Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
THE purpose of these notes is to suggest a new approach in the study of articulation with the aid of palatography.
The language material studied consists of words in English, Marathi, Burmese, Chinese, and Fijian uttered for the purpose by native speakers of the languages, trained to work with artificial palates.
It must constantly be borne in mind that utterances are events, not facts. The finding and the stating of the facts are the business of the phonetician. He attempts this by means of a set of correlated techniques each one of which makes its own specialized abstractions from the utterances. The findings are stated in the technical syntax and idiom of the discipline, employing categories and notations required by the conceptual framework.
page 857 note 1 See Scott, N. C., “ The Monosyllable in Szechuanese ”, BSOAS., Vol. XII, Part 1 (1947)Google Scholar, and Henderson, Eugénie, “ Notes on the Syllable Structure of Lushai ”, pp. 713–725 of this volume.Google Scholar
page 858 note 1 See Carnochan, J., “ A Study in the Phonology of an Igbo Speaker ”, BS0AS., Vol. XII, Part 2 (1948).Google Scholar
page 858 note 2 See Potter, Kopp, and Green, Visible Speech (Van Nostrand, New York, 1947)Google Scholar, an important work for all phoneticians. It is a descendant of Melville Bell's Visible Speech and of the invention of the telephone by his son, Graham Bell. See my “ English School of Phonetics ”, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1946, pp. 98, 127 ff.Google Scholar
page 858 note 3 See Panooncelli-Calzia, Die experimentelle Phonetik in ihrer Anwendung auf die Sprachwissenschaft, 1924, pp. 69 et seq.Google Scholar
page 858 note 4 See fig. 22.
page 859 note 1 Carnochan, J., “ A Study in the Phonology of an Igbo Speaker ”, BS0AS., Vol. XII, (1948), pp. 417–426Google Scholar
page 859 note 2 See Sweet, Primer of Phonetics, p. 40Google Scholar. He also suggested nine cardinal positions as a system of reference for the scientific description of vowels. See Ibid., p. 15.
page 860 note 1 See Fig. 3, which shows a palate dusted with French chalk and untouched. The reference lines were added on the photograph.