Blog Post 1



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If anyone has seen the “Bad Lip Readings” videos on youtube and thought they were actually pretty good, then the articulation of speech might be of interest. I always found phonology, or the articulation of speech sounds to be quite interesting. At a young age, I taught my sister how to pronounce “three” instead of “free” by showing her the placement of my tongue, lips and teeth. How we produce certain sounds and the articulation of our mouths is fascinating and that a meaning can change just based on how we articulate our mouths. In one of my spanish classes, we learned how to pronounce “año” meaning “year”, however the tilde, or the squiggle above the “n”, was a sign that the n was pronounced differently, you had to hold your tongue to the roof of your mouth, if you did not, then you simply would say “ano”, which means “butt”, in spanish. As a result of a friend of mine having a stroke, I got to attend her speech classes so that she may relearn how to talk, they covered the basics and I learned how to read lips. When we watched the video is class, of the scientific attempt to see if animals could talk like us, I found myself questioning that if evolution is true (I am not slamming religion.)  how did we as humans acquire and evolve to have such a complex way of communicating? I also questioned during the video, since animals do not have the correct anatomy to talk to us, could humans come up with a way to talk to animals?







Comments

  1. Sariah DurrantMarch 28, 2018 at 10:45 PM

    I love bad lip reading videos, but sometimes it does get hard to play along with the fun when you can actually read lips. And your questions about animals are interesting. Even though animals cannot articulate words like we can, they most certainly have developed ways to communicate with humans directly. Most of the communication between cats is non-vocalized, but their meows and the majority of their vocalized communication is directed towards humans. So, if there is communication happening between a person and their cat, and cats can understand or grasp the concept of particular human words and yowl at us when they want something, I think we're on the right track to actually talking to each other.

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