The problem of language constituted the most contentious subject of the philosophies and human sciences in the twentieth-century and drove what came to be known as the "linguistic turn" to Western thought. Phenomenology, linguistics, analytic philosophy, speech act theory, anthropology, psychology, poststructuralism, media studies, and ordinary language philosophy-all addressed language as the primary vehicle of human thought and communication, and queried whether any accurate linguistic representation of reality were possible. The sound of the human voice lay at the center of the debate. The...