A discussion of the relationship between the human body and language
seems to be the inevitable result of any reflexion by man on his
particular condi- tion. This has held true since the earliest records in
written tradition. It may be an excessively ambitious undertaking to try
to catalogue the themes in that reflexion and reconstruct its successive
stages within the confines of a book of fairly modest proportions such
as this one; but the challenge has been stimulating enough to call for a
response. The long research work that preceded the writing of this book
and the large collection of source material accumulated over a period of
several years at least afford the writer the satisfaction of
appreciating more than anyone else the care for accuracy and
completeness that went into the gradual reduction of this text to
manageable proportions. Moreover, it is hoped to make available to all
those interested at a later date the rich and rare corpus of documents
that forms the basis of this book, in an anthology of selected readings.
It was originally intended to publish these documents in a companion
volume to this book.