A brief historical survey of phonetic-phonological feature systems
p. 23-42
Texte intégral
1. Halle on the origin of phonetic features
1The immediate stimulus for this work are comments by Morris Halle on the paper of Clements at the 2004 M.I.T. Conference From Sound to Sense, honoring Ken Stevens. These comments were posted on the web1. He remarked:
The conception of speech sounds as composite entities (and not as the atoms of language) was first advanced by Alexander Melville Bell in his 1867 Visible Speech. This book presented Bell’s phonetic alphabet, where each letter directly expressed the features that composed the sound represented.
2To historians of phonetics, Bell’s2 Visible Speech (Bell 1867) is well known. The title page of this work is shown in Figure 13, where the title and sub-title are also presented in his Visible Speech phonetic notation. Bell, the father of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, was an elocutionist and phonetician. His “universal alphabet” consisted primarily of two types of characters, rounded ones which were consonants and vertical lines which were vowels. Different types of consonants were symbolized by a different orientation and diacritics and different vowels by diacritics attached to the vertical symbols.
3In addition there were various other diacritics to indicate distinctive duration and tone and other prosodic elements. Figure 2 gives Bell’s own illustrated key to the consonantal symbols. As mentioned, the orientation of a C-shaped letter indicates the place of articulation. Figure 3 illustrates how place of articulation was indicated. As for vowels: the vertical line had one or more “serifs” attached to it to indicate tongue height and tongue front-back position: see Figure 4.
1 Title page of Alexander Melville Bell’s Visible Speech.

2 How place of articulation of consonants is indicated in Bell’s notation (Bell 1867, p. 38).

2. Was Alexander Melville Bell the first to recognize features?
4But was Alexander Melville Bell the first to view speech sounds as consisting of “composite entities”, i.e., features? Obviously not. I am not sure what Halle was thinking or what he meant by his statement and it is not my intention to analyze his statement. But I am motivated to think about the history of the use of features in the description of speech sounds and, in fact, it is quite a long history. In the remainder of this paper I mention some earlier treatments of speech sound features and address the following points:
– How is a featural account manifested?
– What are the features?
– How are the features used, i.e., to what purpose?
3. What evidence of the concept of features?
5A featural account of speech sounds can be manifested in three basic ways: (1) explicit use of the term “feature” or equivalent with specification of what the features of speech sounds are, or (2) the differential use of adjectives to describe sounds, e.g., an oral a vs. a nasal a, or (3) inferential use of features, e.g., by a transcription that codes what are recognized as features or by a tabular presentation of speech sounds with sounds sharing a given feature occupying the same row or column.
3 Illustration showing how place and manner of articulation is coded in Visible Speech (Bell 1867, p. 63).

4 How vowels are represented in Bell’s notation (Bell 1867, p. 38).

4. The history of phonetic features
4.1 The classical Indian grammatical tradition
6Speech sound features were explicitly recognized in the Classical Indian grammatical tradition which dates back to at least Pāṇini (fifth century BPE) (Allen 1953). And although he is considered to be the start of this tradition which has continued unbroken up to the present time, he himself alludes to earlier works on language. The purpose of the detailed description of Sanskrit phonetics and phonology was to ensure the correct rendering of the sacred prayers. The Indian grammarians differentiated between parts of the vocal tract and described all of these parts’ functions. The descriptive vocabulary, applied with an accuracy that is commendable given modern knowledge, includes such terms that translate as: buccal, glottal, nasal, degrees of closure, voicing, velar, labial, palatal, retroflex, dental, etc. They used this descriptive system which often went into fine anatomical and physiological detail to differentiate all the distinctive phonemes of Sanskrit, of which there were about 44 or 45, not including prosodic features. In spite of their explicit recognition of features, it was allowed that:
Within the sound-unit the component features have n° independent existence, nor the sound-units within the word… (Bhaṛtrhari, author of the Vākyapadīya; Allen 1953, p. 9).
5 The first anatomical illustration of the vocal tract for phonetic exposition (from a twelfth century encyclopedia; taken from Bakalla 1994).

8 A plate from (Casserius 1600-1601, p. 15) showing the structures of the human larynx.

7Although not as developed as the ancient Indian tradition, some seminal use of features can be found in ancient Greek phonetics and especially the phonetics of the “First Grammarian” who described Icelandic in the twelfth century (Kemp 1994).
4.2 Arab and Persian phonetics
8Arab and Persian phonetics flourished from the seventh to the eleventh centuries. Their focus was both descriptive and prescriptive of Arabic (regarding how to read the Qur’ān aloud). Various authors engaged in original scientific studies of the whole speech production process, from respiration to oral articulations. Speech pathology (stuttering, lisping), bilingualism, and many other speech-related topics were covered (Bakalla 1994). Figure 5 is apparently the first depiction of the speech anatomy for phonetic purposes. It is from a twelfth century encyclopedia (see Bakalla 1994). Insofar as different Arabic speech sounds could be assigned to different parts of the vocal tract, the description was in terms of features which were anatomical-physiological.
4.3 Han’gul: the Korean alphabet
9King Sejong of Korea (1397-1450) was by all accounts a very enlightened and knowledgeable ruler. He commissioned the creation of a writing system for Korean, Han’gul, which was completed in 1443 (an event celebrated each year on 9 October). Not only was it alphabetic – one of the few cases besides the Greek alphabet where vowels and consonants both had independent representation – but it was also intended to be an iconic representation of the sounds signified. The iconic characters were grouped together to represent separate syllables, where the initial Consonant, the Vowel and optional final Consonant could be identified (see Figure 6).
10In Figure 7 are presented the characters for [p, t, tʃ, k] (top row) and [ph, th, tʃh, kh] (second row). To a first approximation, the second series uses the same character as the first with the addition of an extra line. (The so-called “tense” stops like k are differentiated from plain voiceless unaspirated stops by being written twice.)
4.4 Phonetic studies in the Renaissance
11Anatomists during the Renaissance obviously recognized that a variety of anatomical structures contributed to the production of speech. Two of the earliest anatomical publications on the organs of speech and hearing — where detailed drawings were given — were Fabricius ab Aquapendente (1537-1619) whose phonetic work was published in 1600 (Fabricius ab Aquapendente 1600) and by his student, Julius Casserius (1561-1616). The latter’s work in this area is the richly illustrated treatise De vocis auditusque organis historia anatomica. (Casserius 1600-1601). Casserius, whose main purpose was to describe these anatomical structures, was aware of the separate functions of the larynx as the sound source and the rest of the vocal anatomy above that as modifying the sound — thus not treating speech sounds as indivisible entities. Figure 8 is a plate from his work showing the human larynx and other muscles of the neck.
4.5 Petrus Montanus’ De Spreeckonst
12Petrus Montanus (1594/1595-1638), a Dutch churchman, gave a detailed description of the Dutch of his day in a way that is regarded today as remarkably modern. His work De Spreeckonst (Montanus 1635) includes a matrix in which the distinctive sounds are arranged where the axes of the matrix show their place and manner of articulation (Figure 9).
9 Montanus’ matrix specifying features of the Dutch consonants. Fronted (palatal) and backed (velar) dorsal consonants are differentiated.

4.6 John Wilkins’“Real Character”
13John Wilkins (1614-1672) was a churchman, philosopher, and scientist. He was one of the founders of the Royal Society. He wrote extensively on a variety of topics, including language and cryptography. Wilkins’ main linguistic work, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (Wilkins 1668) (Figure 10a) had as its main purpose a new form of written language that directly conveyed meaning without being anchored in the words and grammar of any particular human language.
14However, many other topics are taken up in this work, among them two phonetic transcriptions for English. Wilkins manifests knowledge of speech sound features in several ways. First is his tabular presentation of the English sounds (Figure 10b) where the headings of the rows and columns are features.
15Figure 11 shows how he discusses each sound in minute featural detail. Wilkins was quite thorough in his cataloguing of sound; as Figure 12 shows, he even thought of voiceless nasals.
16Second, he proposes two phonetic transcriptions both of which display some featural elements. One of them is a syllabary, shown in Figure 13.
17In this syllabic phonetic transcription the place of a consonant was coded by the angle of a slanting line attached to a vertical line; an approximately 45° angle is for labials, a 90° angle for apicals; if this line comes off the top of the vertical line, it is voiced, if at the bottom, voiceless; a straight vertical line indicates a stop, a line with a curved termination, a fricative, etc. Vowels were indicated by a “serif” somewhere on the body of the vertical line.
18Wilkins’ other phonetic transcription was quasi-iconic, representing in a stylized way the place and manner of articulation. To make the symbols’ phonetic significance more evident to the reader he presented them with more realistic sagittal sections of the sounds, as shown in Figure 14.
10a Title page of John Wilkins’ Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language.

10b Wilkins’ tabular presentation of English sounds. The headings of the rows and columns imply a featural decomposition of the sounds (Wilkins 1668, p 358).

11 Wilkins’ discussion of speech sounds in featural terms (Wilkins 1668, p. 360).

12 Wilkins’ mention of voiceless nasals (last line). His terms “breathless” and ‘breathing” correspond to the modern terms “stop” and “continuant”, respectively (Wilkins 1668, p. 379).

13 Wilkins’ syllabic phonetic transcription for English (Wilkins 1668, p. 376).

14 Wilkins’ iconic phonetic transcription illustrated by saggital drawings of the positions of the articulators (Wilkins 1668, p. 378).

16 William Holder’s featural analysis of English speech sounds (Holder 1669, p. 62).

17 Francis Lodwick’s universal alphabet; in each column the new symbols are on the left, the corresponding traditional symbols on the right. Speech sounds sharing the same feature, like voicelessness, have a similar symbolic representation (Lodwick 1686, p. 137).

4.7 Holder, Lodwick and Amman
19Wilkins’ analysis of speech into features was by n° means an isolated event in his time. At least four of his contemporaries published works demonstrating similar analyses: John Wallis (1616-1703, Wallis 1653), William Holder (1616-1698, Holder 1669), Francis Lodwick (1619-1694, Lodwick 1686), and Johan Conrad Amman (1669- 1730, Amman 1694, 1700).
20Figure 16 is a tabular (and featural) representation of speech sounds by Holder (1669) and Figure 17 is a table showing Lodwick’s proposed universal phonetic transcription (1686) which employs common graphical elements for speech sounds with similar phonetic features.
21Johan Conrad Amman (1669-1724), a Swiss physician practicing in the Netherlands, wrote accounts of his attempt to teach a deaf person to speak. He noticed different types of assimilations and proposed a “natural” hierarchical classification of the features of speech, e.g., in assimilation and in pathological speech, substitution of one sound for another involves features at the lowest strata of the hierarchy, e.g., place, not at the highest, such as manner; substitutions of consonant for vowel, or nasal for fricative do not occur. This is one of the earliest and most interesting uses of features and feature hierarchies.
22There was a great deal of phonetic/phonological work done in the eighteenth century (1701-1800) and much of it shows awareness of speech sound features.
18 Ten Kate’s two phonetic transcriptions superimposed on the normal Dutch orthographic representation of a portion of the Lord’s Prayer (Ten Kate 1723, vol. I, plate opposite p. 130).

19 De Brosses’ universal phonetic transcription applied to four languages in order to show the historical relationship between Latin and the other daughter languages, French, Spanish, and Italian (De Brosses 1765, vol. I, plate VII, opposite p. 130).

4.8 Ten Kate
23Lambert ten Kate (1674-1731) was a leading language scholar of his (and all) time. He gave a quite comprehensive documentation of the Dutch of his period, including its history, morphology and lexicon. Brink (1986) indicates that his comments on the phonological relationship between the Germanic languages and the Classical languages makes him an “almost Grimm”. As part of his two volume work, Aenleidning tot de Kennisse van het verhevene Deel der nederduitsche Sprake (ten Kate 1723) he offered two phonetic transcriptions (see Figure 18), one exploiting letters with diacritics and the other, numbers with diacritics: upside down numbers for consonants and rightside up numbers for vowels. In the case of the letter-based systems, capital letters B, D, K4 indicated place of articulation and superimposed diacritics, the manner of articulation, e.g., fricative, voiceless stop, voiced stop, nasal.
4.9 De Brosses
24Charles de Brosses (1709-1777) was an eighteenth century writer who, among other endeavors, speculated on the origin of languages. Many of his speculations (de Brosse 1765) would not be credited today but as part of this work he proposed a universal phonetic transcription in order to show the close relationship between Latin and the Romance languages — in spite of their different orthographies. This phonetic transcription was based on features. Figure 19 shows a portion of his comparative phonetic demonstration applied to the opening phrase of the Lord’s Prayer. There are some peculiarities in the transcription but leaving these aside, the angle of the line indicated place of articulation and a serif or diacritic indicated manner; vowels were written above the consonants.
20 Franklin’s discussion (in 1756) of English speech sounds in featural terms (Franklin 1803, vol. II, plate facing p. 357).

21 Court de Gébelin’s account of the articulatory features of consonants (Court de Gébelin 1776, p. 71).

4.10 Benjamin Franklin
25Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), n° finer example of an eighteenth century savant, philosopher, scientist and statesman, proposed a modified, more phonetic, orthography for English. Toward this end he eliminated redundant letters like c q x and added six new letters. Although this orthography was not featural, his discussion of it (in 1756; reprinted in his collected works printed in Franklin 1803) reveals his awareness of the featural character of speech sounds (see Figure 20).
22 Kratzenstein’s specifications for the anatomical dimensions (i.e., features) of vowels (Kratzenstein 1781, p. 15).

4.11 Antoine Court de Gébelin
26Antoine Court de Gébelin (1725-1784), a Protestant churchman and a scholar of ancient culture, published a speculative account of the origin of language in 1776, Histoire Naturelle de la Parole (Court de Gébelin 1776). This volume, an extract from his multi-volume work, Le Monde Primitif, is valuable and prized by book collectors since it contains the first colored anatomical plates, in this case of the vocal anatomy. It is, therefore, n° surprise that Court de Gébelin gives a description of speech sounds in terms of articulatory features: see Figure 21.
4.12 Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein
27Kratzenstein (1723-1795) is primarily known for his work in medicine, physics, and music – in the latter case for his introduction of the “free reed” for some “modern” Western musical instruments; it is the sound source for the harmonium and accordion. This free reed was the voice source for his vowel synthesizer, as reported in his 1781 work: a long title, usually shortened simply to Tentamen, his essay which won a prize from the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (Kratzenstein 1781). It is regarded as the first scientific account of mechanical speech synthesis — ‘scientific’ in the sense that he lays out his procedures in great detail, to the point that his results could be replicated by others. Since the terms of the contest only required specifying the nature of the five (sic) vowels, his work does not cover consonants in any detail. However, for the vowels he does give a featural analysis, estimating the cross-dimensional apertures of the vocal tract at various points from glottis to lips (understandably, only his measures for the lips are the most accurate); see Figure 22.
23 Von Kempelen’s listing of the articulatory structures involved in producing speech. (Elsewhere he explains the function of each structure in speech) (Von Kempelen 1791, p. 59).

24 This figure is a woodblock plate from von Kempelen’s 1791 work (plate 20, opposite p. 918).

4.13 Wolfgang von Kempelen
28Among phoneticians, perhaps the most celebrated of the eighteenth century scientists who published works on speech is Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen (1734-1804). He is generally credited with constructing the first speech synthesizer capable of fully articulate speech (although the control of the device was by the hands of the human operator: especially the implementation of the resonances where the hand of the operator functioned in a way similar to the hand of the French horn player) (von Kempelen 1791). Obviously, in order to achieve this level of sophistication, it was necessary that he understand the decomposition of speech sounds into their parts, i.e., their articulatory features. Figure 23 is his list of the anatomical structures that figure in the generation of speech (aside from the lungs). Figure 24 is from a woodblock print showing a perspective view of his synthesizer. (The levers cover holes which produced fricatives when air was forced through them; the mouth resonator is not shown in this figure.)
25 Figure 25. A passage from Erasmus Darwin’s 1803 work, The Temple of Nature, in which he proposes a universal featural representation of speech sounds (p. 118 of the notes).

26 The title page of Pitman’s 1840 work describing his system of stenography.

4.14 Erasmus Darwin
29Another eighteenth century scholar speculating on the origin of society and language was none other than Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), grandfather of Charles Darwin. His work that included a discussion of language, The Temple of Nature, was published posthumously in 1803 (Darwin 1803).
30The passage in Figure 25 speaks for itself to evidence Darwin’s awareness of speech sound features.
4.15 Isaac Pitman
31An important milestone in the development of a phonetic notation that is inherently featural is “Phonography”, intended as a shorthand system (stenography) by Isaac Pitman (1813-1897) in 1837 (Pitman 1837). Figure 26 shows the title page of the first book (1840) published, which exemplifies that system. The “decoration” at the top is in fact a kind of key to the transcription: different features (as usual, articulatory) are coded as straight or curved lines with different orientations and which may be thick or thin (this assumes the writing is done with a steel split-tip ink pen). (There is some resemblance to Wilkins’ notation.) This may very well have been a direct inspiration to Alexander Melville Bell. Pitman’s system of stenography still thrives today.
4.16 Richard Lepsius
32One of the important developments in the introduction of a universal phonetic transcription — and one that was demonstrated with a much wider variety of languages — was Lepsius’ linguistic alphabet (1855). Lepsius’ (1810-1884) credentials as a field linguist were highly respected. It is likely that Passy’s phonetic transcription, which was the ultimate basis for the IPA, was influenced in part by Lepsius’ phonetic alphabet. Unlike some of the other transcriptions surveyed above, his transcription was not inherently featural, rather he used conventional alphabetic symbols with diacritics to define a wide variety of sound types. However, when discussing these symbols or when presenting them in tabular form, he made use of featural terms. This is evident in the title page of the first edition (Lepsius 1855) of his exposition of his system and in the examples of how the system would apply to particular languages (Figure 27).
4.17 Other Manifestations of Phonetic Features
33There were, in fact, dozens of writers before Alexander Melville Bell’s 1867 work whose discussions of phonetics used speech sound features. Like those reviewed above the shapes of invented phonetic symbols varied and the terms applied to describe the features varied, but they were almost uniformly articulatory, i.e., describing or symbolizing place, manner, and modification (e.g., by +/-voice or +/- nasal, etc).5 I do not have the space to review them all. Among them are: The Icelandic “First Grammarian” (twelfth century AD) (see Haugen 1972); Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (Helmont 1667); William Thornton (Thornton 1793); Johan Conrad Adelung (Adelung 1795); Count Volney (Volney 1819); Jacob Grimm (Grimm 1822) (Grimm stated what we now call “Grimm’s Law” in featural terms: “In the labial, lingual and guttural sounds, the Gothic… tenues correspond to the High German aspirates; the Gothic aspirates to the High German mediae.”); Benjamin Rush (Rush 1827); Johannes Müller (Müller 1834-1840); Karl Moriz Rapp (Rapp 1836-1841); Alexander John Ellis (Ellis 1845); Max Müller (Müller 1855); Ernst Brücke (Brücke 1860); Samuel Haldeman (Haldeman 1860); Felix du Bois-Reymond (du Bois-Reymond 1862); Carl Sundevall (Sundevall 1862); Rudolf von Raumer (von Raumer 18636); Carl Ludwig Merkel (Merkel 1866); Johan Nepomuk Czermak (Czemac 1879) (this reference is to his collected works; articles on phonetics start as early as 1857).
27 The title page of the first edition of Lepsius’ exposition of his universal phonetic alphabet (Lepsius 1855). The rows and columns of the letters in the box at the bottom stand for phonetic features more fully explained in the text.

5. How were featural specifications of speech sounds used?
34There is no mystery as to why featural specifications were given of speech sounds: they served the same functions as they do in modern phonology: 1) to be able to make generalizations about sub-classes of sounds – as, e.g., ten Kate (1723), de Brosses (1765), Rask (1818), and Grimm (1822) did in expressing the differences in features in the constituent speech sounds in cognate vocabulary in various European languages –, and 2) to be able to express the element of symmetry in the inventory of distinctive speech sounds in the languages described. This latter aspect has some theoretical significance that is still driving much current research on the issue of whether sound systems are “designed” by speakers to consist of sounds maximally distinct from one another (like, say, the semaphore system of flag signals once used by sailors) or whether instead they follow the principle called by Ohala (1979) “maximal use of the available (distinctive) features”7 which would give rise to much symmetry. The fact that so many of the scholars struggling with the task of specifying features for the speech sounds in a variety of languages assumed an element of symmetry gives some support to the latter view.
Conclusion
35Although awareness of the articulatory features of speech sounds may not be widespread among the vast majority of speakers of languages, it was not uncommon and not difficult to do, given a certain amount of careful observation and introspection. Alexander Melville Bell was not the first to do this or to make a phonetic transcription which explicitly incorporated features. In fact, his system may have been inspired by some featural descriptions of speech done before 1867. Of the features noticed, place of articulation seems to have been the easiest to specify, with voiced and voiceless and manner of articulation, including nasal manner, being the next most common to be extracted.
36Let us acknowledge, however, that the really remarkable breakthrough in the featural description of speech was the acoustic features developed when Fant met Jakobson in the early 1950s and which were published as Preliminaries to Speech Analysis in 1952 by Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (Jakobson et al. 1952).
Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/lingu/events/phonology_symposium/Halle_comment.doc.
2 Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905)
3 Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise noted, illustrations from cited works are from the author’s personal collection. If the images are less than ideal it is because there was a reluctance to subject these old books to possible damage in a flatbed scanner.
4 In case anyone wonders why the velars were symbolized with a voiceless letter K, whereas the other places of articulation had the letters for voiced consonants, B, D, it must be remembered that although Dutch uses the orthographic symbols K and G, it has n° phonetic stop [g].
5 The only exception to this generalization might be those descriptions of speech sounds, mainly vowels, formulated in acoustic terms by Willis 1830, Grassmann 1854, and Helmholtz 1862.
6 An important work of von Raumer was his Die Aspiration und die Lautverschiebung, originally published in 1837.
7 Acronymized as “MUAF”.
Auteur
University of California, Berkeley, USA
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