Phonics

“ In ordinary speech, the sound and articulation of a word, although indispensable to utterance, and therefore a necessary part of it, are of little or no value in themselves; for our interest is centered upon the meaning or upon the action which is expected to result from its understanding. We do not attend to the quality and rhythm of the word- sounds which we utter or hear, and the articulatory sensations, although felt, have only a shadowy existence in "the fringe of inattention." But in poetry, which is speech made beautiful, the mere sound of the words has value. ”

“ But in all races it may be surmised that the main determining cause in the first instance is that natural rise and fall of the voice which gives expressiveness and meaning to speech, even though contributory causes arising from the imitative faculty common to man may perhaps be admitted—such as the sound of the wind, the waves of the sea, the cries of animals, the notes of birds, the striking of one object against another, and finally the sounds made by primitive instruments. ”

“ Another class of interjections are such as any one conversant with the gesture-signs of savages and deaf-mutes would recognize as being themselves gesture signs, made with vocal sound, in short, voice-gestures. The sound m’m, m’n, made with the lips closed, is the obvious expression of the man who tries to speak, but cannot. Even the deaf-and-dumb child, though he cannot hear the sound of his own voice, makes this noise to show that he is dumb, that he is mu mu, as the Vei negroes of West Africa would say. To the speaking man, the sound which we write as mum! ”

“ A smooth gliding sound is agreeable, by smoothing the mind and lulling it to rest. A rough bold sound, on the contrary, animates the mind. The effort perceived in pronouncing, is communicated to the hearers: they feel in their own minds a similar effort,{246} which rouses their attention and disposes them to action. I must add another consideration. The agreeableness of contrast in the rougher language, for which the great variety of sounds gives ample opportunity, must, even in an effeminate ear, prevail over the more uniform sounds of the smoother language [76] . ”

“ A good reader or speaker will vary his or her voice in the elements of emotional expression (that is, pitch, quality, movement, stress, force) , on words, phrases, and sentences, in such a manner that the listeners get a suggestion of the meaning of a word by the sound of it. For instance, the words bright, glad, joyful, dull, sad, weak, may be pronounced in such a manner as to suggest by the quality of voice used their meaning; and, in the same manner, phrases and whole sentences may have variation in voice so as to suggest their meaning. This is modulation. ”

“ They are not addressed to any one, they are merely overheard, if heard at all, as the bark of a dog, the sound of approaching footsteps, or the rustling of the wind is heard. If they convey certain ideas to the hearer, it is only in the very general sense in which any and every sound or even any phenomenon in our environment may be said to convey an idea to the perceiving mind. ”

“ Sever such relations between sound and idea by the separate consideration of each in scientific analysis, and you reach the inartistic or analytic conception of prose as the proper instrument of reflection and totally unconnected with poetic form—you Aristotelise your prose; and poetry, so far as it depends on the harmony of sound and idea, vanishes before a "philosophic" contempt which would ridicule or deny altogether the subtle relations of sound and idea in the languages of social groups. ”

“ Through attention paid to the sympathetic sensations of tone, the listener may carry on mentally a running commentary on the throat actions of all those whose voices are heard. Continuing to use the word empirical in the sense thus far adopted, it may be said that the summary of the impressions conveyed in the sympathetic sensations of tone constitutes empirical knowledge of the voice. In other words, empirical knowledge of the voice is an understanding of the operations of the vocal mechanism, obtained through the attentive listening to voices. ”

“ We may, however, include under the head of interjections those instinctive cries uttered by men when engaged in a common work, to which Professor Noiré would trace all roots whatsoever. [66] The sense of life and power that makes the child shout or the bird sing, and is the ultimate motive of human speech, causes us to beat time by the help of rhythmical utterances. And though the utterance be but a monotonous sing-song, it becomes a symbol and sign of the action it accompanies to all those who have taken part in it, and in course of time may pass into a word. ”

“ For the human voice is emotionally expressive through its mere sound alone: one can know a large part of what is going on in the breasts of people who talk in a foreign tongue just by listening to the sound of their voices—their excitement or boredom, their anger, love, or resentment; and one becomes conscious of these emotions, as in hearing music, without knowing what they are all about. ”

“ When we give a name to anything harsh or boisterous we, of course, use a harsh or boisterous sound, the better to describe our meaning. By the use of such words as express such sounds we convey the ideas intended to be expressed. It is purely natural to imitate, by the sound of the voice, the quality of the sound or noise which any external object makes, and to form its name accordingly. In every language will be found a multitude of words constructed upon this principle. We call a certain bird a cuckoo because of the peculiar sound which he emits. ”

“ I desire you to speak, little one. If I can believe in the illusion of flesh and eager eyes, then I can believe in the illusion of sound. Come speak. I am at the mercy of my madness. If you speak to me, little one, I will understand. My stupid senses that retain their earthly logic will be ravished at the sound of your voice. ”

“ Thus the feeling of sound develops into the sense of hearing, which is the sense of causation; for the primordial ego, in the race and in the individual alike, first cognizes causation as speech and distinguishes it from force, for it can cause another to act by speech and it is conscious that it can be caused to act by speech. ”

“ The same conditions prevail with vocal utterance. Thought makes the impression; the æther, passing through its narrowed passages at a rate as swift as thought, creates the sound. The impression is made as thought progresses, the expression as sound progresses. While the impression is thoughtful, the expression is thoughtless. While we think for a sound during the impression, we do not think for it during its expression ”

“ And while effusive utterance is always the prevalent mode, it will give place to the expulsive mode or to the explosive, when energy of thought or force of passion requires it so.
Thus, as the diction rises from plain discourse to the language of feeling, the appropriate vocal expression gathers intensity and becomes more varied, assumes, as may be said, brighter colors and displays greater contrasts; and so, in the third class of diction, the diction of passion, it displays its intensest and most vivid modes—its brightest colors, its deepest contrasts. ”

“ It is necessary at the outset to insist on this fact of the speaker’s unconsciousness, both of the elements of sound which make up the word, and of the movements of his vocal organs; for, once fully grasped, it will guard against an error which is too prevalent, viz. that sound-change is the result of conscious volition in those who speak. ”

“ This we produce when we please by the spoken word, the vocal utterance, whether of speech, or musical note, or inarticulate cry, varied as we please, high, low, loud, soft—a complete alphabet of expression, conveying thus by signals, at once rapid and significant, the varying moods and phases of our inner life to other beings that had else been strangers, for the most part, to the thoughts and feelings which agitate our bosoms. ”

“ The Third Study should have convinced you that a sense of good humor is a safe and desirable thing to cultivate; that the whimsical tone in interpretation will leaven almost any lump of sheer learning and counteract a serious overdose of sentiment; that fable, fairy tale, and nonsense rhyme depend too for successful interpretation upon this element of whimsicality in the reader; that the secret of the whimsical element in vocal expression lies in a use of pause and inflection. ”

“ From these examples, the attentive reader must have already remarked that the tumultuous rush of words frequently results from the merest resemblance in sound. Not seldom does the riot of words degenerate into paltry quibbling, into the silliest pun, into the automatic association of words according to their sound, without regard to their meaning. ”

“ In poetry, as we have found already in our general differentiation of the several arts, tone is not as such elicited and artistically produced by various humanly constructed instruments, but the articulate sound of the human organ of speech is reduced to the mere symbol of speech, retaining thereby nothing more than the value of a sign of ideas, which is by itself devoid of significance. ”

“ After a time men discovered that all the sounds of the human voice were really decomposable into a very few and that all human speech, consisting as it does of combinations of these sounds, could be represented by combinations of simple phonograms each of which should represent neither an idea nor a syllable but one of the primary sounds. ”

“ Rightly understood, it is the following of nature. Its value is that it emphasizes the constancy of this one of the constant factors in voice. Its result is a certain kind and degree of monotony; without that particular kind of monotony the voice is faulty. When the tone is forced out of its proper place, it is dissipated and more or less lost. A student once told the writer, when complimented on the good placement of his voice, that he learned this in his summer employment as a public crier at the door of a show tent. ”

“ The expressiveness of these various modifications of voice is therefore innate. Each of us, from babyhood upwards, has been spontaneously making them, when under the various sensations and emotions by which they are produced. Having been conscious of each feeling at the same time that we heard ourselves make the consequent sound, we have acquired an established association of ideas between such sound and the feeling which caused it. ”

“ Strike, and what is designed for utterance gives forth the appropriate volume of sound while other parts take the blow in silence but react in their own especial movement; the total of all the utterance and action and receptivity constitutes what we may call the personal voice, life and history of the living form. ”

“ The impression made by the singing-teacher's voice is of the same order as that made upon the deaf by the features of their instructor which are representative of his voice. We are living, breathing phonographs. Every impression we receive through any of our senses must be made in a material manner before it can have [Pg 91] its immaterial expression. We engrave upon living tissue, instead of on rubber or wax. ”

“ I speak with many voices through my mouth, sing with modulated notes: often I change my voice, I cry aloud, I hold my melody, nor do I refrain from laughter. Aged bard of the evening, I bring to men joy in cities when I cry with varying voice; they sit in silence, quiet in the dwellings. Say what my name is who, like a female jester, loudly mimic a player’s song, announce to men many welcome things with my voice. ”

“ But if we admit this, it is clear that one could easily speak to the deaf by means of music; for tone and measure are no less capable of regular combination than voice and articulation, so that they might be used as the elements of speech. ”

“ The quality of voice, its purity or harshness, its aspiration, &c., will vary with the kind of feeling; the degree of force will vary according to the intensity of feeling; the pitch will be according to what we may call the height or depth of your feeling; the movement, or time, will be according as the emotion is quick or slow. After having cultivated the voice well in these elements of emotional expression, your own common sense ought to be your best guide in the application of them to reading and speaking. You, for the time being, should be the author of what you read. ”

“ I have no doubt that in a remoter antiquity the roots of language were regarded as sacred, and when chanted every letter was supposed to stir into motion or evoke some subtle force in the body. Tone and word combined we know will thrill the nervous system, and this is specially so with lovers of music and persons whose virgin sensitiveness of feeling has never been blunted by excess. ”

“ A phonograph, for example, is a very coarse parallel, in which the vibrations of sound translate themselves first into terms of wax, and then re-emerge again as vibrations when certain conditions are fulfilled.
“Or, secondly, you may be old-fashioned and simple, and say that by some law, vast and inexorable, beyond our perception, the personal spirit of the very man is chained to the place, and forced to expiate his sin again and again, year by year, by attempting to express his grief and to seek forgiveness, without the possibility of receiving it. ”

“ The first thing to cultivate, in order to open the vocal organs and free them from all hindrances, is the disposition to impart to others what the mind has seen. To be interested in the subject is not sufficient; it is the desire to impart which will open the vocal organs, free them and give them nerve energy.
SMOOTHNESS OF VOICE. The second chapter in this volume is Smoothness of Voice. When the mind of the speaker is steadily concentrated upon the thought for the exclusive purpose of causing other minds to act upon it, the tones under the repetition of drill gradually tend to evenness. ”