Visible Speech Is Also Known As the Physiological Alphabet

Visible Speech

Origins

Visible Speech is a writing system invented in 1867 by Alexander Melville Bell, father of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. Melville Bell was a teacher of the deaf and intended his writing system to help deaf students learn spoken language.

Visible Speech was also the first notation system for the sounds of speech independent of a particular language or dialect and was widely used to teaching students how to speak with a "standard" accent.

Visible Speech symbols are intended to provide visual representations of the positions the organs of speech need to be in to articulate individual sounds. Once the underlying principles are understood it is apparently fairly straightforward.

Visible Speech is also known as the Physiological Alphabet.

Visible Speech with IPA equivalents

IPA charts with Visible Speech symbols

Visible Speech for English

Alexander Melville Bell's original Visible Speech chart

Sample text in Visible Speech

Transliteration

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Visible Speech charts and sample text provided by Joseph Pickett

Links

Information about Visible Speech
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_Speech
http://web.meson.org/write/vispeech.php

Free Visible Speech fonts
http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_VisibleSpeechCSUR.html

Proposal for encoding Visible Speech in Unicode
http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/visible-speech.html

Other phonetic alphabets

Benjamin Franklin's Phonetic Alphabet, Dialectal Paleotype, International Phonetic Alphabet, Pitman Initial Teaching Alphabet, Unifon, Visible Speech

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In phonology, a diphthong, pronounced /ˈdɪf.θɒŋ/ or /ˈdɪp.θɒŋ/, (also gliding vowel) (from Greek δίφθογγος, diphthongos, literally "two sounds" or "two tones") refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. In most dialects of English, the words eye, boy, and cow contain examples of diphthongs.

Diphthongs contrast with monophthongs, where only one vowel sound is heard in a syllable. Where two adjacent vowel sounds occur in different syllables, as in, for example, the English word re-elect, the result is described as hiatus, not as a diphthong.

Diphthongs often form when separate vowels are run together in rapid speech during a conversation. However, there are also unitary diphthongs, as in the English examples above, which are heard by listeners as single-vowel sounds (phonemes).[1]

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, pure vowels are transcribed with one letter, as in English sun [sʌn]. Diphthongs are transcribed with two letters, as in English sign [saɪ̯n] or sane [seɪ̯n]. The two vowel symbols are chosen to represent the beginning and ending positions of the tongue, though this can be only approximate. The diacritic ̯> is placed under the less prominent component to show that it is part of a diphthong rather than a separate vowel, though it is sometimes omitted in languages such as English, where there is not likely to be any confusion. (In precise transcription, [ai] represents two vowels in hiatus, found for example in Hawaiian and in the English word naïve, and does not represent the diphthong, for instance, in the Finnish word laiva, "ship").