Manny’s Reviews > I See a Voice: Deafness, Language and the Senses--A Philosophical History > Status Update

European philosophers used to imagine that signing would be encouraged in the East, because of its supposed similarity to non-alphabetic scripts, but it would seem that there are no records of indigenous Eastern signing systems, and modern Chinese sign language appears to have been originated in schools set up by Western missionaries.

Pitman believed that his 'system of phonetic shorthand' would add 'a sevenfold celerity' to the practice of writing. The productivity of authors would be so much improved that they would be able, within the span of an ordinary lifetime, to write bodies of work that would otherwise have taken at least three hundred years to complete.

It has been supposed that speech is invested with a mysterious virtue, which makes it the natural and living expression of thought and feeling; appeal has been made to a few vague notions of Plato's about the relation between language and ideas; and the old equivocation, which enabled the word logos to refer both to speech and to reason, has been treated as if it embodied some profound truth.

I was just thinking that the dramatic story of the Abbé de l'Epée ought to be turned into a movie, and turning the page discovered that it was a play as early as 1799. Josephine Bonaparte may have attended a performance.

Leibniz liked the situation of the deaf to that of the Chinese, who, he thought, would have little to lose if they all became deaf and dumb: their speech was acknowledged to be impoverished and barely articulate, but their writing system compensated by being 'abundant, and independent of language'.

Newton's reason for preferring to find seven colours in the spectrum was that it helped clinch his analogy between light and sound. For if there were seven colours, ascending from Red to Violet, then they could be aligned with the seven notes of the ancient Greek musical scale - that is to say, the octave, which later became the basis of early Christian church music as well.