Word-Palatograms and Articulation

T HE 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. Phonetic listening rests on a general psycho-physical basis, and on the nature and nurture (including the technical training) of the individual observer. He is usually aware of the limitations of this technique. The alphabetic notation employed does not rest mainly on modern acoustic and physiological categories but largely on fictions, some of them very ancient, set up by grammatical theory and adapted for the statement of the findings by listening and looking, and by reference to the sense of posture and movement of the listener.