Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Ki ...

to, language. The preoccupation with the voice focused on its responsibility for creating the sounds that language then fashioned into sense. In this context, meaning, or the content of one's speech, takes precedence over the affects of vocalized sound. Speech descends from the Greek spharageisthai, which means “to crackle,” where in the Old High German it took on the division of spreche (language) and sprehhan (speech). In English today, speech refers to the spoken or written articulation of a language, and the equation of writing with vocalized language demotes any special nature the distinct sound of any one human voice may have on its auditors. Therefore, though related and even conflated, the three terms voice, language, and speech have specific traits and functions, which this book distinguishes throughout. One uses a voice in order to make speech, and speech entails the use of language, even though a language also can be written or signed and the voice also may be employed to make nonverbal sounds, like screaming and laughing.

The Eye and the Ear

That speech has been regarded as both spoken and written can be explained when we recognize that early written documents, besides ledgers, were meant to be read aloud to an audience.² Nonetheless, the continuing conflation of speech with writing in an age of silent reading alerts us to the issue of the value we place on our different senses. Arguably since Aristotle, who claimed that “sight is the principle source of knowledge,”³ but especially since the Enlightenment, philosophers and scientists have relied increasingly upon empirical methodologies that privilege optical forms of measurement and proof over forms appealing to the other senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Adriana Cavarero addresses the polarization of the senses in For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005),in which she explores how Western thought “privileges the semantic with respect to the vocal”⁴ and how it “rarely strains to hear the voice of the existent as unique.”⁵ The methodological prejudices imposed by writing and sight seem to lead philosophers of language and linguists to focus on the semiotic,