ABSTRACT
In the first introductory quote, Ludwig Wittgenstein makes an important point about grammar. However, the official Anscombe translation (“Essence is expressed by grammar”) does not capture the semantic field covered by the German original. Two paragraphs later, Wittgenstein notes that grammar tells us what kind of object something is, which, etymologically deriving from the Latin esse, would, in fact, confirm the translation. The German equivalent of essence would be “Wesenskern,” but Wittgenstein used the term Wesen, which covers a field including being, creature, nature, personality, and air. But there is also a verb, wesen, and Heidegger (1985) uses Wesen as noun form of wesen, to live, to be at work. In this form the verb, having arisen from the Proto-Indo-European es or *s es-(to stay, live, spend the night), is etymologically related to inflec-
tions of the verb “to be” (Engl., was, Gr., waren). In this root of the verb to be, “the noun Wesen does not originally signify quiddity, essence, but the constitutive staying of presence (Gegenwart), pre-sence (An-wesen) and ab-sence (Ab-wesen)” (Derrida 1972: 244).1 To discuss the essence of language, language as such, therefore, “means getting ourselves to the location of its being present (Wesen): gathering in the event” (Heidegger 1985: 10). Language is both the essence and the being of humans. “Essence/being/life is,” to return to Wittgenstein, “expressed in/by grammar”; linguistic form and forms of life are mutually constitutive and irreducible. We cannot, therefore, study linguistic form, i.e. grammar, independent of life as a whole (Vološinov 1976). This is also why translation-both between languages as within a language-is full of contradictions, because of the different grammars of language and life across cultures. The semantic field of the German verb “aussprechen” does not
Das Wesen ist in der Grammatik ausgesprochen [Essence/Being/Life is expressed in/by grammar].
