The disorders of speech.

  • Wyllie, John, 1914-
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The disorders of speech. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    man, who had understood all his remarks by the method of lip- reading. In this country, many cases have already been successfully taught by this method; but it is universally admitted that success has hitherto not been so great as it has been in Germany. The reason alleged is that the English language is not so well fitted for lip- reading as the German is. There can be no doubt that the chief difficulty in regard to English is, not that the sounds of the words are more difficult of pronunciation, but that the spelling of the M-ords has departed so widely from their sounds. The spelling, in English, is now far from being strictly phonetic, whereas in German it still continues to be almost strictly so. The deaf-mute can thus read a German word correctly if he has mastered the phonetic values of the component letters. Knowing the letter- sounds well, he can even practise reading aloud by himself with- out much danger of falling into errors of pronunciation. It is very different with the English deaf-mute. Even a person not deaf (say a foreigner), in learning English, finds the spelling of the words no sure guide to their pronunciation. What then must be the difficulties of a deaf-mute, who cannot always have a tutor at his elbow, to show him, by lip-reading, how each word is pro- nounced ? In America, this difficulty has been grappled with in a special way. It appears that, in some of the American insti- tutions, Melville Bell's system of visible speech has been adopted, this system having an alphabet (altogether different from the ordinary one) in which each letter has a definite phonetic significa- tion. In this country attempts are made to get over the difficulty by phonetic spelling. But I do not think that phonetic spelling has been made so accurate and easy of comprehension as it might be made. In particular, I think it would probably be of great advantage to deaf-mutes to have a phonetic alphabet in which the relationships of one vowel to another, and of one consonant to another, are clearly displayed. If such a Physiological Alphabet as I have given in the first paper were adopted for the teach- ing of deaf-mutes, each letter would have a definite phonetic signification, so that words spelt phonetically by it might be read with ease by the deaf-mute, if only he had previously mastered the individual letter-sounds. In order to adapt this Physiological Alphabet to the teaching of deaf-mutes, it would be necessary to write the vowel-sounds in such a way as to enable the deaf-mute T