Spengler and morphology

While Spengler is better known for his efforts (in Decline of the West) to establish a historical morphology of cultures, he also briefly branches out there into linguistic historical morphology:

Instead of sum, Gothic im, we say ich bin, I am, je suis; instead of fecisti, we say tu habes factum, tu as fait, du habes gitân, and again, daz wîp, un homme, man hat. This has hitherto been a riddle because families of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is solved when we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The Faustian soul is here beginning to remould for its own use grammatical material of the most varied provenance. The coming of this specific ‘‘I’’ is the first dawning of that personality-idea which was so much later to create the sacrament of Contrition and personal absolution. This “ego habeo factum,” the insertion of the auxiliaries ‘‘have’’ and ‘‘be’’ between a doer and a deed, in lieu of the "feci" which expresses activated body, replaces the world of bodies by one of functions between centres of force, the static syntax by a dynamic. And this “I” and “Thou” is the key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic portrait is the type of an attitude — a confession it is not, either to the creator of it or to the understanding spectator. But our portraits depict something sui generis, once occurring and never recurring, a life-history expressed in a moment, a world-centre for which everything else is world-around, exactly as the grammatical subject ‘‘I’’ becomes the centre of force in the Faustian sentence. (Atkinson translation, 1926, pp. 262-3)

A linguist - or a scientist - is not particularly well-positioned to judge airy intuitions about "the dawn of a new life-feeling" or the emergence of a "Faustian soul"; how would one even go about testing such claims rigorously? But the emergence of forms like these is rather better studied. On a world scale, there is nothing unusual about fecisti - plenty of languages collapse the subject pronoun, tense/aspect/mood, and the verb into a single word. In fact, a good 70% of languages in Siewierska's WALS survey mark subject agreement on the verb one way or another. Nor is their completely analytic separation all that rare (22% of the same sample). However, Siewierska's work reveals that there really is something unusual about a form like ich bin, where the independent pronoun is obligatory yet the verb still agrees with it:

My cross-linguistic investigations of verbal person markers reveal that person markers which require the presence of accompanying independent nominals or pronominals are very rare. In a sample of 272 languages I found only two such markers, in Dutch and Vanimo, a New Guinea language of the Sko family. The only other languages that I have come across which display such markers are: English, German, Icelandic, Faroese, some Rhaeto-Romance dialects, Standard French and perhaps Labu, an Austronesian language of New Guinea, and Anejom a language of Vanatu. (Siewierska 2001:219

Perfect marking based on "have" also turns out to be a European feature with almost no parallels elsewhere, as shown by Dahl and Velupillai's WALS chapter on the perfect; they emerged and spread there only in the Middle Ages as an areal innovation. (Bridget Drinka has worked on this question in more detail.)

For Spenglerians, then, these two would at first sight seem to be very promising features to focus on - two globally very rare features, known to have emerged in Europe only after the fall of the Roman Empire, equally innovative in Romance and Germanic and prominent in both. However, there are naturally a couple of hitches.

Person marking requiring independent pronominals is essentially a North Sea feature; though found in French, it never made it far enough south to be shared by Italian and Spanish. Given the prominent role of Italy in Spengler's account of the emergence of Faustian culture, a Spenglerian would presumably be forced to dismiss this feature or to find some workaround. If he retained it, the obvious next task would be interesting: to examine the scattering of South Pacific languages which share this feature and see if their speakers' attitudes to the ego (?) show any relevant parallels to Western European ones.

Perfect marking with "have" shows a better match with the hypothesised Faustian culture-area - but extends a little beyond it, to Albania and to some extent Greece. (Indeed, even Algerian Arabic shows a rather marginal possessive perfect construction.) This presumably reflects Romance influence on these languages in the context of Western Europe's rise to power in the Mediterranean, though one wonders why nothing similar happened outside the Mediterranean. Not a problem for a historical linguist; but would a Spenglerian be forced to take this as evidence for a change in ego-conceptions in those regions, and seek corroboration for it in literature and painting?