Galen wrote a book called Peri phones, On the voice, which is lost. One of the summaries made by Oribasius, court physician to Julian the Apostate, has generally been thought to contain the outline of and perhaps excerpts from the missing Galenic text. I was surprised to find that this summary had little to say about human language (I’m looking for the sources of a letter by the Ikhwan as-Safa on that topic) but I probably shouldn’t have been. Phone (“foe-nay”) means “speech” in literary texts only sometimes and by metonymic extension. In technical contexts, it always just means “sound” – often, “sound biologically produced,” a larger category of which human speech only makes up a small part.
In that much-quoted passage from Aristotle’s Politics, for instance, where he defines humans as “political animals having speech,” this is by distinction from other animals which have phone. Speech allows us to talk about the just and the unjust, which means we can form communities. Phone, on the other hand, only allows indexical signalling of what’s pleasant or painful. You can’t build a community around that, says Aristotle, although I’m sure some would disagree.
The relevant contrast in Galen (as represented by Oribasius) is between phone and dialektos or dialexis. As far as I can tell, this use of those words is otherwise unexampled. Aristotle also opposes dialektos and phone (Historia animalium 535a28), in the sense that men have many languages (dialektoi) but one manner of speaking. Oribasius, however, must mean by dialektos something more like language as such – not a particular language, one among many, which is what Aristotle and most other writers who use the word mean by it.
Oribasius brings up the dialektos/phone opposition at the end of his summary, and apparently only to point out that the former, from an organic perspective, is a lot more fragile than the latter. Break a nose, knock out a few teeth, trim off the lips – that’s not going to prevent anyone from making noise. On the other hand, someone subject to such treatment will have a hard time producing speech. Contrariwise, any intervention that affects the phone will inhibit dialexis too. The human capacity seems to be layered on top of an animal one, not only conceptually (as in Aristotle) but also physiologically. From an evolutionary perspective, which was obviously not the one that Aristotle or Galen adopted, language looks like a late, superficial addition that’s easily taken away.
This would have been much clearer to a readership that had seen people have their tongues ripped out, which I think may be most readerships through the Renaissance. At least it was certainly on the menu of gruesome tortures available to the writers of plays like Titus Andronicus or the Spanish Tragedy, so people would have seen it represented onstage; I don’t know how regular an occurence it was in real life, and finding out would be beyond my capacities.
Go back in time a little further, say to late antiquity, and glossectomy starts getting mentioned as though it were quite the done thing. I’m thinking particularly of a story from book three of Gregory’s Dialogues, where the Arrian Visigoths of Spain remove the tongues of a dozen-ish Nicene priests who refuse to convert. The cool thing, in this case – an actually good miracle, though I’ve been dragging Gregory for including a lot of low-tier ones, more of which to come – is that God grants them the power to speak regardless. They make their way to Constantinople, where they set their case before Justinian. Gregory knows a guy who saw them there and can confirm that they were missing the relevant part of speech. Moreover – to make sure we know it’s a divine miracle and not a physiological marvel – one of the priests sinks into “luxuria” and loses the use of language as a result. One of the lessons of Gregory’s Dialogues in general is that God can always call take-backs if you put his gifts to bad use.
The point of this story – as of the more well-known myth of Philomela – is that Aristotle gets things slightly wrong. Language may be useful for talking about justice, but it’s still more important for talking about injustice and giving historical accounts of injustices that you’ve suffered. Unless you can do that, you’re just making noise – even if you’ve still got a tongue in your mouth.