Speech Sounds Quotes

When we, as humans, articulate, our tongues tend to hit the back of the teeth.

I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.

Speech sounds can be analyzed into fundamental units called phonemes; these move around like protozoa in a drop of water, and, like protozoa, join together and split up.

[On the United States:] A nation which does not appreciate that the simple elocution exercise 'Merry Mary married hairy Harry' contains not one but three vowel sounds.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

I've always been very in tune to my voice and to other people's voices and how they express themselves vocally. And I always loved accents and dialects - I collected them like stamps.

In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.

Physicist is both to my mouth and ears so awkward that I think I shall never use it. The equivalent of three separate sounds of "I" in one word is too much.

Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.

It is not speech or tool making that distinguishes us from other animals, it is imagination....Of what use are speech sounds and tools without an inspiration toward perfectibility, without a sense that we can create or construct a history.

The best scheme of Phonetics is a stiff uncertain thing.

From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds.

Diphthongs are indicated by combinations of hooks and circles.

Saying certain letters without moving my mouth is tough... like B, P and W, you know.

I'm going to say a phrase or terminology or vowel that I don't know how to attack .

Out of the simple consonants of the alphabet and our eleven vowels and diphthongs all possible syllables of a certain sort were constructed, a vowel sound being placed between two consonants.

The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.

Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.