SPEECH The two persons who have written authoritatively about Miss Kellers speed the way she lear are Miss Sarah Fuller, of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston, Massachusetts, who gave her the first lessons, and Miss Sullivan, who, by her uing discipline, carried on the success of these first lessons.
Before I quote from Miss Sullivans at, let me try to give some impression of what Miss Kellers speed voice qualities are at present.
Her voice is loleasant to listen to. Her speech lacks variety and modulation; it runs in a sing-song when she is reading aloud; and when she speaks with fair degree of loudness, it hovers about two or three middle tones. Her voice has an aspirate quality; there seems always to be too much breath for the amount of tone. Some of her notes are musical and charming. When she is telling a childs story, or oh pathos in it, her voice runs into pretty slurs from ooo ahis is like the effect of the slow dwelling on long words, not quite well mahat oices in a child who is telling a solemn story.
The principal thing that is lag is sentence at and variety in the iion of phrases. Miss Keller pronounces each word as a fner does when he is still lab with the elements of a sentence, or as children sometimes read in school when they have to pick out each word.
She speaks Frend 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 Frend so does not put suffit stress on ated syllables. She says for example, "pro-vo-ca-tion,」
"in-di-vi-du-al," with ever so little differeween the value of syllables, and a good deal of insisten the pronunciation of the same word one day and the . It would, I think, be hard to make her feel just how to pronounce DIARY without her erriher toward DIAYRY or DIRY, and, of course the word is her one nor the other. For no system of marks in a lexi 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 Kellers vowels are not firm. Her AWFUL is nearly AWFIL. The wavering is caused by the absence of at on FUL, for she pronounces FULL correctly.
She sometimes mispronounces as she reads aloud and es on a word which she happens o 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 mu their books that they have ed 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 distiness of her words, but she do muake her speech clearer.
When she was at the Wright-Humason School in New York, Dr. Humason tried to improve her voiot 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 Kellers speech is easy to uand. Some uand her readily; others do not. Her friends grow aced to her speed fet that it is different from that of any one else. Children seldom have any difficulty in uanding her; which suggests that her deliberate measured speech is like t