Abstract

The concept of a secret language dates back to the Indo-European era. Researchers dealing with the reconstruction of Indo-European poetic tradition compared the oldest literary texts and noticed two planes of discourse, which they called ”the language of men” and ”the language of gods.”. The language of men constitutes the lower level — the level of everyday conversation. The language of gods belongs to the sphere of formalised poetic statements. As Cavert Watkins puts it, in the archaic lexis there was an opposition between semantically unmarked expressions used every day and rarer, more ”weighty” phrases that were semantically marked. The principles of creating and distinguishing the language of gods from the language of men are very precise; a detailed analysis would not fit into the spatial constraints of the present article. In general terms, the polarity between the language of gods and the language of men consists in differentiating between the commonplace and the ancient or traditional, between ordinary poetic expressions and a higher poetry which may be described as prophetic, and finally, between the explicit and the vague and implicit.