Alexander Melville Bell

Alexander Melville Bell ( born March 1, 1819 in Edinburgh ( Scotland); † August 7, 1905 in Washington, DC) was a researcher in the field of physiological phonetics and author of numerous books on elocution. As a professor of speech and elocution, he developed the first universal phonetic writing system, a phonetic spelling and a phonetic alphabet, which he called Visible Speech. Considered together with Alexander John Ellis and Isaac Pitman as one of the founders of the English school of modern phonetics. In Germany, his works were received, particularly since the 1880s.

He was the father of Alexander Graham Bell.

Life

He studied under his father, Alexander Bell, a famous rhetorician, and a performance artist, and was most important to his assistant. He taught from 1843 to 1865 on speech and elocution at the University of Edinburgh and from 1865 to 1870 at the University of London. 1868 as well as 1870 and 1871 he taught at the Lowell Institute in Boston.

In 1870 he was a lecturer in philology at Queen's College in Kingston (Ontario ) (Canada ) before he went to Washington in 1881. There he devoted himself to teaching the deaf and dumb, for which he developed a phonetic alphabet, which he called " Visible Speech " ( visible speech ).

Bell died in 1905 at the age of 86 years and was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington.

Publications

• Steno - Phonography (1852 )
• Letters and Sounds (1858 )
• The Standard Elocutionist (1860 )
• Principles of Speech and Dictionary of Sounds ( 1863)
• Visible Speech: The Science of Universal alphabetics (1867 )
• Sounds and Their Relations (1881 )
• Lectures on Phonetics (1885 )
• World English: the Universal Language (1888 )
• The Science of Speech ( 1897)
• The Fundamentals of Elocution (1899 )