEX II

'CLASSICAL5 LANGUAGES AND
LITERATURES

THE most striking point about the usage of any language or literature
that has been canonized as 'classical' is that it is not the mother tongue
of any of the members of the society in which it is being cultivated in
virtue of having been given this status; and this salient feature of 'the
classics' is as characteristic as it is prominent; for a 'classical' language
or literature is ex hypothesi a 'dead' one which has been brought back to
life artificially through the deliberate and selfconscious cultural achieve-
ment of a renaissance.

In the polyglot population of the Western World, for example, there
was no people whose mother tongue was Ancient Greek or Latin at
the time of the literary renaissance of Hellenism at the beginning of
the Modern Age of Western history. The Romance-speaking Western
peoples, whose mother tongues were derived from Latin as a matter of
philological fact, were just as incapable of understanding, speaking, or
reading Latin by the light of nature as were their fellow Westerners
whose mother tongues were twigs of the Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic, or
Letto-Lithuanian branches of the Indo-European family of languages;
and those Western peoples whose non-Indo-European mother tongues
—Basque, Magyar, Estonian, and Finnish—had not even the remotest
linguistic affinity with either Latin or Greek showed no less enthusiasm
than was shown by their Indo-European-speaking neighbours for a
revival of the study of the Hellenic literature in the original Greek, as
well as in an imitative Latin, which became one of the common cultural
enterprises of the Western peoples in and after the fifteenth century of
the Christian Era.

The same point comes out in a survey of the currency of other classical
languages and literatures in other societies. In an Arabic Muslim World
a Classical Arabic language and literature were cultivated by peoples
whose mother tongues were varieties of the Berber form of Hamitic
speech, as well as by those whose mother tongues were dialects of a
current vernacular Arabic. In an Iranic Muslim World both a Classical
Arabic and a Classical Persian language and literature were cultivated
by peoples whose mother tongues were members of the Turkish and
Indo-Aryan families, as well as by peoples whose mother tongues were
Irano-Aryan vernaculars linguistically akm to Classical Persian. In a
Hindu World a Classical Sanskrit language and literature were cultivated
by Indians whose mother tongues were members of the Tamil and other
non-Indo-European families, as well as by Indians whose mother
tongues were Indo-Aryan vernaculars of Sanskrit origin. In a Far
Eastern World a Classical Sinic language which had been standardized
(for the eye, though not for the tongue and ear) by Ts'in She Hwang-ti,
the founder of the Sinic universal state, and which had consequently