Speech is one of the marvels that characterize man, and also one of the most difficult spontaneous creations that have been accomplished by nature.
It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.
Breathing is fundamental to speech. A stammer is caused by erratic airflow, so if you have a smooth airflow, you have smooth speech.
Whatever doubt there may be as to the quality or purpose of our free speech we certainly have ample volumes in production.
When we, as humans, articulate, our tongues tend to hit the back of the teeth.
When I use my vocal cords, it kind of feels like what it feels like when you put your shoes on the wrong foot.
As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36)
Every word we speak calls on 37 muscles and thousands of nerves. It's not surprising that sometimes these nerves and muscles fail us.
The voice is a human sound which nothing inanimate can perfectly imitate. It has an authority and an insinuating property which writing lacks. It is not merely so much air, but air modulated and impregnated with life.
The natural habitat of the tongue is the left cheek.
'Particularly' is particularly difficult because the 'L' and the 'R' are totally different, like totally different letters. I would spend hours in front of the mirror with my dialect coach to observe my tongue. You don't think, when you speak, about all the things that happen in your jaw and your mouth, how everything reacts, so you have to watch all those things and realise we have a totally different use of our tongue and jaws.
For me, speaking is work. It's not like when you breathe.
The only way a ventriloquist speaks differently is that he forgoes using his or her lips, and learns to reproduce sounds using the tongue, upper palate, and teeth only. Those 'difficult' letters are B, F, M, P, V, W, and Y.
Books are mute as far as sound is concerned. It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two 'languages.' It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves.
But it's very technical and you really have to work and work and work to crack it. It's about using your whole face, jaw and tongue in a totally different way. It was very interesting - I love the English language, which made it easier.
To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.
The tongue is the only muscle in the human body that never gets tired [talking].
Our brains are way, way more complex than any computer we know how to make. They're way more creative. The input's pretty good, but the output is constrained by our tongues and jaws moving and us typing.
When you stop to examine the way in which our words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard-put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins.
A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.
Suppose we think while we talk or write--I mean, as we normally do--we shall not in general say that we think quicker than we talk, but the thought seems not to be separate from the expression.
Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.
She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.
Instead of following one another the sounds overlap; a sound which is acoustically perceived as coming after another one can be articulated simultaneously with the latter or even in part before it.
The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.
