I Has A Hank.

[bloodyrosemccoy]

U.S. Coast Guard Day
National Mustard Day
Woman's Pro Football Day
Birthday - Louis Armstrong (musician)

 

Oh, yeah. You know you’re jealous, Lychee.

 

He comes with a leg.  I don’t know what I'm going to do with it.  Maybe he can use it to bludgeon people.

It’s ironic that I’m doing all these photo posts because this week I’m blind. My glasses are In The Shop to get polished and fitted for clip-on shades, I can’t find my backup pair, and contacts give me a headache if I wear ’em too long. Less than fun. 

I also has a new book: Body Trauma: A writer’s guide to wounds and injuries.  It’s written by a doctor, not an author—a distinction made clear when you read it. The author has delusions of literariness and awkwardly waxes poetic about the emergency room and makes damn sure to let you know that things like domestic abuse and torture are “despicable.”  But it has information I can’t find elsewhere, so I can get some more good details into Doctors in SPACE!—although as always I have to adjust some things for the various different alien physiologies (Ghil bleeds blue, Betty the fuzzworm has two hearts and no bones, etc.).  Gives me good ideas, too.

 

Because of the enormous amount of research and background I have to do for even these short stories, I may not get this done before I go—especially since I’m blind. But I’ll try to snatch some time to when I can. Wish me luck!

Comments

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

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.

[shadesofmauve]

Thanks!

For the purposes of the story, the character for the most part /doesn't/ want to attempt speech, for the reasons you describe.* But when faced with an emergency situation and nothing to write on at hand...he's going to try something. (late-midaeval fantasy, no sign-language...they might eventually import a type of sign, but he'd never be a fluent speaker because of the late-age learning).

I'd figured bilabials were fair game, but the vowels had me confused. I hadn't figured on how the resonance would change, either - hard to interpret. So in an emergency, he's got m, p, b, f, v, h...(imagine me sitting at my computer singing the alphabet in my head and trying to make all the letter sounds without moving my tongue. I should probably invest in tongue depressors. For research purposes.)

The fantasy tonguless-sterotype that really bugs me, by the way? Hissing. I suppose you could almost open-mouth kitty-hiss, but you couldn't do sibilants!

Thanks!

*I'm honestly not sure whether he felt that way all along or I/he/we just 'realised' it when you pointed it out, but it's very true. He's always been a reserved guy.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

If you want to do more research, "articulatory phonetics" is a good phrase to start with. "Acoustic phonetics" might help, too.

I REALLY hope the 'hiss' the writers are talking about IS a kitty hiss, because otherwise FAIL.

And I forgot!--if you want to get carried away (I'm not sure how into this you want to get), there's a few other things you could do with your vocal cords themselves. Your character could mess around with phonation and change the acoustics of the voice. It's possible that this would be a good detail if you want to use it.