Teeth as part of the vocal tract
« previous post | next post »
The oral cavity is one section of the vocal tract. Along with the tongue, lips, and hard and soft palates, the teeth help to form different types of speech sounds. If any one of these components is missing or deformed, it will have a pronounced (!) effect on speech production.
Two days ago, I met an older man, probably about sixty, whose teeth were highly irregular, and he was missing about half of his teeth, with gaps here and there.
It was clear to me that the man was in no way deficient in intelligence, and that he was actually knowledgeable and articulate. Problem was, he had difficulty making all the sounds he needed to express himself. It was also evident that he was trying to compensate for the missing vocal components of his mouth.
As a thoughtful, sensitive, creative listener, after a while, I got used to what aspects of his pronunciation were missing or altered, and it gradually became easier for me to understand what he was saying.
In the Chuang Tzu / Zhuangzi (Wandering on the Way), there's a character whose name I translated as "Gnaw Gap". I wonder if he was missing some teeth.
Selected readings
- "Ambling, shambling, rambling, wandering, wondering: the spirit of Master Zhuang / Chuang" (7/21/21)
- "Mosey" (7/19/21)
- "Goblet word" (5/30/20)
- Mair, Victor H., tr. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998; first ed. New York: Bantam, 1994); also available as Zhuangzi Bilingual Edition, translated by Victor H. Mair (English) and Minci Li (Modern Chinese) (Columbus: The Ohio State University Foreign Language Publications, production of the National East Asian Languages Resource Center, OSU, 2019) — this is actually a trilingual edition, since the 736 pages volume also includes the original Classical Chinese version.
Neil Kubler said,
September 22, 2024 @ 4:53 pm
For a large-scale (200 speakers) dialect survey of the Pescadores/Penghu archipelago that I began in the 1970s and which is ongoing today with the 3rd generation, my original plan had been to work with informants in their 90s or high 80s, since I thought their speech would be more representative of the "original" dialects. However, it was teeth (or lack thereof and consequent unclear pronunciation) that turned out to be the biggest problem! Other problems included the time-consuming social niceties required for each candidate (first a courtesy call and present prior to a possible working session) plus the fact that the older generation did not easily catch on as to why a foreigner would want to know how to say the word for "sky" in their subdialect. I ended up working with sixth graders and junior high school students at schools throughout the islands, who immediately understood what I was trying to do and were very helpful.