the being is held to be? What if propriation by its entry withdrew every present being that is subject to sheer orderability and brought that being back into its own?
Every language that human beings possess propriates in the saying. Every language is, as such, in the strict sense of the word, language proper, allowing for variations in the measure of its nearness to propriation. Every proper language, because it is allotted to human beings through the way-making movement of the saying, is sent, hence fateful.
There is no such thing as a natural language, a language that would be the language of a human nature at hand in itself and without its own destiny. Every language is historical, also in cases where human beings know nothing of the discipline of history in the modern European sense. Nor is language as information the sole language in itself. Rather, it is historical in the sense of, and written within the limits set by, the current age. Our age begins nothing new, but only brings to utter culmination something quite old, something already prescribed in modernity.
What is peculiar to language depends on the propriative provenance of the word; that is, on the provenance of human speech from the saying.
Let us at the end remember as we did at the outset these words of Novalis: "Precisely what is peculiar to language—that it concerns itself purely with itself alone—no one knows." Novalis understands the word peculiar in the sense of the particularity that makes language exceptional. Through the experience of the essence of language as the saying, a saying whose showing rests on propriation, what is peculiar [das Eigentümliche] comes into the proximity of owning [Eignen] and propriating [Ereignen]. There the peculiar receives its birth certificate, as it were; but this is not the place for us to think back to the primordial determination of such peculiarity.
The peculiar character of language, which is determined on the basis of propriation, lets itself be known even less than the particularity of language, if "knowing" means having by circumspection