Mundbildschrift and Mundbild ;-)

[Sandy Fleming]

On Sun, 2007-05-13 at 22:32 -0600, K.J. Boal wrote:

> I believe I read somewhere that Alexander Graham Bell had actually developed 
> a SpeechWriting type of system, where anyone could look at it and see how 
> the mouth, tongue, nose and even throat worked together to produce sounds.  
> The story goes (if I remember correctly) that he demonstrated this system at 
> some kind of Exhibition; he left the stage while his assistant wrote several 
> suggestions from the audience.  When he came back on stage, he easily read 
> the first few sentences, but he couldn't make sense of the last one.  He 
> started to read the sounds, even though he didn't know what he was doing... 
> and did a perfect impression of wood being sawn!

I read somewhere a long time ago that a lot of people were interested in
AGB's system and tried to learn it from printed materials but only a
very few who managed to get personal tuition from AGB himself were able
to make any progress in learning it.

Far too complicated or just badly documented? I don't know.

As for "sawing wood"-style anecdotes, I imagine that even if AGB's
rendering only reproduced the original sound very crudely it would be
enough to wow the audience, and from then on the story would improve in
the telling!

Sandy