MILLION LANGUAGES

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXI, Issue 304, 8 December 1931, Page 11

MILLION LANGUAGES

WONDERS OF NEW MACHINE. . A machine which may speak I 'JOO,OOO lang i.iges, each of them composed from the sounds of plain English, was described to the college of engineering of the University ef Illinois United States, at Urbana recently by Mr. Sergius P. Grace, assistant vicepresident of the Bell laboratories. This apparatus is a further development of speech scramblers, now used to render transatlantic radio telephone conversation unintelligible to eavesdroppers. Mri Grace told of its possibilities for changing the present jargon whenever that becomes desirable. Mr. Grace said: “The apparatus could produce a new language almost M quickly as you could figure out how to pronounce one of its more difficult combinations, such as this one, represented by the spelling issugolttlgsyn. It is probable that huinan speech organs cannot even imitate some of the sound combinations which can be made easily with this electrical apparatus. Only another similar machine can pick up and reverse these combinations into human tones and intelligible words.” Speech, even one syllable of it, is a combination of many different rates of sound vibrations, all produced simultaneously from the vocal cords. The vibrations range mostly from 50 per second to 3500. The mechanical speaker, it is claimed, can pick up arbitrarily any zone in this entire range of vibrations, such as only those from 50 to 1500. It can transmit this narrow zone alone shutting out every other part of the sound, something no human voice does. “Employing this method, one form of the new experimental apparatus divides sound into five zones. It transmits them in five separate channels through the air. This gives an opportunity not only to scramble, but, if desired, to delay any one of the zones, or any combination of them, by a fraction of a second during transmission. The result is speech sounds which are new in the sense that they never have been formed hy human voices and probably some of them never can be. “Speech,” said Mr. Grace, “thus is chopped up, much like meat in n machine, and the possibilities of new combinations in the chopping are almost infinite. Every combination is a new language so far as its sound to the ear is concerned.”