Speech and speech disorders in Western thought before 1600

YNEZ VIOLE O'NEILL, Speech and speech disorders in Western thought before 1600, Westport, Conn., and London, Greenwood Press, 1980, 8vo, pp. xiii, 246, front., £12.95. The history of classical, medieval and renaissance linguistics is a burgeoning field, as can be seen, for example, in the pages of the journal Historiographia Linguistica. The present work claims to be the first attempt at a survey of the history of speech in traditional natural philosophy and medicine, though the author might have noted some earlier monographs such as those of Twistleton (1873), Holmes (1885), Panconcelli-Calzia (1942, 1943), and Semaan (1963).1 This new book was undertaken "as a test of the hypothesis that a coherent body of thought about speech and its impairments existed during the period from classical antiquity through the sixteenth century." (p. 9). The chapters are arranged in chronological order. Concentration is more on the neurological aspects of the subject than on the so-called functional disorders such as stuttering and lisping. Much attention is given to problems of terminology, and most of these observations are valuable (e.g. p. 23, criticizing the inconsistencies of Littre's French translation of Hippocrates). However, the conjectural derivation of Ugo Benzi's term altecha (p. 180) is incorrect. Altecha is actually a latinization of the Arabic adjective althagh,2 introduced by Gerard of Cremona in his translation of Avicenna's Canon.3 It describes malarticulation, especially of r or s. The frequent clarification of the scholarly apparatus for lay readers is commendable. Historians of medicine, even in esoteric areas, do well to remember that many potential readers are not themselves historians of medicine. The transliteration of Greek orthography, on the other hand, is rather careless, e.g. traulos is nearly always printed as traylos. (Granted upsilon alone normally becomes Roman y, as in psyche, nevertheless in diphthongs it is always u, as in auto, euphoria.) Furthermore, adjectives/substantives like anaudos, aphonos, balbus, are habitually used in this book as though they were abstract nouns. To say that someone "suffers from balbus" (p. 64) is grammatically equivalent to describing a mute as suffering from speechless. The appropriate abstract nouns are anaudia, aphonia, balbuties, etc.4 One might forbear mentioning such details were this not the first and only available survey of the subject. There is a strong smell of the lamp throughout parts of this book. Phrases like "Galen related in a work of dubious authenticity that . . ." (p. 61) remind one more of an Escher print or a Moebius strip than of any imaginable historical reality. More puzzling still, on p. 78 it is admitted that the lack of discussion of speech in Oribasius's medical compilation "may well have resulted from the vagaries of transmission"; yet immediately afterwards this lack is described as "a fascinating finding, and one that fits appropriately into the [history-of-ideas] sequence that we have been following." A bit too appropriately, one should think. On p. 89 this gossamer thread is stretched still further: "the theme that Oribasius had begun to sound ... had reached a crescendo." Oribasius again receives gratuitous credit on p. 77, for it was Galen, not he, who treated the rhetor afflicted with a voice impediment. Oribasius merely excerpted the, case. The distinction between language and speech is well established (pp. 5-6), but it is hardly correct to say that this distinction was generally "confused" during the period. Rather, the traditional theories were based on the concept of logos, or word (in a very broad sense),