Visible Speech
Visible Speech is a system of phonetic symbols developed by British
linguist Alexander Melville Bell in 1867 to represent the position of Visible Speech
the speech organs in articulating sounds. Bell was known Script Alphabet
internationally as a teacher of speech and proper elocution and an type
author of books on the subject. The system is composed of symbols
Creator Alexander Melville Bell
that show the position and movement of the throat, tongue, and lips as
they produce the sounds of language, and it is a type of phonetic Time 1867 to the present
notation. The system was used to aid the deaf in learning to speak. period
Direction Left-to-right
In 1864 Melville promoted his first works on Visible Speech, in order
to help the deaf both learn and improve upon their speech (since the Related scripts
profoundly deaf could not hear their own pronunciation).[1] To help Sister 85
promote the language, Bell created two written short forms using his systems
system of 29 modifiers and tones, 52 consonants, 36 vowels and a ISO 15924
dozen diphthongs:[2] they were named World English, which was
ISO Visp, 280: Visible
similar to the International Phonetic Alphabet, and also Line Writing,
15924 Speech
used as a shorthand form for stenographers.[3]
Unicode
Melville's works on Visible Speech became highly notable, and were Unicode U+E780 to U+E7FF in
described by Édouard Séguin as being "...a greater invention than the range the ConScript Unicode
telephone by his son, Alexander Graham Bell".[3] Melville saw
Registry
numerous applications for his invention, including its worldwide use
as a universal language. However, although heavily promoted at the
Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan,
Italy in 1880, after a period of a dozen years or so in which it was
applied to the education of the deaf, Visible Speech was found to be
more cumbersome, and thus a hindrance, to the teaching of speech to
the deaf, compared to other methods,[4] and eventually faded from
use.
Bell's son Alexander Graham Bell learned the symbols, assisted his
father in giving public demonstrations of the system and mastered it to
the point that he later improved upon his father's work. Eventually,
Alexander Graham Bell became a powerful advocate of visible
speech and oralism in the United States. The money he earned from
his patent of the telephone and the sale of his Volta Laboratory patents
helped him to pursue this mission.
Contents
The early years Illustrations of Visible Speech
A fresh take on pronunciation for the deaf
Method
See also
Notes
References
External links
The early years
In 1867, Alexander Melville Bell published the book Visible Speech:
The Science of Universal Alphabetics. This book contains information
about the system of symbols he created that, when used to write
words, indicated pronunciation so accurately, that it could even reflect
chart of English sounds
regional accents.[5] A person reading a piece of text handwritten in
Melville Bell's system of characters could accurately reproduce a
sentence the way it would be spoken by someone with a foreign or
regional accent. In his demonstrations, Melville Bell employed his
son, Alexander Graham Bell to read from the visible speech transcript
of the volunteer's spoken words and would astound the audience by
saying it back exactly as the volunteer had spoken it.
A few samples of the writing system invented by Melville Bell may
be seen in the images on this page. These images depict Melville
Bell's intention of creating a script in which the characters actually
look like the position of the mouth when speaking them out loud. The
system is useful not only because its visual representation mimicks the
physical act of speaking, but because it does so, these symbols may be
used to write words in any language, hence the name "Universal
Alphabetics".[6]
Melville Bell's system was effective at helping deaf people improve
their pronunciation, but his son Graham Bell decided to improve upon
his father's invention by creating a system of writing that was even
more accurate and employed the most advanced technology of the
time.
A fresh take on pronunciation for the deaf
On the Nature and Use of Visible
Alexander Graham Bell later devised another system of visual cues Speech
that also came to be known as visible speech, yet this system did not
use symbols written on paper to teach deaf people how to pronounce
words. Instead, Graham Bell's system, developed at his Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., involved the
use of a spectrogram, a device that makes "visible records of the frequency, intensity, and time analysis of short
samples of speech".[5] The spectrogram translated sounds into readable patterns via a photographic process.
This system was based on the idea that the eye should be able to read patterns of vocalizations in much the
same way that the ear translates these vocalizations into meaning. Modern implementations of Bell's idea
display sound spectra in real time and are used in phonology,[7] speech therapy and computer speech
recognition.
Method
The idea of the use of a spectrograph to translate speech into a visual representation was created in the hopes
of enabling the deaf to use a telephone.[8] If the sounds could be translated into something readable, then a
deaf person at the receiving end could then read out the pattern of speech to determine its meaning without
having to hear what was said. The spectrograph readings could also be used to teach pronunciation by having
a person speak into the spectrograph and watch a small television-like screen to monitor the precision of their
utterances.[8]
See also
International English
Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf
Universal language
Volta Laboratory and Bureau
Hangul
Notes
1. Winzer 1993, pg.192
2. Winzer 1993, pg.193
3. Winzer 1993, pg.194
4. Winzer 1993, pg.195–203
5. Potter, Kopp, and Kopp, 1966. Visible Speech.
6. Melville Bell, 1867. Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics.
7. Myers and Crowhurst, Phonology case studies, University of Texas at Austin 2006 [1] (http://ww
w.laits.utexas.edu/phonology/index.html)
8. Kopp, 1967. Visible Speech Manual.
References
Kopp. Visible Speech Manual, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1967. ISBN HV 2490
K83+
Potter, Kopp, Kopp. Visible Speech, Dover Publications, 1966. ISBN TK 6500 P86 1966.
Bell, Alexander Melville. Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics, Simkin,
Marshall & Co., London, 1867.
Winzer, Margret A. The History Of Special Education: From Isolation To Integration. (https://boo
ks.google.ca/books?id=sXFaytRNneUC) Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993.
ISBN 978-1-56368-018-2.
External links
Visible Speech with IPA equivalents (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/visiblespeech.htm)
(Omniglot.com)
Visible Speech as a Means of Communicating Articulation to Deaf Mutes (http://memory.loc.go
v/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=magbell&fileName=377/37700401/bellpage.db&RecNum=0)
(American Memory: Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers)
Description and Overview of Visible Speech, with fonts (http://web.meson.org/write/vispeech.ph
p)
Visible Speech, by Alex M. Bell through Google books (https://books.google.com/books?pg=P
A13&dq=Visible+Speech&id=EGwKAAAAIAAJ#PPA11,M1)
Primer of Phonetics, by Henry Sweet through Google books. A manual on Sweet's revision of
Visible Speech, Organic Speech (https://books.google.com/books?id=LxcoAAAAMAAJ)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Visible_Speech&oldid=1006000037"
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