The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert MacyKeller, Helen
General
The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert Macy
Keller, Helen
Deafblind women -- United States -- Biography; Keller, Helen, 1880-1968
The principal thing that is lacking is sentence accent and variety
in the inflection of phrases. Miss Keller pronounces each word as
a foreigner does when he is still labouring with the elements of a
sentence, or as children sometimes read in school when they have to pick
out each word.
She speaks French and German. Her friend, Mr. John Hitz, whose native
tongue is German, says that her pronunciation is excellent. Another
friend, who is as familiar with French as with English, finds her French
much more intelligible than her English. When she speaks English she
distributes her emphasis as in French and so does not put sufficient
stress on accented syllables. She says for example, "pro-vo-ca-tion,"
"in-di-vi-du-al," with ever so little difference between the value of
syllables, and a good deal of inconsistency in the pronunciation of the
same word one day and the next. It would, I think, be hard to make her
feel just how to pronounce DICTIONARY without her erring either toward
DICTIONAYRY or DICTION'RY, and, of course the word is neither one nor
the other. For no system of marks in a lexicon can tell one how to
pronounce a word. The only way is to hear it, especially in a language
like English which is so full of unspellable, suppressed vowels and
quasi-vowels.
Miss Keller's vowels are not firm. Her AWFUL is nearly AWFIL. The
wavering is caused by the absence of accent on FUL, for she pronounces
FULL correctly.
She sometimes mispronounces as she reads aloud and comes on a word which
she happens never to have uttered, though she may have written it many
times. This difficulty and some others may be corrected when she and
Miss Sullivan have more time. Since 1894, they have been so much in
their books that they have neglected everything that was not necessary
to the immediate task of passing the school years successfully. Miss
Keller will never be able, I believe, to speak loud without destroying
the pleasant quality and the distinctness of her words, but she can do
much to make her speech clearer.
When she was at the Wright-Humason School in New York, Dr. Humason tried
to improve her voice, not only her word pronunciation, but the voice
itself, and gave her lessons in tone and vocal exercises.
It is hard to say whether or not Miss Keller's speech is easy to
understand. Some understand her readily; others do not. Her friends grow
accustomed to her speech and forget that it is different from that of
any one else. Children seldom have any difficulty in understanding
her; which suggests that her deliberate measured speech is like theirs,
before they come to the adult trick of running all the words of a phrase
into one movement of the breath. I am told that Miss Keller speaks
better than most other deaf people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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