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From:
Stefan Woehrmann Date: Sun Oct 1, 2000 10:49 pm Subject: Re: cued speech and SW flash-cards | ||||||||
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Hi Joe, thank you for your echo !! Reading your message the third time - I get the feeling, that I am not good at explaining. I apologize ;-) But Joe- I like the system and it seems to become a major improvement - So I would like to explain it again. Hm - you know - Iīm not a linguist and when I discussed this issue with Valerie at the phone we had fun. Itīs funny to try to compare the sounds of a language with the sounds of another language. When I offered my face -symbols the first time I had the idea it might help to add english words that would include sounds that come very close to the ones I had in my mind. Valerie laughed aloud when I demonstrated my voiceless or voiced sounds ha ha -- And she told me that many of my english examples wouldnīt fit ! Well - let me put it this way. If you close your mouth and "say" mmmmmmmm while the air is streaming out of your nose - you can hear a sound - I call it M - It is voiced - with voice . My students put their hands at my larynx in order to feel the vibrations that occur. Now let us look at the P - itīs a plosive- loud - you can do it only once - the air is streaming out of your mouth if you open your lips - no e no a - just this "voiceless " hard P, no vibrations at the larynx - I write the streaming lines (constructed these faces myself with SW 4.3) In contrary to that you have the soft B with sound - so no streaming lines - but vibrations for a short time same with T and D same with K and G Listen to your LLLL, NNNNN or A what about S In German there is a voiced S and a sharp voiceless ss or ß voiced S you feel the vibrations - therefore no streaming lines voiceless sharp ss no vibrations but streaminglines (I made a new gif - just in case it would help to understand) My idea is to invent symbols that allow my kids to read out loud German words without looking at the graphems. German isnīt spoken as it is written and it sounds pretty strange to hearing ears if you articulate every "er" or "E" or ... or ... So what I try to do is to offer "signals" that help my students to remember their triumph when they managed to perform a wonderfull "st" "ai" "au" P(h) b(e) t(h) and so forth. What really fascinates me most - itīs kind of fun - is that the whole group accepts these faces as what I meant them to be - information about how to articulate. I went on and wrote all the numbers from one to 20 with faces like these ! Puh - you canīt imagine how much the pronounciation improved - compared to reading the German words of the numbers ! Itīs hard to believe - The other point is that my son Johannes even reads completely unknown sentences without any effort if they are written with these new signs. So - it seems that Iīm on my way to create a wonderfull instrument ;-) Thanks for your attention Stefan ;-) ----- Original Message ----- From: joe martin To: Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2000 8:29 PM Subject: Re: cued speech and SW flash-cards > Hi Stephan; > I'm totally amazed by your work. (as usual) I've been thinking abut these > face symbols, and I have a question. When I look at the mouth with air > streaming out of it, to me that says "aspiration." Voicing seems to me to > be associated with the vocal cords, as you describe with your "lock" symbol. > and I think aspiration isn't important in German, just as it isn't in > English?? > My viewpoint is that of a hearing linguist, so it is worlds away from what > your "little teachers" are seeing. I remember having a terrible time > figuring out what was meant by voiced/ voicless. Still, I wonder about > this; do you use both the air and the lock symbol? Is it confusing to have > air-out for voicing? > Mostly, I'm just amazed at what you are accomplishing. Exciting, isn't it?? > > Joe > ---------------- > | ||||||||
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