Visible Speech

VisibleSpeech-illustrations

VisibleSpeech-Englishchart

VisibleSpeech-nature&use

Visible Speech is a system of phonetic notation devised by Alexander Melville Bell in 1867. It is a unique system designed to represent the position of the speech organs in articulating sounds. Alexander Melville Bell, a teacher of elocution and the father of Alexander Graham Bell, developed Visible Speech to help with the instruction of deaf individuals in speaking and reading lips. The system was revolutionary in its approach to representing all human sounds visually, making it a universal notation system that could be used across different languages and dialects.

Overview

Visible Speech consists of a set of symbols that represent the position and movement of the throat, tongue, and lips to produce different sounds. Unlike the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which was developed later and is widely used today, Visible Speech was designed not only to transcribe the sounds of languages but also to visually demonstrate how those sounds are produced. This aspect of Visible Speech makes it particularly valuable for teaching pronunciation and for linguistic research in phonetics.

Development and Application

Alexander Melville Bell's motivation for creating Visible Speech was primarily educational. He sought a method to teach deaf students how to speak and read lips more effectively. The system was also used to document and study the sounds of various languages, including those that were poorly understood or under-documented at the time. Bell's work with Visible Speech led him to travel extensively, giving lectures and demonstrations of his system in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.

Despite its initial success and the interest it generated among educators and linguists, Visible Speech was eventually overshadowed by the IPA. The IPA offered a more straightforward approach to phonetic transcription that was easier for most people to learn and use. However, the principles behind Visible Speech influenced the development of phonetic notation and the study of linguistics.

Components

The symbols of Visible Speech represent three main aspects of sound production: the position of the speech organs, the type of sound produced (such as voiced or voiceless, nasal or oral), and the manner of articulation (such as plosive, fricative, or approximant). Each symbol is a visual abstraction of the articulatory process it represents, making the system intuitive once the basic principles are understood.

Legacy

Although Visible Speech is no longer widely used, its legacy persists in the fields of phonetics, linguistics, and speech therapy. It introduced the concept of visually representing speech sounds, which has influenced the development of other phonetic alphabets and tools for speech instruction. Additionally, Alexander Graham Bell's work on Visible Speech contributed to his own experiments with sound transmission and eventually the invention of the telephone.

See Also

• Phonetics
• Linguistics
• Alexander Graham Bell
• International Phonetic Alphabet