706 RENAISSANCES

become the exclusive vehicle for conveying the Confucian classics, was
cultivated, as the key to the classical literature which it enshrined, by
peoples whose mother tongues were Korean and Japanese, as well as by
peoples whose mother tongues belonged, as Annamese belonged, to the
Sino-Siamese family, or were actually derived, as the latter-day Chinese
spoken vernaculars were, from the particular language belonging to the
Chinese branch of the Sino-Siamese family which had been canonized
as 'classical'.

When we extend our survey to languages and literatures that were
cultivated as 'classical' by civilizations of the second generation, the same
picture presents itself again. In a Babylonic World the Classical Sumer-
ian language and literature, like their Classical Greek counterparts in the
Modern Western World, were cultivated by peoples whose diverse
mother tongues—in this case, Semitic, Elamite, and Urartian—had in
common the single negative characteristic of having no affinity with the
language that had been canonized as 'classical'; and the Classical Akka-
dian language and literature, that were parasites on the Sumerian as the
Latin were on the Ancient Greek, were cultivated, side by side with the
Sumerian, by the non-Semitic-speaking Elamite and Urartian peoples
of the Babylonic World as well as by the speakers of Babylonian and
Assyrian Semitic vernaculars of Akkadian origin. The same Classical
Sumerian and Classical Akkadian languages and literatures were like-
wise cultivated in a polyglot Hittite World whose peoples' Asianic and
Indo-European mother tongues had no affinity with either Sumerian or
Akkadian. We may also observe that in the corpse of an Egyptiac body
social which was galvanized into a long-drawn-out life-in-death by the
repeated stimulus of successive stabs administered by a series of alien
intruders—Hyksos, Assyrians, Persians, Hellenes—a Classical Egyptian
language and literature were cultivated, until the advent of Christianity,
not only by latter-day Egyptians whose mother tongue was of Classical
Egyptian origin, but also by Libyans whose mother tongue belonged to a
different branch of the Hamitic family and by polyglot Ethiopians among
whom an earlier Hamitic-speaking stratum of population had been partly
submerged under successive waves of invaders from the heart of Tropi-
cal Africa whose mother tongues were not akin to Classical Egyptian
even remotely.1

Thus, wherever we find any language or literature being cultivated as
classical, we almost invariably2 also find that it is current in this clas-
sical usage among people who do not speak this language, or any lan-
guage derived from it, as their mother tongue. Yet this trait, though
almost invariably present, is nevertheless not a distinctive hall-mark that
can be taken as the differentia of languages and literatures that have
become 'classical'; for there are other categories, besides, in which the
self-same feature presents itself. Lingua franche* the official languages of

1 See II. ii. 114-15.

a ^'Invariably* has to be qualified by 'almost', in view of the fact that, in Orthodox
Christendom, the revival and cultivation of Ancient Greek as a classical language was
virtually confined to Modern-Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians. A possible explana-
tion of this exception to what seems to be the general rule is offered on pp. 713-17, below.

3 See V. v. 483-537.