2 - Language

Summary

Language and the Fall

Aristotle (1994–2000b: II. 8) defined voice as produced by the impact of inspired air upon the windpipe, together with the use of lungs, tongue, and lips, whilst Galen viewed the vocal chords and aperture located in the anterior of the larynx as the most important instruments of the voice. At the same time, though, Aristotle stressed that it is the sound produced only by a creature possessing soul and Galen noted that the ancients did not call speech (aude in Greek) everything that fell upon the sense of hearing, nor that alone which is emitted from the mouth (which included the sigh, the hiss, the groan, the cough, and so on), but only the voice by means of which humans talk to each other and by which communication from one individual to another is brought into effect (Wollock 1997: 11). The notion that speech was not merely a sound but was the voice with which humans communicated was cemented by the seventh century. In Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, the two functions of speech (aude) and hearing (auditus) came to be inextricably linked:

Auditus appellatus, quod voces auriat; hoc est aere verberato suscipiat sonos. […] Aurium inditum nomen a vocibus auriendis […] per inmutationem enim litterae aures quasi audes nuncupatae sunt.

(1911: XI.i.22–XI.i.46)

In the same way that the organs of sight apprehended external data to be processed by the brain, human speech came to be understood in the early Middle Ages as being bound up with hearing, with receiving aural spirits or pneuma that travel forth, entering the sensus communis via the auditory channel. As such, a proper reasoning faculty – Thomas Aquinas’s ratio particularis – was more crucial to communication than the physical body, which was vulnerable to speech impediments such as paralysis, cramp of the tongue, ulcers, and humoural imbalances.