Laut - Sprache - Rhythmus und Reim

Abstract:

Sound - language - rhythm and rhyme

The basis of all language is sound comprising vowels and consonants. Vowels are expressions of the human mind: A - amazement at the wonders of the world and one’s own soul; E - a sobering encounter with one’s own self; I - an expression of one’s own human being in relation to the world; 0 - loving attention to the world; U - slight fear of something unfathomable; EI - stroking, comforting, and AU - reverence for everything sublimc. Consonants, however, are noises adapted from nature which man integratcs transformed into his soul, relating them to the state of his mind.

Human speech organisation and the speech itself are threefold: 1. the force and dynamics of speech are intentionally created by the muscles of the chest and trunk and represent willing in speech; 2. sonation is created by the larynx and is the expression of feeling; 3. the mouth and nosc as speech organs create the different consonants thereby bringing thoughts into speech. The overall development of the German language is likewise threefold. Ancient High German was a language of willing with almost magical forces (magic spells of Merseburg). Middle High German was a language that especially expressed state of mind or feeling (medieval German love poems). And it was not until Martin Luther that New High German became the language of thinking. Rudolf Steiner further developed German to enable it to express spiritual concepts.

In ancient Greece, artistic, rhythrnic speech had already existed, albeit without rhyme. Greek hexameter corresponds to the heart-lung rhythm of the sleeping human being. Rhyming poetry developed in the Middle Ages (Edda, medieval German love poems). Development of rhyme is demonstrated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his Faust (part II, act 3, inner courtyard of a castle), where Faust teaches rhyming to Helena. By union of the»male«with the»female«, i. e. the content of thought (Faust) with the rhyme structure formed by the etheric body (Helena), poetry comes into existence and is then born as Euphofion.

In his autobiographical work Dichtung und Wahrheit (book XVI) Goethe gives an imaginative picture of how he experiences the development of poetry in himself as a»night«process of his inner being for which he feels a deep respect, almost like a mother hen surrounded by her brood of hatched and chirping chicks. Goethe wrote poems and cycles of poems especially when he abstained from physical relationships with the women he loved. But also in other circumstances he could appeal to his rhyming etheric body, for instance when contemplating Schiller’s skull on the occasion he was asked to identify it in the vault where Schiller was buried.