Parsing Visible Speech

chapter 6 Parsing Visible Speech Th is chapter examines the experimental phonetic script known as “Vis- ible Speech,” developed by Alexander Melville Bell in the late 1860s and adapted by Isawa Shūji (1851–1917)1 for Japa nese national and colonial education between the late 1870s and 1910s. From its inception in En- glish, Visible Speech was intended as an aid to the deaf, stammerers, and other verbally disabled persons. Created in advance of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), Visible Speech sought to restore proper enun- ciation to the speech impaired through a new graphic script that Bell believed literally mapped onto the parts of the mouth, throat, and vocal cords. In an era of manual recording and transmission prior to mechani- cal devices such as the telephone that his son invented, Bell averred that Visible Speech provided the most phonetically and phonographically precise script the world had ever known. Arguably, however, it was not Melville Bell or Graham Bell, but Isawa who disseminated it most widely and came closest to applying it on any signifi cant scale. In its adaptation, he further demonstrated the extent to which experimental scripts that originated in the Anglophone world were integrated into the ambit of Japa nese modernity. 1. Isawa romanized his name as Isawa Shuje, which is also sometimes written as Izawa. I have followed contemporary usage. 144 Scripting National Language Alexander Melville Bell and the Human Speaking Machine Visible Speech was unquestionably Melville Bell’s major life’s work, but it was not his only eff ort at script reform. In the late 1880s, he created a modifi ed alphabet called “World- English,“which promised to be more of a compromise script when Visible Speech failed to take hold on a large scale. In an appeal to the printing industry on both sides of the Atlantic, Bell dedicated Visible Speech and World- English to “Conductors of the Press [who] have the power of greatly facilitating the object of this work, by making it known; or of retarding it, by simply ignoring the eff ort. Opposition is not to be looked for from any quarter.”2 He also wrote shorthand manuals such as Pop u lar Shorthand or Steno- Phonography (1892). Although he admitted that Visible Speech could not compete with shorthand in terms of speed, Bell maintained its phonetic accuracy su- perseded Pitman’s and other shorthand methods. In this way, Bell located his work on script reform squarely in the commercial and practical domain, as well as the utopian. Notwithstanding his considerable stature in nineteenth- century language and script reform, Melville Bell has been largely forgotten by modern linguistics. Of course he is hardly alone in this respect— Isaac Pitman, Alexander John Ellis, and other prominent phoneticists, orthog- raphers, and artifi cial language planners of the same era have similarly been marginalized. My concern here is less for Melville Bell’s restoration to glory, however, than to provide the necessary historical context to un- derstand how and why Isawa embraced this script with the enthusiasm of a religious convert, and in turn wanted to use it to advance Japan’s own imperial policies in the home islands, Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, and elsewhere. Th ere is an implicit yet widely shared conceit that En glish and a handful of other major Eu ro pean languages became fi xed in their modern forms by the mid- nineteenth century, and hence it was only the late modernizing states such as Japan that had to deal with language reform. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities diff erentiates between waves 2. Alexander Melville Bell, Prologue, World- English..

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