B495 <=> B497 [BTG XXX Art, p. 496]

“So instead of the said expression Orpheist they just invented the word artist, which had to mean ‘he-who-is-occupied-with-art.’

“In order better to represent to yourself all the causes subsequently arising also from that misunderstanding there, you must first of all know that before the second terrestrial Transapalnian catastrophe, when these favorites of yours still arose and prepared themselves normally for responsible existence, they, by means of intentionally producing from themselves corresponding consonants for their what is called ‘speech,’ that is for mutual intercourse, had and could pronounce – also like all the three-brained beings of all the Great Universe – consonants up to three hundred and fifty-one definite what are called ‘letters.’

“But later on, when thanks as always to the same conditions of ordinary being-existence abnormally established by themselves, every kind of property proper to the presences of three-brained beings gradually deteriorated, this ‘being-ableness’ also deteriorated in them and at such a tempo that whereas the beings of the Babylonian period could use for conversation among themselves only seventy-seven definite consonants, the deterioration continued at such a tempo after the Babylonian period, that five centuries later, the beings there could use at most only thirty-six definite ‘letters,’ and the beings of certain communities could not reproduce even this number of separate articulate sounds.

“So, my boy, as the information concerning the Babylonian period passed from generation to generation to the succeeding generations not only by means of what is called ‘verbal transmission,’ but still also by means of marks on durable materials, that is, as it would be expressed there, by means of ‘inscriptions’ consisting of conventional signs which then stood for definite ‘being-articulate-sounds’ or letters – then, when at the beginning of the contemporary civilization certain beings there began to decipher them ‘from-a-bit-here-and-a-bit-there’ and realized that they could not sound or pronounce many of these definite letters, they then invented what is called a ‘written compromise.’