Page:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu/481

Rh pronounce it, as far as possible, apart from its context; and to preserve it unchanged through every variation of length and force, and in every combination of sounds. The next step is to analyse its formation. Let the student, for instance, compare the two consonants in such a word as five by isolating and lengthening them till he can both hear and feel the voice-vibration in the second one. In the same way let him learn to feel the changes in the position of the tongue and lips in passing from one vowel to another. When the native sounds have been thoroughly studied in this way, the learner will proceed to foreign sounds, deducing each new sound from those which are already familiar to him.

The natural method of learning sounds is mainly a subjective one We listen patiently till our ears are steeped, as it were, in the sound; and then, after repeated trials, we hit on the exact position of the organs of speech by which we can reproduce the sound to the speaker's satisfaction. But the natural method admits also of objective control and criticism of the movements of the lips and Jaws by direct observation. The movements and positions of the tongue and soft palate, and other modifications of the mouth and throat passages are also more or less accessible to observation in the case of self-observation with the help of a small mirror held in the hand. If the mirror is small enough to go into the mouth, and is fixed obliquely to a handle, so that it can be held against the back of the mouth at such an angle as to reflect a ray of light down the throat, we have the laryngoscope. Laryngoscopy has confirmed earlier results, and has also added to our knowledge of the throat sounds. But, on the other hand, it has been a fruitful source of error. There has been great discrepancy between the results obtained by different observers; and many results which were at first received with implicit confidence for their supposed rigorously scientific and objective character have been found to be worthless. It seemed at first as if Rontgen's discovery of the so-called X-rays would meet the want of a means of direct observation of the positions of the tongue, not lengthways, but from the side, as also of the interior of the throat. But although the cheeks are to a certain extent transparent to these rays, the shadow of the tongue projected on the screen is too indistinct to be of any use.

But there are other methods besides those of direct observation by which the positions of the tongue may be objectively determined and measured with more or less accuracy. The interior of the mouth may be explored by the fingers. If the little finger is held against the gums during the articulation of the vowels in it, ate, at, the difference in the height of the tongue will at once become apparent in the formation of the first vowel the tongue is pressed strongly against the artificial palate, while in that of the second it only just touches it, and in that of the third it does not touch at all

Several forms of apparatus have been devised for a more accurate determination of the positions of the tongue and the other movable organs of speech. The best results hitherto as regards the vowel-positions have been obtained by Grandgent, who uses disks of cardboard of various sizes fixed to silver wires. A full description of this and other methods will be found in Scripture's Elements of Experimental Phonetics.

There are other methods whose results are obtained only indirectly. The simplest of these are the palatographic, by which are obtained “palatograms” recording the contact of the tongue with the palate. The apparatus most generally used consists of a thin, shell-like artificial palate, which is covered with chalk and placed in the mouth; when the sound is made, the articulation of the tongue is inferred from the contact-marks on the plate. This method is evidently limited in its application. It, too, has the drawback of not being applicable to the sounds formed in the back of the mouth. The outlines of palatograms are much vaguer than they appear in the published drawings of them; and it is a question whether the thickness even of the thinnest plate does not modify the record.

The methods hitherto considered are all comparatively simple. They require no special knowledge or training, and are accessible to all. But there are more elaborate methods—with which the name “experimental phonetics” is more specially connected—involving special training in practical and theoretical physics and mathematics, and requiring the help of often complicated and costly, and not easily accessible, apparatus. The investigation of the speech curves of phonograph and gramophone records is a typical example. Good examples of these methods are afforded by E. A. Mever's investigations of vowel-quantity in English (Englische Lautdauer, Uppsala, 1903). Their characteristic feature is their delicacy, and the minuteness of their distinctions, which often go beyond the range of the human ear. Although their results are often of value, they must always be received with caution: the sources of error are so numerous.

The claims of instrumental phonetics have been so prominently brought forward of late years that they can no longer be ignored, even by the most conservative of the older generation of phoneticians. But it is possible to go too far the other way. Some of the younger generation seem to think that the instrumental methods have superseded the natural ones in the same way as the Arabic superseded the Roman numerals. This assumption has had disastrous results. It cannot be too often repeated that instrumental phonetics is, strictly speaking, not phonetics at all. It is only a help. it only supplies materials which are useless till they have been tested and accepted from the linguistic phonetician's point of view. The final arbiter in all phonetic questions is the trained ear of a practical phonetician: differences which cannot be perceived must—or at least may be—-ignored; what contradicts the trained ear cannot be accepted.

Sound-Notation; Spelling Reform.—Next to the analysis of the sounds themselves, the most important problem of phonetics is their representation by means of written and printed symbols. The traditional or “nomic” orthographies of most languages are only imperfectly phonetic. And, unfortunately, of the languages in most general use, two are exceptionally unphonetic in their orthographies, French showing the greatest divergence between sound and symbol, while English shows the maximum of irregularity and arbitrariness. The German orthography is comparatively phonetic: it has hardly any silent letters, and it generally has one symbol for each sound, each symbol having only one value, the exceptions falling under a few simple rules, which are easily remembered. There are other languages which have still more phonetic orthographies, such as Spanish, Welsh and Finnish. But even the best of them are not perfect: even when they are not actually misleading, they are always inadequate. On the other hand, no system of writing is wholly unphonetic. Even in French and English there are many words whose spelling not even the most radical reformer would think of altering. In fact, all writing which has once emerged from the hieroglyphic stage is at first purely phonetic, as far as its defective means will allow. The divergence between sound and symbol which makes spelling unphonetic is the result of the retention of phonetic spellings after they have become unphonetic through changes in the pronunciation of the words themselves. Thus, such English spelling as knight and wright were still phonetic in the time of Chaucer; for at that time the initial consonants of these words were still pronounced, and the gh still had the sound of ch in German ich. So also see and sea are written differently, not by way of arbitrary distinction, but because they were pronounced differently till within the last few centuries—as they still are in Irish-English.

Where there is no traditional orthography, as when Old English (Anglo-Saxon) was first written down in Latin letters, spelling was necessarily phonetic; but where there is a large literature and a class of professional scribes, the influence of the traditional orthography becomes stronger, till at last the invention of printing and the diffusion of one standard dialect over a large area occupied originally by a variety of other dialects make changes of spelling as inconvenient as they were once easy and natural. The ideal orthography for printers is one which is absolutely uniform over the whole territory of the language, and absolutely unchangeable. In such orthographies as those of the present English and French there is no longer any living correspondence between sound and symbol: they are, in intention at least, wholly unphonetic; they are preserved by graphic, not by oral, tradition.

But unphoneticness has its practical limits. A purely unphonetic degradation of an originally phonetic system of writing—one in which there is absolutely no correspondence between sounds and letters—could not be mastered even by the most retentive memory: it would be even more difficult than the Chinese writing. Hence a phonetic reaction is inevitable. In the middle ages the spelling was periodically readjusted in accordance with the changes of pronunciation-as far, of course, as the imperfections of the existing orthography would allow. This adjustment went on even after the introduction of printing. In fact, it is only within the last hundred years or so that the orthographies of English and French have become fixed. One result of this fixity is that any attempt to continue the process of adjustment assumes a revolutionary character. When, in 1849, the pioneers of the modern spelling-reform