Sacred languages were imagined as emanations of reality itself

Evidence

Yet if the sacred silent languages were the media through which the great global communities of the past were imagined, the reality of such apparitions depended on an idea largely foreign to the contemporary Western mind: the non-arbitrariness of the sign. The ideograms of Chinese, Latin, or Arabic were emanations of reality, not randomly fabricated representations of it. We are familiar with the long dispute over the appropriate language (Latin or vernacular) for the mass. In the Islamic tradition, until quite recently, the Qur’an was literally untranslatable (and therefore untranslated), because Allah’s truth was accessible only through the unsubstitutable true signs of written Arabic. There is no idea here of a world so separated from language that all languages are equidistant (and thus inter-changeable) signs for it. In effect, ontological reality is apprehensible only through a single, privileged system of re-presentation: the truth-language of Church Latin, Qur’anic Arabic, or Examination Chinese. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 64

Categorization

• XREF: Directly scaffolds the Islamophobia field’s understanding of how ‘truth-language’ claims shape the construction of religious/civilizational Others; the reader will carry this concept forward. — connects to: Modern philology emerged by secularizing language from divine to human origins; Pre-modern great communities imagined themselves via sacred script, not ethnicity — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 60; Language creates consciousness of self as separate from the environment. (+6 more)
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘non-arbitrariness of the sign’ as the load-bearing concept for pre-national sacred communities.

Related

• Pre-modern great communities imagined themselves via sacred script, not ethnicity (similarity 0.86)
• Sacred-languistic community imagined membership as alchemic absorption rather than adherence (similarity 0.85)
• Sacred-language communities absorbed outsiders through script mastery (similarity 0.84)
• Sacred written languages created pre-national communities out of signs, not sounds (similarity 0.83)
• Once languages lost divine status, their native speakers became their owners. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Sacred-languistic community imagined membership as alchemic absorption rather than adherence #expands (0.90) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 64
• Language enables meanings rather than passively carrying them #expands (0.85)
• Meaning arises from articulating linguistic systems rather than reflecting the world #corroborates (0.85)
• Language creates consciousness of self as separate from the environment. #expands (0.80)
• Positivist truths are linguistic illusions grown canonical through use #corroborates (0.80)