Course: The First Three Years of the Child
Walking, Speaking, ThinkingLesson 3Introduction
This course is based on the work of Karl König, MD, and covers the developmental phases of early childhood with a focus on the first three years and the unfolding of the child's ability to walk, learn to speak, and the awakening of thinking based on the prior acquirement of speaking.
Rudolf Steiner called them the spiritual gifts: walking, speaking, and thinking. These gifts make it possible for the human being to ultimately become what he or she is, a unique being endowed with cognition and the quest for one's own self. These gifts form the foundation for the development of the three highest human senses, the sense of speech, the sense of thought and the sense of ego. It is only when these senses are recognized to be the result of the development of walking, speaking and thinking that a true understanding of the awakening of the human being's spirit during the first three years of life can be gained. |
Course Outline
Lesson 1: Introduction
Lesson 2: Acquisition of the Ability to Walk Upright Lesson 3: Learning One's Native Language Lesson 4: The Awakening of Thinking Lesson 5: The Unfolding of the Three Highest Senses Lesson 6: Reflection and Final Paper 
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Karl König - A Short BiographyDr. Karl König was born on the 25th of September 1902 in Vienna, Austria and died on the 27th of March 1966 in Überlingen at the Lake of Constance in Germany. Early in his life he developed a strong relationship to the values of Christianity and to questions regarding the issues of social life.
Karl König studied zoology, biology and medicine in Vienna. During this time he struggled with questions regarding the evolution of life. It was the encounter with Goethe's work on natural science, Goethe's approach and methods, that gave him the direction for finding answers. He published the results of his first research about the effects of homeopathic substances during the time as an assistant at the Vienna Institute for Embryology. |
Dr. Karl König and unknown child
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Soon König got to know followers of Rudolf Steiner, and during the first encounter with Ita Wegman she asked him to work as an assistant at the "Klinisch-therapeutische Institut" in Arlesheim in Switzerland. The co-founder of the institute was Rudolf Steiner. It was also in Arlesheim where he started to give numerous lectures and courses, rich in content and covering a great variety of topics. As we can read in his 'Autobiographic Fragment' the roots of his deep inner connection and relationship to children with special needs are to be found here in Arlesheim. A lecturing journey to Silesia lead to the marriage with Tilla (Maasberg) and his deep connection with the social and religious impulses of the "Herrnhut" brotherhood where she originated. Because of his Jewish descent he had to give up his work as general practitioner and in the institute of Pilgramshain, which he had just founded with Albrecht Strohschein and which was one of the first curative educational centers based on Anthroposophy. Also the "School for Social Work", founded by Emil Bock and himself in Eisenach in 1932, could not be continued. In 1936 he fled via Prague back to Vienna where he restarted his medical practice. Already in 1938 he was as successful with his work as in Silesia. During this period he lead an anthroposophical study group with young people, many of them Jewish. Together with this group he soon had to flee again. They reached Scotland by different ways. The old "Camphill" estate, a former hiding place of the last knights of the "Order of the Temple" became the place of origin for a community based on curative education, which then developed during the postwar years as the "Camphill Movement" and over time spread to many countries all over the world. For Karl König the foundation of such a community was an attempt to realize suggestions Rudolf Steiner had made for for social life based on insights into spiritual reality. For König it was an endeavor to take up anew the true and deeper tasks that had been hindered by the destruction of Central Europe. In 1966 Karl König died in Überlingen near to the communities he had founded at the Lake of Constance. Tireless work and effort to help children, adolescents and adults with special needs in practical, therapeutic and educational life, through publications, talks and seminars, had become more and more the central content of his life.
Karl König's Meeting with Ita WegmannIn the year 1927, a number of biographical paths cross in a significant way. Karl König, who had graduated as a medical doctor in April that year, had wished to visit Arlesheim and meet Ita Wegman. But Ita Wegman was not encouraging as there were already other visiting doctors at the Clinic. Help came from an unexpected quarter. Rudolf Steiner’s sister, Leopoldine, died in Horn, north-west of Vienna, on 1 November 1927. Ita Wegman traveled to the funeral, and Karl König was asked to be one of those who met
her. That was why he stood on the platform
of a railway station in Vienna and
waited for the train.
Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) had two
younger siblings, Leopoldine (1864–
1927) and Gustav (1866–1941). Gustav
was born deaf and needed care throughout
his life. Leopoldine became a seamstress,
living with her parents until they
died, then looking after her brother until
she herself began to loose her sight.
Leopoldine Steiner’s funeral was
held on 3 November 1927. Ita Wegman
traveled by train from Arlesheim to Vienna.
She will have heard of the death
shortly after Leopoldine Steiner died
but it is unlikely that she would have
traveled so far already the same day.
Karl König writes that Ita Wegman
arrived late in the evening in Vienna,
which rules out her traveling on the
day of the funeral. So it is most probable
that Karl König met Ita Wegman
for the first time on Wednesday
2 November 1927.
That Ita Wegman really did attend
Leopoldine Steiner’s funeral is confirmed
by an anecdote illustrating
her concern for Gustav Steiner that
day:
Doctor Ita Wegman attended Poldi’s
[Leopoldine’s] funeral in the rôle
of member of the Vorstand at the
Goetheanum. Mrs Wegman wished
that Mrs Karner would ‘straight afterwards
do something joyful with
the bereaved Gustav.’ Mrs Karner
took him to visit places of his childhood:
Pottschach and Neudörfl (in
Burgenland) which pleased Gustav
greatly. (Wolfgang Vögele: Von
Wien nach Zürich p. 15). A few days after their first meeting
Ita Wegman and Karl König had a
conversation: I felt quite at ease when I sat opposite
her and she asked me a few questions
about my life and work, and then
suggested that I join her Clinic in Arlesheim.
(HM-W p. 65)
Karl König was astonished that she suggested
he come to Arlesheim a few weeks
later. Despite his protests—he wished to
finish his clinical year in Vienna—they
agreed to her suggestion. Destiny spoke
very strongly, because Karl König arrived
in Arlesheim on the same day as
Mathilde (‘Tilla’) Elisabeth Maasberg.
They stayed at the same house, became
friends and married one and a half years
later, on 5 May 1929.
In February 1943 a conference was
held in Camphill to mark the moon node
from when Rudolf Steiner had held the
‘Curative course’, Tilla König told how
Pilgramshain was created and of her
meeting with Karl König. Here from the
notes of her lecture:
In November I went to Arlesheim
(19.11.1927). I had to look for a little
room because we had no money. In the
same house and on the same day Dr. K.
came from Vienna.
Peter Selg, in his excellent book Ita Wegman
and Karl König, Letters and Documents
bases his dating of Karl König’s arrival
in Arlesheim on what König himself
wrote, which was November 7, 1927:
Whether Karl König was mistaken
about the date of his start at the Arlesheim
clinic when writing later is not
known.
As Karl König’s diary from the year 1927
no longer exists, we have to rely on other
sources and live with the unclarity. But
the available evidence does suggest a later
date than 7 November for Karl König’s arrival in Arlesheim. Circumstances
seem to indicate that Tilla had noted
the correct date. Assuming that König
met Ita Wegman on that 3rd November,
then the 19th would have been ‘a few
weeks later,’ which is the expression he
used himself. And just on this same day
as Karl König and Tilla Maasberg most
probably met, Saturday 19 November
1927, the Act of Consecration of Man for
one who has died was held in Vienna for
Leopoldine Steiner. The day after, Sunday
20 November 1927 was the first ordinary
celebration of the Act of Consecration of
Man and a week later, on Sunday 27 November
1927, the Christian Community
congregation was inaugurated in Vienna
with the first official celebration of the
Act of Consecration of Man.
Eight days after Tilla Maasberg, and
most probably Karl König, arrived in Arlesheim,
was the first Advent Sunday, 27
November 1927, and the Advent Garden
was held in the Sonnenhof in Arlesheim.
Karl König experienced the Advent Garden
for the first time, and thereby found his life’s task. This well-known description
is to be found in the biography by
Hans Müller-Wiedemann (p.68):
It was a profoundly moving sight for
me to see how each individual child
endeavoured to carry out this task with
joy and earnestness. There stood the
large candle! The small candles fixed to
the apples, symbols of the Fall, were to
be lit at this light of Christmas tidings!
And suddenly I knew: ‘Yes, this is my
future task!’ So to awaken the spiritual
light inherent in each one of these children
that it will lead them to their true
humanity—that is what I want to do!’
Leopoldine Steiner had lived a quiet life
as a seamstress. In a special way she was
the good spirit whose death gave the opportunity
for Karl König and Ita Wegman
to meet, so being instrumental in
the process that led to the founding of
Camphill. But it is also important to note
that the first of the three inaugural celebrations
of the Act of Consecration of
Man was celebrated for her when The
Christian Community started its work in
Vienna and thereby she was also, in an
inner way, involved in this event.
References: Hans Müller-Wiedemann: Karl König—A Central-European Biography of the Twentieth Century. Translated by Simon Blaxford-de Lange, Camphill Books 1996. Peter Selg, Ita Wegman and Karl König. Letters and Documents. Floris Books 2008. Das Werden einer Christengemeinschaft. Zum 70-jährigen Bestehen der Christengemeinschaft in Österreich. Wien 1997. Von Wien nach Zürich, Erinnerungen von Gertrud Schmied-Hamburger, zusammengestellt von Wolfgang G. Vögele. Birkenblatt Sonderheft 2012 (Alters- und Pflegeheim Birkenrain, Bellariastrasse 21, 8002 Zürich) 
Karl König, MD
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Child Development and Developmental TheoriesWhat we know about child development is rooted in developmental theories. Over the years, psychologists and other scientists have developed a variety of theories to explain observations and discoveries about child development. Below please find an attempt at summarizing some of them below.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Freud believed that the way parents dealt with their child’s basic sexual and aggressive desires would determine how the child’s personality developed. Freud also thought that all babies were born with instinctive selfish urges which he labeled the “Id”. As a child experienced that not all his or her whims were met, he or she developed a more realistic appreciation of what is realistic and possible, which Freud called the “Ego”. Over time, Freud believed, babies learn values or morals, which he called the “Super-Ego”. The Super Ego, he thought, then worked with the Ego to control the selfish urges of the Id. Erik Erikson (1902-1994) Erikson believed that personality develops in a series of stages. In each stage, Erikson believed children experience conflicts that affect development. He believed these conflicts are based on either developing a psychological quality, or failing to develop that quality. During these times, the potential for success and development is high, but so is the potential for failure. Below are Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages that occur during childhood and adolescence, and a brief summary for each:
Jean Piaget (1896-1990) Piaget believed that early cognitive development occurs through a process where actions prompt thought processes, which influence the actions the next time around. He talked about Schemas which describe both the mental and physical actions involved in interpreting and understanding the world. New information acquired through an experience is used to modify, add to, or change previously existing schemas. He believed cognitive development follows a fixed process of four stages that are the same for all children, though they may arrive at each stage sooner or later than their peers. His first stage is Sensori-Motor (0 – 2 years); in this stage, the child is learning about the world around him through his senses. This is the stage, Piaget said, where infants learn about object permanence, that a person or object still exists, even if the infant cannot see it. The second stage is the Preoperational Stage (2 – 7 years); in this stage, the child sees his world as if it revolved around, and for, him. Piaget’s third stage is the Concrete Operational Stage (7 – 11 years); though not yet able to think in the abstract, children in this stage are starting to mentally solve problems, develop concepts such as numbers, and are getting better at understanding and following rules. Piaget’s final stage is the Formal Operations Stage (11 years and up); in this stage, the child is able to think, not just in terms of the concrete, but also in the abstract. He is now able to hypothesize and see his world as it could be, not just as it is. Piaget tells us that children learn differently than adults because they do not yet have the experiences and interactions needed to interpret information. Especially as infants, children are constantly gathering information though their senses. They learn about their world by watching, grasping, mouthing and listening. They learn to avoid danger for example, not by reading a caution sign, but by experiencing ‘hot’ or falling from a the chair they just climbed up on. But, it is not just activities and sensory experiences that help children to develop; they also learn through interactions with adults and their peers. Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917-2005) Urie Bronfenbrenner developed the Ecological Systems theory to explain how a child’s environment influences a child’s development. In his model, there is a hierarchy of influence levels. He puts the child, who comes with his own temperament and conditions, in the middle, or Micro System. The nuclear family, or Meso System, has the greatest influence on a child’s emotional development since, hopefully, his first attachment is to his mother or other primary caregiver. The community a child lives in and the school(s) he attends, the Exo System, also have a substantial amount of influence on his social emotional development; in particular, the early childhood program he attends, and the relationships he establishes with his teacher or provider. Bronfenbrenner’s Macros System, or society, which includes culture, government and public policies, comes next. The final system, the Chrono System includes transitions such as moving, changing schools, divorce and other life changes that can effect a child’s social emotional development. Arnold Gesell (1880 – 1961) By studying thousands of children over many years, Gesell came up with “milestones of development” – stages by which normal children typically accomplish different tasks. These are still used today. Gesell’s most notable achievement was his contribution to the “normative” approach to studying children. In this approach, psychologists observed large numbers of children of various ages and determined the typical age, or “norms,” for which most children achieved various developmental milestones. B.F.Skinner (1904 – 1990) Skinner coined the term operant conditioning and believed children’s behavior and learning can be shaped by providing rewards and punishment. Alfred Bandura (1925 – ) Bandura believed that children can learn new information and behaviors by watching, or observing, other people. This was referred to as the social learning theory. Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934) Vygotsky believed in the sociocultural theory – that children learn actively and through hands-on experiences, and that parents and caregivers and peers have a role in a child’s development. Children, he said, learn best when new information is scaffolded for them. He called the area of cognitive development, from where a child starts out to where he could get to with scaffolding, the Zone of Proximal Development. John Bowlby (1907 – 1990) John Bowbly is thought to be the first to introduce the attachment theory. He believed that early relationships with caregivers play a major role in child development, and continue to influence social relationships throughout life. If an infant’s parent or caregiver is consistently dependable, the child will develop an attachment, or bond, with his or her parent or caregiver, and will feel secure enough to explore the world around him. |
Tasks and Assignments for The First Three Years Lesson 3
Please study chapter 2 (Learning One's Native Language) of The First Three Years of the Child by Karl König. (See below). Once you feel you are sufficiently acquainted with the study material please complete the following:
1. Create a summary of the chapter in your own words. 2. Comment on the study material. 3. König speaks of three members of language: Saying, Naming, Talking. Explain this in your own words and give examples. 4. Create three sets of poetry. In set 1 use only saying words, in set 2 naming words and in set 3 talking words. Submit the completed assignment via the submission form or via email. 
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The First Three Years of the Child
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Chapter 2: Learning One's Native Language
Speech as expression, naming and speaking
After the child has become able to raise himself to an erect position and acquires free mobility in space, the second step in becoming man follows. He learns to speak and use his native language. This is an especially impressive acquisition and only in recent decades have child psychologists paid deserving attention to its importance. By the time the child learns to speak his native language by conquering words and word connections, he has taken a most important step on the path toward becoming a human Being. The tremendous gulf separating the human being and the animal is also indicated here. Portmann is fully justified in saying, 'Therefore, we must point emphatically to the fact that human speech in word as well as gesture, both of which rest on the principle of communication through signs, is something totally different from all animal sounds.' (1)
Those animal sounds when made by man are also only sound. Cries, screams, moans or other sounds expressing the woes and joys of existence are not speech. Speech is not merely expression, but naming. One of the roots of speech is to be found in the fact that through it names are given to the world and its manifestations.
In the First Book of Moses you can read,
So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. And the man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. (Gen. 2:19f).
The giving of names is directly connected with the creation of Eve. With whom, after all, should man speak if not with his own kind? He can give names to the animals. He can name things and beings, but who is to answer when he begins to ask? The word spoken into space remains without an answer, is shattered and blown away. It dies, and dumbness follows.
These brief remarks hint at the soul qualities that form speech and speaking. Only a small part of speech is an expression of human existence and feeling, and as such it is still intimately connected with man's animal nature. When, however, through speech, sounds are raised out of this sphere and the tones humanized, speech then becomes the servant of the word. The sounding tone unites with the power of speech and thus the names of things can be pronounced. It is speech itself working through man that calls things by name.
This, however, is not all. Naming is only the statement of fact. Speech strives for something more; it aims at finding a connection with itself. Speech wants to come to terms with the word that is heard in order to understand what it has heard, to answer the question received, to demand answers from out of its own questioning. Therefore, God gives Adam his Eve because only when man experiences himself through speech in another human being does he become aware of himself.
Speech can now be said to unfold in the human being in a threefold manner:
As an expression of what lives in the soul as animality.
As an expression of the ability to name all things of this world. Thus, the names of things and beings sound forth.
As an expression of the power that tries to meet itself in speaking. Speech thereby gradually comes to terms with itself.
Man is connected with this threefold expression of speech through his whole being. At first, however, he is not the one who speaks, but the one through whom speech sounds and expresses itself. For this it needs its own tools and these are created in man by speech itself. The immature man represents an undeveloped natural condition in which speech becomes active in such a way that it is able to become manifest. Even as the artist creates tools from the substances of nature by means of which he fashions his work, so speech takes man as the natural substance and creates out of him its own work of art. Thus, man ultimately appears as image because through the speech with which he has been endowed, he can become manifest as self. He can sound through it (personare) as personality and communicate with, or impart himself to other human beings.
It was a rather childish agnosticism that imagined and also tried to prove that the organs of speech were no more than the larynx with which, when speaking, some small parts of the cerebral cortex are connected, and that these are the essential elements through which man begins to prattle. Today we know that it is the whole of man who speaks. As physical, soul and spirit being he takes part in the formation of speech and in speaking expresses himself as personality. Rudolf Steiner has described it in the following way:
It is in the form of the larynx and all that is connected with it that makes us man ... All the rest of the human form, down to the smallest details, has been so formed and plastically moulded that at the present stage man is, so to speak, a further elaboration of his organs of speech. The organs of speech are fundamental to the human form. (2)
What are these instruments of human speech, whose further formation and metamorphosis man himself seems to be?
The anatomy of the organs of speech
The larynx, the centre of the organs of speech, is the intricately formed, central part of a pipe through which the breath streams in and out. This pipe, which widens and branches out downward as well as upward, is called the trachea or windpipe. Air passes down through the windpipe, then through the two large bronchi that enter the right and left lobes of the lungs. As these tubes penetrate the lungs further, they continue to divide dichotomously, growing smaller and smaller, multiplying over and over again. The final configuration, rightly called "bronchial tree, is formed like the trunk of a tree that divides into two main branches. These divide further into smaller ones, finally forming twigs and ever smaller twigs. The only difference between the trunk of this tree and that of an ordinary one is that its roots are in the larynx and its branches grow downward. Thus, this bronchial tree is upside-down compared to natural trees.
Just as each twig of a tree terminates in a leaf, so each of the innumerable bronchiole terminates in an alveolus, a small cell into which the inhaled air streams. There the air meets indirectly the blood that flows around the walls of the alveolus. The inhaled air, changed through this meeting, streams back in exhalation and passes once more through the larynx on its way out. While being breathed out the air gives service to speech. The laryngeal muscles rhythmically move the parts of the larynx, creating a thickening and thinning of the out streaming air, which forms the pliable basic substance needed for the formation of tone and sound.
The pipe around which the larynx is formed also continues upward as the pharynx, or throat, that opens into the oral and nasal cavities. From the throat, two small Eustachian tubes lead backward to the middle ear to connect indirectly with the air vesicles of the temporal bone lying behind.
The mouth, including teeth, lips, tongue, cheeks and palate, is the sculptor of the sounds of speech. It moulds the air prepared by the larynx to form labial, palatal, dental and lingual sounds, and can cause the prepared air to be aspirated or forced, vibrated or nasalized. From these various combinations the consonants are formed.
The nasal cavity acts as a resonator. It also regulates the amount of air needed.
The Eustachian tubes leading to the middle ear create an intimate connection between speaking and hearing that should not be overlooked.
To arrive at a real and concrete picture of this structure, we would have to say: Proceeding downward, the trunk of the windpipe opens into the two large bronchi. These then continually divide and finally become the innumerable air cells, or alveoli, of the lungs. The alveoli, like tender organs of touch, meet the expanding plane of the surrounding blood. So it is that in the lungs the air of the speech organs experiences the touch of the flowing blood. Like so many thousands of little feet, the alveoli touch the surface of the blood, feel its strength or weakness, its speed or hesitancy. They are thus a vastly extended organ of touch that experiences the nature of the blood and reacts accordingly. It is for this reason that we can speak only with great effort when the blood flows too fast and fitfully through bodily over-exertion. Then these organs of touch are swept into the rushing current of the bloodstream and are lost in it. When, on the other hand, the blood flows too slowly, as can happen in some illnesses or in individuals who are sluggish by nature, the connection between these organs of touch and the bloodstream will not be intimate enough and, for lack of strength, speech will be wrested from the chest only with difficulty. Let us keep in mind, therefore, that downward it is the course of the blood that has a determining influence on speech.
Upward, however, the two Eustachian tubes spread out like arms and with their hand-like ends reach into the vicinity of the ear. There they hold on, grasping the ear so that hearing and speaking, address and rejoinder, can come about in immediate cooperation. In the middle ear the air organism touches the membrane of the eardrum like a hand. The membrane of the so-called circular window leading into the mysterious cavity of the inner ear is also touched. In this way the touching hand of the upper air organism is connected with the inner as well as the outer ear because, while the circular window leads into the cochlea of the ear capsule, the eardrum represents the boundary to the outer acoustic duct.
The mysterious cell where the names of things and beings are hidden is found only in the inner ear. There the eternal ideas out of which all being and becoming is formed touch the earthly realm of the human organism and pronounce their true names. The air of the speech organism extends up to it like a hand reaching for the word inscribed in all things and beings.
The speech organism reaches above into the region of the ear and thus connects the streaming of the blood with the apprehension of names. It is in this way that the act of hearing comes about for names and words. The air organism exists not only for speaking, but also for hearing, and it intimately entwines both faculties. In the region of the mouth and nose the organs of speech have their workshop where they actively form speech. The speech organism rests on the blood, hears in the ear, and works in the mouth and nose cavities. Its centre, however, is the larynx, balancing above and below like a heart, harmonizing and uniting the tendency to fall apart or to collapse upon each other. This is only possible because the larynx is not a rigid tube but a complicated joint that is kept in continual movement by a definite number of muscles. From above and below, from front and back, muscles pass to the larynx, unite with its parts and make it into a distinct organ of the motor system. In this way speaking becomes a motor act for expression. As already emphasized in the first chapter of this book, every muscle movement calls for the participation of the entire voluntary muscular system and this holds true also for the motor nature of speech. It is completely built into the activity of the whole motor system, is part of it and cannot function without it.
Gehlen has clearly pointed to this fact. He says,
If, with Karl Bühler, one considers presentation only as one of the achievements of speech related to expression and communication, one widens the standpoint quite correctly into the sociological, but one still tends to overlook the motor side, which after all also belongs to speech. Regarded from this standpoint, speech utterances are first and foremost movements that can well be transformed into other kinds of movement. These are made use of in the education of the deaf and dumb. (3)
The whole organism of movement is characterized as the necessary foundation of all speech. This in turn presupposes an indirect inclusion of the peripheral and central nervous systems. Thus, the extremely complicated ramification of the whole process of speaking becomes evident. The organs of speech stand like a central formation within the human organism. While they are determined by it, they certainly determine it as well. The air moved in breathing is their basic substance. It touches the blood below and comes into intimate contact with the ear above. The muscular systems of larynx, throat, and mouth, as part of the complete motor apparatus, become the builders of both the substance and the form of speech.
The life of the speech organism begins at the moment of birth. The beginning has been made when the air current is drawn into the body and tone formation is accomplished with the first cry. During the embryonic period, this speech organism was at rest, being built up and formed, but at birth its activity begins, enabling the child gradually to learn speech as well as speaking.
Saying, naming, talking - three aspects
Before we describe the successive stages of acquiring speech, a few brief but fundamental explanations of terminology must be made. We pointed out in the first section of this chapter that speech itself desires to come into contact with, and to speak to, itself, that the names of things emanate from speech. Speech gives the names. We should, therefore, assign more importance to speech as a being in itself than is usually done.
We are too easily inclined to say to other people, especially if they are children, 'Think first before you speak.' But who really does this? Do we not often become aware of what we actually mean only after we have spoken? The philologist, Jespersen, repeatedly referred to the remark of the little girl who said, 'Please let me speak so that I know what I think.' How right this child was! A large part of our speaking is like a conversation we hold with our thinking. But we also converse in this way with others, and it is often this very moment of surprise at our own remarks that gives enchantment to a conversation.
I do not mean to say with this that the expression, 'I speak' is not true. I speak, indeed, but by no means do I need to think first in order to say what I mean. In speech the ego as individuality lives not only in the realm of the waking consciousness, where thinking is accomplished, but also in the realm of dream consciousness out of which it speaks. (4)
Even as a movement becomes perceptible only after each of its parts as well as the whole have been completed, so too speech becomes fully conscious only after it has been spoken. In most cases it is true that 'I' agree with what I have said, but in cases of mistakes, and especially in pathological conditions, speech becomes a self-existent entity that often, to the horror of the speaker, seems to rise from unknown depths. Here lies one of the roots of stuttering and stammering.
'It speaks' and 'I speak', are both true. Speech is an entity independent of me, which follows its own modalities and laws, has its own reasoning, is active by itself, and expresses itself in speaking, dwelling within me like the breath that comes and goes. It is an entity that seizes my motor organism and lifts it into the realm of the speech organs, wedding it to the air. It is an entity that also rests on the stream of my blood and reaches up to my ear. It is interwoven with me and yet is something different from what I, myself, am.
I speak the speech. That is the primary given fact, but thereby I express myself, my wishes and feelings, my hidden inclinations, my desires and my presentiments. All this is contained in the words, 'To say.’ I, myself, say what I am by means of speech.
Speech expresses itself in speaking. This is the second function of speaking. Here speech lives in its own realm. It deciphers the eternal and temporal names of things and beings, and in this way man learns to know their names. It is not I who call things by name. In reality, I have been given speech and thus names are revealed to me. I can pronounce and also understand them. All this is contained in the words, 'To name.’ Things and beings are named in the realm of speech and I am allowed to take part in it.
Speech expresses me in speaking. It lets me understand other speakers and turns me toward them. Thus, speech can come to terms with itself and with thinking. Speech is a social structure through which the wall between ego and ego can be bridged, even though often only seemingly. Conversation, talk, exchange of thoughts, all have their home here. This is expressed in the words, 'To talk'. Speech builds the bridges of talking across which I can reach the other ego.
What Karl Bühler characterizes in a primitive, one-sided way as statement, influence and presentation has its correct application here. (5) Statement is contained in saying, presentation in naming and influence in talking. Speaking encompasses all three, and speech itself is even wider and greater than speaking. Speaking is only the active side of speech, which also has a passive side - hearing. Just as speech can speak, so can it also hear the spoken word, the statement. It can hear itself in me, as well as in others insofar as they are speaking. Therefore, the tool, the speech organism, reaches up into the ear where it participates in hearing.
Thus, speech has two sides: The motor side, speaking, and the sensory side, hearing. Both must work together in unison so that speech itself can become manifest. Usually, when a child is born deaf, the child is not really deaf but his speech has not reached the sensory region. Something similar can occur in the motor area of speech. In any case, speech should be recognized as something comprehensive, embracing these two functions. At the same time, it should also be seen as something self-existent.
Schematically this can be illustrated in the following way:
Speech
Hearing of names (sensory)
Hearing of speech (Sensory)
Speaking in saying (Motor)
Speaking in naming (Motor)
Speaking in talking (Motor)
With this introduction we can go on to consider speech development as such.
The stages of speech development
How the speech organism begins to live at the moment of birth was described in the second section of this chapter. With the first breath air begins to stream in and out and the child's first cry can sound. With this event the foundation of speech is laid. As definite laws can be observed at work in acquiring the ability to stand and walk upright, so also is the gradual acquisition of speech by the young child bound to definite steps as if following a mapped-out plan.
Although the first real words are not spoken before the eleventh or twelfth months, the formation of speech actually begins with the first cry. William Stern has pointed out that the child approaches speaking in a threefold manner. First, through the expressive movements of babbling; second, through meaningless imitation; third, through meaningful reaction to words addressed to him. These three approaches can be distinctly observed, particularly during the first year. All three, however, are preceded by crying. The baby expresses his sensations of sympathy and antipathy in variations of crying or by making crowing sounds that the mother gradually learns to understand during the first months.
What is here called babbling in sound formation occurs only about the third month. Friedrich Kainz says the following about this babbling.
Babbling is a functional playing of the child with his organs of articulation. Just as kicking exercises the motor apparatus, so does babbling mean an instinctive exercise and use of the muscles of the speech apparatus. It consists in the creation of articulated sound formations of syllabic and word-like character, which are at first single sounds that finally develop into endless babbling monologues … In contrast to the sounds of crying, the products of babbling, without being true sounds of speech, gradually assume the character of speech. This becomes apparent from the fact that, besides vowels, consonants also occur. (6)
This is an apposite characterization of babbling, but it should be emphasized that it never contains word-like but only syllabic formations. All babbling consists of syllables, never of words, and rarely of single sounds. The syllable alone is the living building stone of developing word formation because the word does not consist of sounds. The true members of the word are rather the syllables, and the syllable comes into being through the differentiation of the breath within the stream of sound. (7)
In babbling the baby gathers living building stones for his future words. He does so in overflowing abundance and without any sign of rationality. Although speech psychologists have tried to show in the last twenty years that the babbling of babies differs from one nation or race to another, the results have been disappointing. A French baby no more babbles in French, than does a German baby in German, or a Russian baby in Russian. Over the whole earth babies babble as if they were preparing themselves for any possible language. It is almost as if nature through these many-sided and unspecialized sound productions wished to create the equipment and disposition for any demands that might arise at a later date and to prepare the child for learning any possible language. (8)
What Kainz expresses here rather professorially can be put more simply as follows. Every baby is still a citizen of the world, most certainly not of a country. With the extraordinary manifoldness of the syllables he can form, he has the possibility of learning any possible language. It is also of importance to realize that children born deaf babble to the same degree and extent as those who can hear.
Something more must be added to understand the acquisition of baby talk. The gradual preparation in the child for the understanding of everything spoken to him before the end of the first year must also be considered. Though the growing baby seems to take in the words and sentences addressed to him with increasing understanding, his comprehension does not yet constitute a word understanding in its true sense. He is given a great number of things to be perceived simultaneously, including the sounds of words and sentences. When his mother approaches and speaks a friendly word to him, when his father bends over him and lets his watch dangle in front of his nose, when one of his older brothers or sisters shows him a new toy, then the word or the spoken sentence is not of importance to him, but rather the accompanying gestures and actions, the inner approach.
One should try to feel oneself into the baby's way of experiencing. Then one will notice that he does not live in single experiences and relations to single facts, but in the totality and infinite abundance of the gradually unfolding environment. Landscapes of events open up before him with clouds of sensations, with mountains and valleys of movements and gestures, with pastures and slopes of the feelings of affection toward him. As in a landscape the sound of an animal or a human voice may be heard, so the baby hears the spoken word as part of the wholeness of his experience. He feels at first the fullness of his experience as a unity, not the word spoken in it as something separate from it. The all-embracing gesture of experience forms a first basis of understanding between him and the world, but the word is still an almost unnoticed part of this totality.
When, toward the end of the first year, the ability to stand erect occurs, when the little body raises itself from gravity and is freed from the surrounding world, then step by step he and the world grow apart. The landscape of experience begins to disintegrate into distinct parts and the child learns to feel himself separated from his surrounding world. An abyss has opened up between the without and the within.
At about this time the babbling baby talk has collected all the syllable building stones. The speech organs have come into joyful action, and the child begins to notice that the stirrings and feelings of his own world can somehow find expression in this babbling. He also has been able to acquire from the crumbling landscape of experience definite single features. Now, for example, the words, ‘tick-tock’, begin to be joined with the glittering watch. The sequence of the syllables, ‘Ma-ma-ma’, is attached to the appearance of his mother, but also with the longing for his mother and everything that brings comfort, satisfaction and rest.
In this manner the first true speech utterances come about in the thirteenth and fourteenth months, that is, at the beginning of the second year. At first, there was the cry and crying. Then came babbling, though neither of these two sound utterances can be called speaking. Now speaking begins, not by naming things, but rather in such a way that a single word designates a great fullness, a whole landscape of experience in which the child himself, as speaker, has become the centre. The syllable, ‘Meee’, is not only the designation for milk as liquid or food, but it may also mean, ‘I want milk’, or, ‘I do not want milk’, ‘Give me milk’, or perhaps, ‘How good the milk is', 'The milk bottle’, ‘The mother who brings the milk’, or even, ‘The clouds’, which sometimes are as white as milk.
This stage, which William Stern calls the stage of the one-word sentence, lasts a considerable time, terminating toward the end of the eighteenth month. During this period the child acquires between forty and seventy words, which he uses as one-word sentences.
According to what has been said in the preceding sections of this chapter, we can call this period that of 'Saying.' The child uses speech to bring himself and his strivings to expression by means of one-word sentences. It is not yet speech as such that expresses itself; the child uses speech to report about himself and his world of experience. He expresses himself in speaking.
Just as the sixth month is a decisive turning point in learning to walk when the child sits up, so in the sixth month of learning to speak, that is, in the eighteenth month, an equally decisive change occurs. Suddenly and quite spontaneously, the child grasps the connection of things through names. The child comprehends, often from one day to the next, that each thing has a name. From this moment on his vocabulary increases rapidly, so that in the course of the next six months, until about the end of the second year, four to five hundred words will have been acquired. At this time one often has the impression that words rain on the child. He catches the single drops and knows at once how to handle them, although no one has taught him how to do so.
An immediate understanding for the word itself and its meaning is present. When child psychologists say that children arbitrarily change the meaning of words in this period, they are wrong. William Stern points out, for instance, that his nineteen-month-old daughter used the name, ‘nose,’ for the toes of shoes. 'At this time she liked to pull our noses and discovered the same to be possible with the toes of our shoes.' But what more appropriate name than 'nose' could be used? The toes of our shoes are indeed the noses that our feet stretch out from under our skirts and trousers, thus smelling their way through the world.
To the astonishment of her father, this same daughter used the word 'doll', not only for a real doll but also for other toys such as her stuffed rag dog and rabbit. On the other hand, she did not use the word for a little silver bell that was her favorite toy at the time. Again, nothing need astonish us here because in the child's immediate grasp of names, 'doll' is an image of man and animal. She would also use the word 'doll,' for pictures of men and animals in a book. The silver bell, however, was something totally different, and the error did not lie with the child but with the psychologist, her father, who expected the comprehensive concept, 'toy,' to be recognized by the child. For her, however, neither doll nor bell were toys, but among the various forms manifesting in an unfolding world. This can by no means be called a change of meaning in the use of words, but the meaning of words is much more comprehensive and general for the child than later on. 'Nose' is simply everything that puts a point out into the world, and 'doll' is everything that is not reality but image of reality.
For another child, 'Hooh,’ can be the expression of everything connected with anxiety and surprise - darkness as well as an empty room, a mask or a veil that hides mother's face, the touch of something too cold or too warm. All this can be ‘Hooh.’ Because meanings are undifferentiated but immeasurably wide and intimately bound up with the world of eternal ideas, the child learns to know that each thing, anything that exists, has a name.
During this time, from the eighteenth to the twenty-fourth months, the child lives in the realm of speech that is connected with ‘naming.' Everything is named and a tremendous joy fills the child during this period in which he feels himself to be a discoverer. Here is the table and there is the window; here is the moon and there are the clouds; mother, father, aunt, Liz, Bowwow - each and everything reveals itself anew through the fact that it is named and can thus be taken into possession. Yes, the child is now not only a discoverer, but also a conqueror because what he can name belongs to him and becomes his property. At this stage, speech awakens to itself and begins to unfold in the child's soul. The child plays with speech and its words as if with the most beautiful golden balls that are thrown to him for him to possess.
During this period not only the number of words grows, but they also begin to be differentiated. Nouns, verbs and adjectives are gradually acquired and experienced according to value and meaning. The following table shows the gradual differentiation of the three categories of words during the second year. (9)
Age Nouns Verbs Adjectives and Other Words (except interjections)
Age: 1y 3m Nouns: 100% Verbs: - Adjectives: -
Age: 1y 8m Nouns: 78% Verbs: 22% Adjectives: -
Age: 1y 11m Nouns: 63% Verbs: 23% Adjectives: 14%
This clearly shows that toward the end of the second year the child has acquired the building stones for forming the first primitive sentences. The head in the noun, the breast in the adjective and the limbs in the verb form the first basic drawing of the image of man as revealed in every simple and complex sentence. Even if the formation of the sentences is at first stiff and rigid, and the head rests too often on the earth with the limbs stretched into the air, sentence formation has nevertheless begun. The child has reached a stage in speech development similar to the one he acquired in walking when he could take the first free step in space. With sentence formation, something has been reached in the realm of speech that was experienced by the motor system in the acquisition of the ability to walk upright.
At first, the formation of sentences is clumsy, as the child lives in the period of 'naming' and therefore the names are jumbled and on top of each other. A boy may say, for instance, 'Fall stool leg Ann John,' meaning, John fell and bumped his leg on Ann's stool. Gabelenz tells of a little girl who, at the age of two, climbed on a chair, fell and was smacked by her mother. She spoke of it by saying, 'Girl stool climb boom Mummy sit-upon bitten' (Maedi Till ketterbum mammapuch-puch bissen). This shows clearly what can be expected in forming sentences during the period of naming. Everything is name, the being as well as the thing, the experience as well as the sensation springing from it.
When the threshold of the second year has been crossed, true sentence formation gradually begins. If previously all words have been names, they now become nouns, verbs and adjectives. In astonishment, William Stern expresses what holds true for this period:
What effort has to be expended later on at school in learning a second language, which is never really mastered even after many years of practice. On the other hand, the speech of his environment seems to flash upon the normal child of two or three years of age. Without ever learning vocabulary or studying grammar he makes the most astounding progress month after month. (10)
This observation is certainly correct. The occurrence that Stern describes, however, cannot be really understood until one comes to realize that it is not the child who learns the language, but the language itself that unfolds within the child's speech organism.
Kainz has the following to say on this matter. At first the child becomes aware of the fact that in the number of words at his disposal a great variety is contained - designations for persons and things, happenings and conditions, qualities, actions, etc. (11) On no account, however, can one say that it is the child who becomes aware of these facts and makes the relevant differentiations. Anyone who has ever observed children at the age of two or two and a half years old knows that such an assumption is nonsense. It is not the child himself but the language that begins to unfold and to express itself in speech. In the child the urge arises to tell and this urge awakens speech, which now reaches the point we called 'talking' in Section 3 of this chapter. Speech speaks the child. It hears what sounds from without and surrenders to what the urge of the child demands. One's native language is arising.
One's native language unfolds astonishingly quickly in the course of the third year. The sentences, at first so stiff and totally inarticulate, gradually begin to take shape and to assume form and life. Just as when, in the wake of the first steps, the manifold possibilities of upright mobility are acquired only gradually, and the child must learn through weeks and months of practice to come from walking to running, skipping, jumping, turning and dancing in order truly to conquer space, so also in speaking something similar is happening.
Words begin to develop, to be inflected and changed. A noun is gradually differentiated into singular and plural, and transformed by use of the several cases. The verb, as a word designating time, acquires character from the experience of past, present and future. The adjectives begin to indicate comparison, and prepositions and articles come into use. One sees how the shapeless, jointed doll brought about by the first attempts at sentence formation is imbued with life and soul, stretches and expands, and soon begins to walk and skip. Thus ‘talking’ comes into being.
Only in talking is the true acquisition of one's native language accomplished, and this is possible only because the child grows up in a speaking environment. Speech speaks with the other speakers and expresses the personality of the child. Speech assumes a social character and the child grows into a language community, that is, into the community of his people.
The babbling baby was a world citizen. Through the stages of saying, naming and talking he becomes a citizen of his country because he has acquired his native language. Through this he again takes possession of the world, which at first he had to push away from himself. It was through the acquisition of uprightness that the separation came about between world and self, but now through the gift of speech the self as person reconquers the world. All that we can name becomes our property, for we learn to possess it when its name is revealed to us.
The small child now resembles Noah, who gathers around him in the Ark the world belonging to him. The sons and daughters and all animals that he himself calls by name, are now his own. Outside is the flood, the waters rise, yet the safety of the Ark gives protection and confidence. That is the situation in which the child finds himself when he is about two years old. Soon Noah will release the dove in order to learn whether or not the flood has subsided. So the child will send out the doves of his first thoughts as soon as he has acquired the security of speaking.
Learning one's native language
Now that the stages of saying, naming and talking in the acquisition of speech have been described, it is easy to see that these three activities are fitted in the most intimate way into what was outlined as the speech organism in Section 2 of this chapter. This, though a unit, still shows a threefold form. It reaches below to the region of the lungs where the blood opens itself to the air. Above, it comes in direct contact with the realm of the ear through the Eustachian tubes, and in the centre where the larynx and the organs of the mouth are at work, it surrenders to the in and out streaming air. The threefoldness of speech corresponds to this anatomical-physiological threefoldness.
From below, where blood and air meet, and where the motor organism rises, 'saying’ ascends. It leads the desires and wishes, the strivings and personal emotions into the realm of speech to give them expression. Here lies hidden a separate world of speech, which uses the one-word sentence far beyond the age of childhood. When we make demands, give orders, or use angry or abusive language, but also when we want something with longing or impatience, it is the sphere of saying that brings this to expression. Whether I yell, 'Scoundrel' to one, or 'Hey, waiter’ to another, these are one-word sentences that according to my emphasis expresses what I mean. Saying breaks forth from below and goes upward.
From above downward, however, from the ear to the larynx, ‘naming flows and streams. Where the sphere of hearing becomes the source of a special sense, called by Rudolf Steiner the sense of speech, the names of things have their own world. There speech learns the names and they stream into the region of the larynx and express themselves in speaking. Anything we can name with words has its realm here. Whether they are men or animals, things or plants, concrete or abstract, we grasp them all through names. Naming streams toward saying from above downward and unites and mixes with it, although it exists in itself. Naming streams down from the ear to the larynx.
‘Talking,’ on the other hand, is born in the streaming in and out of the air in breathing. Therefore, it is the social element in the realm of speech. It weaves between man and man, between speaker and speaker. It carries the play of question and answer from soul to soul. Naming streams into us from above, saying mingles with it from below, and thus speaking itself, or talking, appears at the end as if it were a unity. Talking, however, is also an independent element itself and lives in the outward flow of the stream of our breath.
Syllables build the saying. Words form the elements of naming. The sentence becomes the garment of talking. In this way syllables, words and sentences also receive their domain, and here the infinitely complex and manifold ties linking speech and speaking to man become apparent. In the previously mentioned lecture on spiritual science and speech Rudolf Steiner describes the mystery of speech with these words:
‘The development of speech is, indeed, only comparable to artistic activity. We cannot demand that speech shall be an exact copy of what it intends to present any more than we can demand that the artist's imitation shall correspond to reality. Speech reproduces only the external, in the sense in which the artist's picture reproduces it. Before man was a self-conscious spirit in the modern sense, an artist, working as the spirit of speech, was active ... It is a subconscious activity that has produced the speaking human being as a work of art. By analogy speech must be conceived as a work of art … ‘ (12)
These words reveal that speech is the work of the spirit of speech, who once created it in man. It is a work of art and if we try to comprehend it artistically, we recognize the three members of which we have spoken.
Speech pathology from stammering to dumbness, from word blindness to sensory and motor aphasia will only be seen in the right way if ‘saying,' 'naming’ and 'talking’ are recognized in their specific characteristics. The manifoldness of these abnormalities can only be understood as the falling apart of this threefoldness, which must become a unity in speaking if speech is to express itself, and as the inharmonious working together of these three members and the inability to weld them together or keep them apart. This is intended merely as an indication because a more detailed treatment of the subject would go beyond the scope of this book.
Whenever one has to deal with speech, its extent, magnitude and dimension seem so vast that it is impossible to do justice to what in truth is an eternal being. Therefore, I close this chapter with the words that Hamann, the wise man from the north, expressed in his book, The Last Will and Testament of the Knight of the Rosy Cross:
Every phenomenon of nature was a word - the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, secret, unspeakable but all the more intimate union, communication and community of design, energies and ideas. All that man in the beginning heard, saw with his eyes, beheld and what he touched with his hands was a living word; for God was the Word. With this Word in mouth and heart the origin of speech was as natural, as near and as easy as child's play … (13)
Notes
After the child has become able to raise himself to an erect position and acquires free mobility in space, the second step in becoming man follows. He learns to speak and use his native language. This is an especially impressive acquisition and only in recent decades have child psychologists paid deserving attention to its importance. By the time the child learns to speak his native language by conquering words and word connections, he has taken a most important step on the path toward becoming a human Being. The tremendous gulf separating the human being and the animal is also indicated here. Portmann is fully justified in saying, 'Therefore, we must point emphatically to the fact that human speech in word as well as gesture, both of which rest on the principle of communication through signs, is something totally different from all animal sounds.' (1)
Those animal sounds when made by man are also only sound. Cries, screams, moans or other sounds expressing the woes and joys of existence are not speech. Speech is not merely expression, but naming. One of the roots of speech is to be found in the fact that through it names are given to the world and its manifestations.
In the First Book of Moses you can read,
So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. And the man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. (Gen. 2:19f).
The giving of names is directly connected with the creation of Eve. With whom, after all, should man speak if not with his own kind? He can give names to the animals. He can name things and beings, but who is to answer when he begins to ask? The word spoken into space remains without an answer, is shattered and blown away. It dies, and dumbness follows.
These brief remarks hint at the soul qualities that form speech and speaking. Only a small part of speech is an expression of human existence and feeling, and as such it is still intimately connected with man's animal nature. When, however, through speech, sounds are raised out of this sphere and the tones humanized, speech then becomes the servant of the word. The sounding tone unites with the power of speech and thus the names of things can be pronounced. It is speech itself working through man that calls things by name.
This, however, is not all. Naming is only the statement of fact. Speech strives for something more; it aims at finding a connection with itself. Speech wants to come to terms with the word that is heard in order to understand what it has heard, to answer the question received, to demand answers from out of its own questioning. Therefore, God gives Adam his Eve because only when man experiences himself through speech in another human being does he become aware of himself.
Speech can now be said to unfold in the human being in a threefold manner:
As an expression of what lives in the soul as animality.
As an expression of the ability to name all things of this world. Thus, the names of things and beings sound forth.
As an expression of the power that tries to meet itself in speaking. Speech thereby gradually comes to terms with itself.
Man is connected with this threefold expression of speech through his whole being. At first, however, he is not the one who speaks, but the one through whom speech sounds and expresses itself. For this it needs its own tools and these are created in man by speech itself. The immature man represents an undeveloped natural condition in which speech becomes active in such a way that it is able to become manifest. Even as the artist creates tools from the substances of nature by means of which he fashions his work, so speech takes man as the natural substance and creates out of him its own work of art. Thus, man ultimately appears as image because through the speech with which he has been endowed, he can become manifest as self. He can sound through it (personare) as personality and communicate with, or impart himself to other human beings.
It was a rather childish agnosticism that imagined and also tried to prove that the organs of speech were no more than the larynx with which, when speaking, some small parts of the cerebral cortex are connected, and that these are the essential elements through which man begins to prattle. Today we know that it is the whole of man who speaks. As physical, soul and spirit being he takes part in the formation of speech and in speaking expresses himself as personality. Rudolf Steiner has described it in the following way:
It is in the form of the larynx and all that is connected with it that makes us man ... All the rest of the human form, down to the smallest details, has been so formed and plastically moulded that at the present stage man is, so to speak, a further elaboration of his organs of speech. The organs of speech are fundamental to the human form. (2)
What are these instruments of human speech, whose further formation and metamorphosis man himself seems to be?
The anatomy of the organs of speech
The larynx, the centre of the organs of speech, is the intricately formed, central part of a pipe through which the breath streams in and out. This pipe, which widens and branches out downward as well as upward, is called the trachea or windpipe. Air passes down through the windpipe, then through the two large bronchi that enter the right and left lobes of the lungs. As these tubes penetrate the lungs further, they continue to divide dichotomously, growing smaller and smaller, multiplying over and over again. The final configuration, rightly called "bronchial tree, is formed like the trunk of a tree that divides into two main branches. These divide further into smaller ones, finally forming twigs and ever smaller twigs. The only difference between the trunk of this tree and that of an ordinary one is that its roots are in the larynx and its branches grow downward. Thus, this bronchial tree is upside-down compared to natural trees.
Just as each twig of a tree terminates in a leaf, so each of the innumerable bronchiole terminates in an alveolus, a small cell into which the inhaled air streams. There the air meets indirectly the blood that flows around the walls of the alveolus. The inhaled air, changed through this meeting, streams back in exhalation and passes once more through the larynx on its way out. While being breathed out the air gives service to speech. The laryngeal muscles rhythmically move the parts of the larynx, creating a thickening and thinning of the out streaming air, which forms the pliable basic substance needed for the formation of tone and sound.
The pipe around which the larynx is formed also continues upward as the pharynx, or throat, that opens into the oral and nasal cavities. From the throat, two small Eustachian tubes lead backward to the middle ear to connect indirectly with the air vesicles of the temporal bone lying behind.
The mouth, including teeth, lips, tongue, cheeks and palate, is the sculptor of the sounds of speech. It moulds the air prepared by the larynx to form labial, palatal, dental and lingual sounds, and can cause the prepared air to be aspirated or forced, vibrated or nasalized. From these various combinations the consonants are formed.
The nasal cavity acts as a resonator. It also regulates the amount of air needed.
The Eustachian tubes leading to the middle ear create an intimate connection between speaking and hearing that should not be overlooked.
To arrive at a real and concrete picture of this structure, we would have to say: Proceeding downward, the trunk of the windpipe opens into the two large bronchi. These then continually divide and finally become the innumerable air cells, or alveoli, of the lungs. The alveoli, like tender organs of touch, meet the expanding plane of the surrounding blood. So it is that in the lungs the air of the speech organs experiences the touch of the flowing blood. Like so many thousands of little feet, the alveoli touch the surface of the blood, feel its strength or weakness, its speed or hesitancy. They are thus a vastly extended organ of touch that experiences the nature of the blood and reacts accordingly. It is for this reason that we can speak only with great effort when the blood flows too fast and fitfully through bodily over-exertion. Then these organs of touch are swept into the rushing current of the bloodstream and are lost in it. When, on the other hand, the blood flows too slowly, as can happen in some illnesses or in individuals who are sluggish by nature, the connection between these organs of touch and the bloodstream will not be intimate enough and, for lack of strength, speech will be wrested from the chest only with difficulty. Let us keep in mind, therefore, that downward it is the course of the blood that has a determining influence on speech.
Upward, however, the two Eustachian tubes spread out like arms and with their hand-like ends reach into the vicinity of the ear. There they hold on, grasping the ear so that hearing and speaking, address and rejoinder, can come about in immediate cooperation. In the middle ear the air organism touches the membrane of the eardrum like a hand. The membrane of the so-called circular window leading into the mysterious cavity of the inner ear is also touched. In this way the touching hand of the upper air organism is connected with the inner as well as the outer ear because, while the circular window leads into the cochlea of the ear capsule, the eardrum represents the boundary to the outer acoustic duct.
The mysterious cell where the names of things and beings are hidden is found only in the inner ear. There the eternal ideas out of which all being and becoming is formed touch the earthly realm of the human organism and pronounce their true names. The air of the speech organism extends up to it like a hand reaching for the word inscribed in all things and beings.
The speech organism reaches above into the region of the ear and thus connects the streaming of the blood with the apprehension of names. It is in this way that the act of hearing comes about for names and words. The air organism exists not only for speaking, but also for hearing, and it intimately entwines both faculties. In the region of the mouth and nose the organs of speech have their workshop where they actively form speech. The speech organism rests on the blood, hears in the ear, and works in the mouth and nose cavities. Its centre, however, is the larynx, balancing above and below like a heart, harmonizing and uniting the tendency to fall apart or to collapse upon each other. This is only possible because the larynx is not a rigid tube but a complicated joint that is kept in continual movement by a definite number of muscles. From above and below, from front and back, muscles pass to the larynx, unite with its parts and make it into a distinct organ of the motor system. In this way speaking becomes a motor act for expression. As already emphasized in the first chapter of this book, every muscle movement calls for the participation of the entire voluntary muscular system and this holds true also for the motor nature of speech. It is completely built into the activity of the whole motor system, is part of it and cannot function without it.
Gehlen has clearly pointed to this fact. He says,
If, with Karl Bühler, one considers presentation only as one of the achievements of speech related to expression and communication, one widens the standpoint quite correctly into the sociological, but one still tends to overlook the motor side, which after all also belongs to speech. Regarded from this standpoint, speech utterances are first and foremost movements that can well be transformed into other kinds of movement. These are made use of in the education of the deaf and dumb. (3)
The whole organism of movement is characterized as the necessary foundation of all speech. This in turn presupposes an indirect inclusion of the peripheral and central nervous systems. Thus, the extremely complicated ramification of the whole process of speaking becomes evident. The organs of speech stand like a central formation within the human organism. While they are determined by it, they certainly determine it as well. The air moved in breathing is their basic substance. It touches the blood below and comes into intimate contact with the ear above. The muscular systems of larynx, throat, and mouth, as part of the complete motor apparatus, become the builders of both the substance and the form of speech.
The life of the speech organism begins at the moment of birth. The beginning has been made when the air current is drawn into the body and tone formation is accomplished with the first cry. During the embryonic period, this speech organism was at rest, being built up and formed, but at birth its activity begins, enabling the child gradually to learn speech as well as speaking.
Saying, naming, talking - three aspects
Before we describe the successive stages of acquiring speech, a few brief but fundamental explanations of terminology must be made. We pointed out in the first section of this chapter that speech itself desires to come into contact with, and to speak to, itself, that the names of things emanate from speech. Speech gives the names. We should, therefore, assign more importance to speech as a being in itself than is usually done.
We are too easily inclined to say to other people, especially if they are children, 'Think first before you speak.' But who really does this? Do we not often become aware of what we actually mean only after we have spoken? The philologist, Jespersen, repeatedly referred to the remark of the little girl who said, 'Please let me speak so that I know what I think.' How right this child was! A large part of our speaking is like a conversation we hold with our thinking. But we also converse in this way with others, and it is often this very moment of surprise at our own remarks that gives enchantment to a conversation.
I do not mean to say with this that the expression, 'I speak' is not true. I speak, indeed, but by no means do I need to think first in order to say what I mean. In speech the ego as individuality lives not only in the realm of the waking consciousness, where thinking is accomplished, but also in the realm of dream consciousness out of which it speaks. (4)
Even as a movement becomes perceptible only after each of its parts as well as the whole have been completed, so too speech becomes fully conscious only after it has been spoken. In most cases it is true that 'I' agree with what I have said, but in cases of mistakes, and especially in pathological conditions, speech becomes a self-existent entity that often, to the horror of the speaker, seems to rise from unknown depths. Here lies one of the roots of stuttering and stammering.
'It speaks' and 'I speak', are both true. Speech is an entity independent of me, which follows its own modalities and laws, has its own reasoning, is active by itself, and expresses itself in speaking, dwelling within me like the breath that comes and goes. It is an entity that seizes my motor organism and lifts it into the realm of the speech organs, wedding it to the air. It is an entity that also rests on the stream of my blood and reaches up to my ear. It is interwoven with me and yet is something different from what I, myself, am.
I speak the speech. That is the primary given fact, but thereby I express myself, my wishes and feelings, my hidden inclinations, my desires and my presentiments. All this is contained in the words, 'To say.’ I, myself, say what I am by means of speech.
Speech expresses itself in speaking. This is the second function of speaking. Here speech lives in its own realm. It deciphers the eternal and temporal names of things and beings, and in this way man learns to know their names. It is not I who call things by name. In reality, I have been given speech and thus names are revealed to me. I can pronounce and also understand them. All this is contained in the words, 'To name.’ Things and beings are named in the realm of speech and I am allowed to take part in it.
Speech expresses me in speaking. It lets me understand other speakers and turns me toward them. Thus, speech can come to terms with itself and with thinking. Speech is a social structure through which the wall between ego and ego can be bridged, even though often only seemingly. Conversation, talk, exchange of thoughts, all have their home here. This is expressed in the words, 'To talk'. Speech builds the bridges of talking across which I can reach the other ego.
What Karl Bühler characterizes in a primitive, one-sided way as statement, influence and presentation has its correct application here. (5) Statement is contained in saying, presentation in naming and influence in talking. Speaking encompasses all three, and speech itself is even wider and greater than speaking. Speaking is only the active side of speech, which also has a passive side - hearing. Just as speech can speak, so can it also hear the spoken word, the statement. It can hear itself in me, as well as in others insofar as they are speaking. Therefore, the tool, the speech organism, reaches up into the ear where it participates in hearing.
Thus, speech has two sides: The motor side, speaking, and the sensory side, hearing. Both must work together in unison so that speech itself can become manifest. Usually, when a child is born deaf, the child is not really deaf but his speech has not reached the sensory region. Something similar can occur in the motor area of speech. In any case, speech should be recognized as something comprehensive, embracing these two functions. At the same time, it should also be seen as something self-existent.
Schematically this can be illustrated in the following way:
Speech
Hearing of names (sensory)
Hearing of speech (Sensory)
Speaking in saying (Motor)
Speaking in naming (Motor)
Speaking in talking (Motor)
With this introduction we can go on to consider speech development as such.
The stages of speech development
How the speech organism begins to live at the moment of birth was described in the second section of this chapter. With the first breath air begins to stream in and out and the child's first cry can sound. With this event the foundation of speech is laid. As definite laws can be observed at work in acquiring the ability to stand and walk upright, so also is the gradual acquisition of speech by the young child bound to definite steps as if following a mapped-out plan.
Although the first real words are not spoken before the eleventh or twelfth months, the formation of speech actually begins with the first cry. William Stern has pointed out that the child approaches speaking in a threefold manner. First, through the expressive movements of babbling; second, through meaningless imitation; third, through meaningful reaction to words addressed to him. These three approaches can be distinctly observed, particularly during the first year. All three, however, are preceded by crying. The baby expresses his sensations of sympathy and antipathy in variations of crying or by making crowing sounds that the mother gradually learns to understand during the first months.
What is here called babbling in sound formation occurs only about the third month. Friedrich Kainz says the following about this babbling.
Babbling is a functional playing of the child with his organs of articulation. Just as kicking exercises the motor apparatus, so does babbling mean an instinctive exercise and use of the muscles of the speech apparatus. It consists in the creation of articulated sound formations of syllabic and word-like character, which are at first single sounds that finally develop into endless babbling monologues … In contrast to the sounds of crying, the products of babbling, without being true sounds of speech, gradually assume the character of speech. This becomes apparent from the fact that, besides vowels, consonants also occur. (6)
This is an apposite characterization of babbling, but it should be emphasized that it never contains word-like but only syllabic formations. All babbling consists of syllables, never of words, and rarely of single sounds. The syllable alone is the living building stone of developing word formation because the word does not consist of sounds. The true members of the word are rather the syllables, and the syllable comes into being through the differentiation of the breath within the stream of sound. (7)
In babbling the baby gathers living building stones for his future words. He does so in overflowing abundance and without any sign of rationality. Although speech psychologists have tried to show in the last twenty years that the babbling of babies differs from one nation or race to another, the results have been disappointing. A French baby no more babbles in French, than does a German baby in German, or a Russian baby in Russian. Over the whole earth babies babble as if they were preparing themselves for any possible language. It is almost as if nature through these many-sided and unspecialized sound productions wished to create the equipment and disposition for any demands that might arise at a later date and to prepare the child for learning any possible language. (8)
What Kainz expresses here rather professorially can be put more simply as follows. Every baby is still a citizen of the world, most certainly not of a country. With the extraordinary manifoldness of the syllables he can form, he has the possibility of learning any possible language. It is also of importance to realize that children born deaf babble to the same degree and extent as those who can hear.
Something more must be added to understand the acquisition of baby talk. The gradual preparation in the child for the understanding of everything spoken to him before the end of the first year must also be considered. Though the growing baby seems to take in the words and sentences addressed to him with increasing understanding, his comprehension does not yet constitute a word understanding in its true sense. He is given a great number of things to be perceived simultaneously, including the sounds of words and sentences. When his mother approaches and speaks a friendly word to him, when his father bends over him and lets his watch dangle in front of his nose, when one of his older brothers or sisters shows him a new toy, then the word or the spoken sentence is not of importance to him, but rather the accompanying gestures and actions, the inner approach.
One should try to feel oneself into the baby's way of experiencing. Then one will notice that he does not live in single experiences and relations to single facts, but in the totality and infinite abundance of the gradually unfolding environment. Landscapes of events open up before him with clouds of sensations, with mountains and valleys of movements and gestures, with pastures and slopes of the feelings of affection toward him. As in a landscape the sound of an animal or a human voice may be heard, so the baby hears the spoken word as part of the wholeness of his experience. He feels at first the fullness of his experience as a unity, not the word spoken in it as something separate from it. The all-embracing gesture of experience forms a first basis of understanding between him and the world, but the word is still an almost unnoticed part of this totality.
When, toward the end of the first year, the ability to stand erect occurs, when the little body raises itself from gravity and is freed from the surrounding world, then step by step he and the world grow apart. The landscape of experience begins to disintegrate into distinct parts and the child learns to feel himself separated from his surrounding world. An abyss has opened up between the without and the within.
At about this time the babbling baby talk has collected all the syllable building stones. The speech organs have come into joyful action, and the child begins to notice that the stirrings and feelings of his own world can somehow find expression in this babbling. He also has been able to acquire from the crumbling landscape of experience definite single features. Now, for example, the words, ‘tick-tock’, begin to be joined with the glittering watch. The sequence of the syllables, ‘Ma-ma-ma’, is attached to the appearance of his mother, but also with the longing for his mother and everything that brings comfort, satisfaction and rest.
In this manner the first true speech utterances come about in the thirteenth and fourteenth months, that is, at the beginning of the second year. At first, there was the cry and crying. Then came babbling, though neither of these two sound utterances can be called speaking. Now speaking begins, not by naming things, but rather in such a way that a single word designates a great fullness, a whole landscape of experience in which the child himself, as speaker, has become the centre. The syllable, ‘Meee’, is not only the designation for milk as liquid or food, but it may also mean, ‘I want milk’, or, ‘I do not want milk’, ‘Give me milk’, or perhaps, ‘How good the milk is', 'The milk bottle’, ‘The mother who brings the milk’, or even, ‘The clouds’, which sometimes are as white as milk.
This stage, which William Stern calls the stage of the one-word sentence, lasts a considerable time, terminating toward the end of the eighteenth month. During this period the child acquires between forty and seventy words, which he uses as one-word sentences.
According to what has been said in the preceding sections of this chapter, we can call this period that of 'Saying.' The child uses speech to bring himself and his strivings to expression by means of one-word sentences. It is not yet speech as such that expresses itself; the child uses speech to report about himself and his world of experience. He expresses himself in speaking.
Just as the sixth month is a decisive turning point in learning to walk when the child sits up, so in the sixth month of learning to speak, that is, in the eighteenth month, an equally decisive change occurs. Suddenly and quite spontaneously, the child grasps the connection of things through names. The child comprehends, often from one day to the next, that each thing has a name. From this moment on his vocabulary increases rapidly, so that in the course of the next six months, until about the end of the second year, four to five hundred words will have been acquired. At this time one often has the impression that words rain on the child. He catches the single drops and knows at once how to handle them, although no one has taught him how to do so.
An immediate understanding for the word itself and its meaning is present. When child psychologists say that children arbitrarily change the meaning of words in this period, they are wrong. William Stern points out, for instance, that his nineteen-month-old daughter used the name, ‘nose,’ for the toes of shoes. 'At this time she liked to pull our noses and discovered the same to be possible with the toes of our shoes.' But what more appropriate name than 'nose' could be used? The toes of our shoes are indeed the noses that our feet stretch out from under our skirts and trousers, thus smelling their way through the world.
To the astonishment of her father, this same daughter used the word 'doll', not only for a real doll but also for other toys such as her stuffed rag dog and rabbit. On the other hand, she did not use the word for a little silver bell that was her favorite toy at the time. Again, nothing need astonish us here because in the child's immediate grasp of names, 'doll' is an image of man and animal. She would also use the word 'doll,' for pictures of men and animals in a book. The silver bell, however, was something totally different, and the error did not lie with the child but with the psychologist, her father, who expected the comprehensive concept, 'toy,' to be recognized by the child. For her, however, neither doll nor bell were toys, but among the various forms manifesting in an unfolding world. This can by no means be called a change of meaning in the use of words, but the meaning of words is much more comprehensive and general for the child than later on. 'Nose' is simply everything that puts a point out into the world, and 'doll' is everything that is not reality but image of reality.
For another child, 'Hooh,’ can be the expression of everything connected with anxiety and surprise - darkness as well as an empty room, a mask or a veil that hides mother's face, the touch of something too cold or too warm. All this can be ‘Hooh.’ Because meanings are undifferentiated but immeasurably wide and intimately bound up with the world of eternal ideas, the child learns to know that each thing, anything that exists, has a name.
During this time, from the eighteenth to the twenty-fourth months, the child lives in the realm of speech that is connected with ‘naming.' Everything is named and a tremendous joy fills the child during this period in which he feels himself to be a discoverer. Here is the table and there is the window; here is the moon and there are the clouds; mother, father, aunt, Liz, Bowwow - each and everything reveals itself anew through the fact that it is named and can thus be taken into possession. Yes, the child is now not only a discoverer, but also a conqueror because what he can name belongs to him and becomes his property. At this stage, speech awakens to itself and begins to unfold in the child's soul. The child plays with speech and its words as if with the most beautiful golden balls that are thrown to him for him to possess.
During this period not only the number of words grows, but they also begin to be differentiated. Nouns, verbs and adjectives are gradually acquired and experienced according to value and meaning. The following table shows the gradual differentiation of the three categories of words during the second year. (9)
Age Nouns Verbs Adjectives and Other Words (except interjections)
Age: 1y 3m Nouns: 100% Verbs: - Adjectives: -
Age: 1y 8m Nouns: 78% Verbs: 22% Adjectives: -
Age: 1y 11m Nouns: 63% Verbs: 23% Adjectives: 14%
This clearly shows that toward the end of the second year the child has acquired the building stones for forming the first primitive sentences. The head in the noun, the breast in the adjective and the limbs in the verb form the first basic drawing of the image of man as revealed in every simple and complex sentence. Even if the formation of the sentences is at first stiff and rigid, and the head rests too often on the earth with the limbs stretched into the air, sentence formation has nevertheless begun. The child has reached a stage in speech development similar to the one he acquired in walking when he could take the first free step in space. With sentence formation, something has been reached in the realm of speech that was experienced by the motor system in the acquisition of the ability to walk upright.
At first, the formation of sentences is clumsy, as the child lives in the period of 'naming' and therefore the names are jumbled and on top of each other. A boy may say, for instance, 'Fall stool leg Ann John,' meaning, John fell and bumped his leg on Ann's stool. Gabelenz tells of a little girl who, at the age of two, climbed on a chair, fell and was smacked by her mother. She spoke of it by saying, 'Girl stool climb boom Mummy sit-upon bitten' (Maedi Till ketterbum mammapuch-puch bissen). This shows clearly what can be expected in forming sentences during the period of naming. Everything is name, the being as well as the thing, the experience as well as the sensation springing from it.
When the threshold of the second year has been crossed, true sentence formation gradually begins. If previously all words have been names, they now become nouns, verbs and adjectives. In astonishment, William Stern expresses what holds true for this period:
What effort has to be expended later on at school in learning a second language, which is never really mastered even after many years of practice. On the other hand, the speech of his environment seems to flash upon the normal child of two or three years of age. Without ever learning vocabulary or studying grammar he makes the most astounding progress month after month. (10)
This observation is certainly correct. The occurrence that Stern describes, however, cannot be really understood until one comes to realize that it is not the child who learns the language, but the language itself that unfolds within the child's speech organism.
Kainz has the following to say on this matter. At first the child becomes aware of the fact that in the number of words at his disposal a great variety is contained - designations for persons and things, happenings and conditions, qualities, actions, etc. (11) On no account, however, can one say that it is the child who becomes aware of these facts and makes the relevant differentiations. Anyone who has ever observed children at the age of two or two and a half years old knows that such an assumption is nonsense. It is not the child himself but the language that begins to unfold and to express itself in speech. In the child the urge arises to tell and this urge awakens speech, which now reaches the point we called 'talking' in Section 3 of this chapter. Speech speaks the child. It hears what sounds from without and surrenders to what the urge of the child demands. One's native language is arising.
One's native language unfolds astonishingly quickly in the course of the third year. The sentences, at first so stiff and totally inarticulate, gradually begin to take shape and to assume form and life. Just as when, in the wake of the first steps, the manifold possibilities of upright mobility are acquired only gradually, and the child must learn through weeks and months of practice to come from walking to running, skipping, jumping, turning and dancing in order truly to conquer space, so also in speaking something similar is happening.
Words begin to develop, to be inflected and changed. A noun is gradually differentiated into singular and plural, and transformed by use of the several cases. The verb, as a word designating time, acquires character from the experience of past, present and future. The adjectives begin to indicate comparison, and prepositions and articles come into use. One sees how the shapeless, jointed doll brought about by the first attempts at sentence formation is imbued with life and soul, stretches and expands, and soon begins to walk and skip. Thus ‘talking’ comes into being.
Only in talking is the true acquisition of one's native language accomplished, and this is possible only because the child grows up in a speaking environment. Speech speaks with the other speakers and expresses the personality of the child. Speech assumes a social character and the child grows into a language community, that is, into the community of his people.
The babbling baby was a world citizen. Through the stages of saying, naming and talking he becomes a citizen of his country because he has acquired his native language. Through this he again takes possession of the world, which at first he had to push away from himself. It was through the acquisition of uprightness that the separation came about between world and self, but now through the gift of speech the self as person reconquers the world. All that we can name becomes our property, for we learn to possess it when its name is revealed to us.
The small child now resembles Noah, who gathers around him in the Ark the world belonging to him. The sons and daughters and all animals that he himself calls by name, are now his own. Outside is the flood, the waters rise, yet the safety of the Ark gives protection and confidence. That is the situation in which the child finds himself when he is about two years old. Soon Noah will release the dove in order to learn whether or not the flood has subsided. So the child will send out the doves of his first thoughts as soon as he has acquired the security of speaking.
Learning one's native language
Now that the stages of saying, naming and talking in the acquisition of speech have been described, it is easy to see that these three activities are fitted in the most intimate way into what was outlined as the speech organism in Section 2 of this chapter. This, though a unit, still shows a threefold form. It reaches below to the region of the lungs where the blood opens itself to the air. Above, it comes in direct contact with the realm of the ear through the Eustachian tubes, and in the centre where the larynx and the organs of the mouth are at work, it surrenders to the in and out streaming air. The threefoldness of speech corresponds to this anatomical-physiological threefoldness.
From below, where blood and air meet, and where the motor organism rises, 'saying’ ascends. It leads the desires and wishes, the strivings and personal emotions into the realm of speech to give them expression. Here lies hidden a separate world of speech, which uses the one-word sentence far beyond the age of childhood. When we make demands, give orders, or use angry or abusive language, but also when we want something with longing or impatience, it is the sphere of saying that brings this to expression. Whether I yell, 'Scoundrel' to one, or 'Hey, waiter’ to another, these are one-word sentences that according to my emphasis expresses what I mean. Saying breaks forth from below and goes upward.
From above downward, however, from the ear to the larynx, ‘naming flows and streams. Where the sphere of hearing becomes the source of a special sense, called by Rudolf Steiner the sense of speech, the names of things have their own world. There speech learns the names and they stream into the region of the larynx and express themselves in speaking. Anything we can name with words has its realm here. Whether they are men or animals, things or plants, concrete or abstract, we grasp them all through names. Naming streams toward saying from above downward and unites and mixes with it, although it exists in itself. Naming streams down from the ear to the larynx.
‘Talking,’ on the other hand, is born in the streaming in and out of the air in breathing. Therefore, it is the social element in the realm of speech. It weaves between man and man, between speaker and speaker. It carries the play of question and answer from soul to soul. Naming streams into us from above, saying mingles with it from below, and thus speaking itself, or talking, appears at the end as if it were a unity. Talking, however, is also an independent element itself and lives in the outward flow of the stream of our breath.
Syllables build the saying. Words form the elements of naming. The sentence becomes the garment of talking. In this way syllables, words and sentences also receive their domain, and here the infinitely complex and manifold ties linking speech and speaking to man become apparent. In the previously mentioned lecture on spiritual science and speech Rudolf Steiner describes the mystery of speech with these words:
‘The development of speech is, indeed, only comparable to artistic activity. We cannot demand that speech shall be an exact copy of what it intends to present any more than we can demand that the artist's imitation shall correspond to reality. Speech reproduces only the external, in the sense in which the artist's picture reproduces it. Before man was a self-conscious spirit in the modern sense, an artist, working as the spirit of speech, was active ... It is a subconscious activity that has produced the speaking human being as a work of art. By analogy speech must be conceived as a work of art … ‘ (12)
These words reveal that speech is the work of the spirit of speech, who once created it in man. It is a work of art and if we try to comprehend it artistically, we recognize the three members of which we have spoken.
Speech pathology from stammering to dumbness, from word blindness to sensory and motor aphasia will only be seen in the right way if ‘saying,' 'naming’ and 'talking’ are recognized in their specific characteristics. The manifoldness of these abnormalities can only be understood as the falling apart of this threefoldness, which must become a unity in speaking if speech is to express itself, and as the inharmonious working together of these three members and the inability to weld them together or keep them apart. This is intended merely as an indication because a more detailed treatment of the subject would go beyond the scope of this book.
Whenever one has to deal with speech, its extent, magnitude and dimension seem so vast that it is impossible to do justice to what in truth is an eternal being. Therefore, I close this chapter with the words that Hamann, the wise man from the north, expressed in his book, The Last Will and Testament of the Knight of the Rosy Cross:
Every phenomenon of nature was a word - the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, secret, unspeakable but all the more intimate union, communication and community of design, energies and ideas. All that man in the beginning heard, saw with his eyes, beheld and what he touched with his hands was a living word; for God was the Word. With this Word in mouth and heart the origin of speech was as natural, as near and as easy as child's play … (13)
Notes
- Portmann, Biologische Fragmente, p. 74.
- Steiner, Metamorphoses of the Soul, lecture of Jan. 20, 1910.
- Gehlen, Der Mensch, p. 208.
- See also below, Chapter 3, Section 3, for the quotation of Rudolf Steiner.
- Bühler, The Mental Development of the Child.
- Kainz, Psychologie der Sprache, Vol. 2, p. 3.
- Porzig, Das Wunder der Sprache, p. 54.
- Kainz, Psychologie der Sprache, Vol. 2, p. 4.
- Stern, Psychology of Early Childhood.
- Stern, Psychology of Early Childhood, p. 141.
- Kainz, Psychologie der Sprache. Vol. 2, p. 35.
- Steiner, Metamorphoses of the Soul, Lecture of Jan. 20, 1910.
- Hamann, Des Ritters von Rosencreuz letzte Willensmeinung.
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