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Title: The Origin of Speech by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy ISBN: 0-912148-13-6 Publisher: Argo Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1981 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $15.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Origin of Speech
Comment: "What is the origin of speech?" is a perennial and unanswerable question. In this book, Rosenstock-Huessy uses this riddle as a starting point for an inquiry into the essential features of human speech that people in modern times have tended to disfavor or take for granted. Counter to the intuitions of modern personalism, Rosenstock-Huessy says that real speech, speech capable of transforming lives, must have been in its origin, and still today, formal speech whereby strangers can be assembled, oriented, and sent forth in trust to pool their energies to create durable order and remarkable change. Intimate chitchat and everyday common sense, argues Rosenstock-Huessy, can be nothing more than the residue left behind by formal speaking and the "uncommon sense" of political agreements and multi-generational social projects.
"The Origin of Speech" declares that human beings require rituals and tangible signs that they live in an orderly universe over which they possess some control. In the process of exerting power through speech, people invariably create both the past and the future as the locations of society's hopes and fears. Ominously, Rosenstock-Huessy points out that the modern mentality has consistently preferred the informal to the formal, the abstract to the ritualistic, and numerical impartiality to personal address, and hence has forfeited the sources of a "grammatically healthy" community.
"The Origin of Speech" is Rosenstock-Huessy's longest sustained essay currently available in English on the subject of speech. Communication scholars and linguists concur: no other writer has approached the problem of formality in language with the fresh insights to be found in "The Origin of Speech."
"Origin of Speech" can also be ordered from Argo Books (www.argobooks.org), as can all the rest of Rosenstock-Huessy's English language works, including many of the lectures he gave on these topics. The lectures alone comprise more than 5000 pages of spontaneous comments he made to students from 1949 to 1968.

Rating: 5
Summary: Boring title, absorbing thoughts, and lingering questions
Comment: Ravenstock-Huessy was an unknown name that I happened to come across when studying educational reform. But no matter what the field, the insights the author provides an awareness of how humans use language and relate to others through their speech. His sagacious comments, delightfully peppered throughout his writing, caused me to pause and reflect many times on how people communciate. He is a linguist, philosopher, psychologist, politician and sociologist at the same time. He addresses such issues as the four diseases of speech- war, crisis, revolution and decay- and helped me think about how current world tensions simply violate the formal speech roles and opt for chaos and conflict. Speech versus reflection and authentic speech, grammar and rituals, questions and answers, gender and the speech of mankind are some of the arenas he gets into. This book caused me to pursue his other works and I am now into my second book, Speech and Reality. W. H. Auden wrote of him saying that "...anyone reading him for the first time...may find as I did, certain aspects of Rosenstock's Huessy's writing a bit hard to takebut let the reader perservere and he will find , as I did, that he is richly rewarded.

This is a readable philosophical book about language. But don't let that throw you; the author (I wish he had a shorter name) puts the cookies on the table and they are enjoyable. Please read it if you have a half a notion to understand human speech. Reading this books pays relational dividends. It caused me to reflect more on how I talk than any other book I have read in the last ten years.