Renan’s comparative philology encoded a racial binary of organic versus inorganic languages

Evidence

This anxiety on Renan’s part to convey the sense of a demonstration actually taking place is heightened when he remarks explicitly that whereas anatomy employs stable and visible signs by which to consign objects to classes, linguistics does not. Therefore the philologist must make a given linguistic fact correspond in some way to a historical period: hence the possibility of a classification. Yet, as Renan was often to say, linguistic temporality and history are full of lacunae, enormous discontinuities, hypothetical periods. Therefore linguistic events occur in a nonlinear and essentially discontinuous temporal dimension controlled by the linguist in a, very particular way. That way, as Renan’s whole treatise on the Semitic branch of the Oriental languages goes very far to show, is comparative: Indo-European is taken as the living, organic norm, and Semitic Oriental languages are seen comparatively to be inorganic. Time is transformed into the space of comparative classification, which at bottom is based on a rigid binary opposition between organic and inorganic languages. So on the one hand there is the organic, biologically generative process represented by Indo-European, while on the other there is an inorganic, essentially unregenerative process, ossified into Semitic: most important, Renan makes it absolutely clear that such an imperious judgment is made by the Oriental philologist in his laboratory, for distinctions of the kind he has been concerned with are neither possible nor available for anyone except the trained professional. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 371

Categorization

• XREF: This is a foundational mechanism for the Orientalism toolkit: the ‘organic/inorganic’ binary and the transformation of time into comparative space connects directly to Said’s later arguments about the Orientalist as author-hero and to how race-thinking (per Arendt) gains pseudo-scientific legitimacy.
• DEFINE: Establishes the core move: comparative philology turns temporal linearity into spatial classificatory binaries, with the trained philologist as the sole authorized judge.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 371