Speech and writing in Rousseau’s conception of language

Abstract

The history of language acquires throughout the Essay on the origin of languages ​​the progress of an accelerated fall in corruption. There is a primitive language that degenerates and changes itself: a process of formation and a deformation. As Rousseau in his reflections identifies – both in origin and in structure – music and language, the loss of expressive power that occurs in languages ​​also affects music and these two corruptions go together, so that both move away from the music language or the sung word from the beginning. The corruption of music and languages ​​corresponds to the erasing of its expressive power and refers to an autonomization of artificial harmony, to the increase of the consonants, of the articulations, of the rationality, to the practice of writing, as well as to the historical, political, economic and social development. All these processes must be taken into account in an analysis of idiom ​​and language. However, it is possible to isolate each one methodologically. Hereupon, the proposal of this article is to investigate the role of writing in the process of corruption and degeneration of languages.