firinel is right. Your voice comes from your vocal cords, so there'd be no damage to that. But they wouldn't be able to to make most consonant or vowel sounds, since those are made by the placement of the tongue.
You could get a little bit of vowel variation depending on how open the character's mouth was and what they did with their lips, but it would sound pretty crude. As for consonants, you could do the labials (m, p, and b) and a few sounds from the "back" of the throat (h and a few non-English sounds, like a glottal stop--sounds like the noise you make in the middle of saying "uh-oh"). All of these sounds would be weird, too, because the tongue's loss would change the way the whole mouth resonates. Not enough tor recognlzable speech, but they could still be pretty noisy.
What I wonder is if they'd want to be. They'd sound like they were honking and probably have trouble controlling the noise, and it would be embarrassingly strange sounding. They probably wouldn't like the sound themselves. However, they could still laugh, cry, scream, get someone's attention, etc., and most likely would if they weren't paying attention. So no, they wouldn't be totally silenced.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-08-05 05:00 am (UTC)You could get a little bit of vowel variation depending on how open the character's mouth was and what they did with their lips, but it would sound pretty crude. As for consonants, you could do the labials (m, p, and b) and a few sounds from the "back" of the throat (h and a few non-English sounds, like a glottal stop--sounds like the noise you make in the middle of saying "uh-oh"). All of these sounds would be weird, too, because the tongue's loss would change the way the whole mouth resonates. Not enough tor recognlzable speech, but they could still be pretty noisy.
What I wonder is if they'd want to be. They'd sound like they were honking and probably have trouble controlling the noise, and it would be embarrassingly strange sounding. They probably wouldn't like the sound themselves. However, they could still laugh, cry, scream, get someone's attention, etc., and most likely would if they weren't paying attention. So no, they wouldn't be totally silenced.