Shorthand
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to longhand, a more common method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and graphein, it has been called brachygraphy, from Greek brachys and tachygraphy, from Greek tachys, depending on whether compression or speed of writing is the goal. Many forms of shorthand exist. A typical shorthand system provides symbols or abbreviations for words and common phrases, which can allow someone well-trained in the system to write as as people speak. Abbreviation methods use different abbreviating approaches. Many journalists use shorthand writing to take notes at press conferences or other similar scenarios. In the computerized world, several autocomplete programs, standalone or integrated in text editors, based on word lists include a shorthand function for used phrases. Shorthand was used more in the past, before the invention of recording and dictation machines.
Shorthand was considered an essential part of secretarial training and police work, as well as useful for journalists. Although the primary use of shorthand has been to record oral dictation or discourse, some systems are used for compact expression. For example, healthcare professionals may use shorthand notes in medical charts and correspondence. Shorthand notes are temporary, intended either for immediate use or for typing, data entry, or transcription to longhand, although longer term uses do exist, such as encipherment: diaries are a common example; the earliest known indication of shorthand systems is from the Parthenon in Ancient Greece, where a mid-4th century BC marble slab was found. This shows a writing system based on vowels, using certain modifications to indicate consonants. Hellenistic tachygraphy is reported from the 2nd century BC onwards, though there are indications that it might be older; the oldest datable reference is a contract from Middle Egypt, stating that Oxyrhynchos gives the "semeiographer" Apollonios for two years to be taught shorthand writing.
Hellenistic tachygraphy consisted of word stem signs and word ending signs. Over time, many syllabic signs were developed. In Ancient Rome, Marcus Tullius Tiro, a slave and a freedman of Cicero, developed the Tironian notes so that he could write down Cicero's speeches. Plutarch in his "Life of Cato the Younger" records that Cicero, during a trial of some insurrectionists in the senate, employed several expert rapid writers, whom he had taught to make figures comprising numerous words in a few short strokes, to preserve Cato's speech on this occasion; the Tironian notes consisted of word ending abbreviations. The original Tironian notes consisted of about 4000 signs, but new signs were introduced, so that their number might increase to as many as 13,000. In order to have a less complex writing system, a syllabic shorthand script was sometimes used. After the decline of the Roman Empire, the Tironian notes were no longer used to transcribe speeches, though they were still known and taught during the Carolingian Renaissance.
After the 11th century, they were forgotten. When many monastery libraries were secularized in the course of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, long-forgotten manuscripts of Tironian notes were rediscovered. In imperial China, clerks used an abbreviated cursive form of Chinese characters to record court proceedings and criminal confessions; these records were used to create more formal transcripts. One cornerstone of imperial court proceedings was that all confessions had to be acknowledged by the accused's signature, personal seal, or thumbprint, requiring fast writing. Versions of this technique survived in clerical professions into the modern day, influenced by Western shorthand methods, some new methods were invented. An interest in shorthand or "short-writing" developed towards the end of the 16th century in England. In 1588 Timothy Bright published his Characterie. Bright's book was followed by a number of others, including Peter Bales' The Writing Schoolemaster in 1590, John Willis's Art of Stenography in 1602, Edmond Willis's An abbreviation of writing by character in 1618, Thomas Shelton's Short Writing in 1626.
Shelton's system became popular and is well known because it was used by Samuel Pepys for his diary and for many of his official papers, such as his letter copy books. It was used by Sir Isaac Newton in some of his notebooks. Shelton borrowed from his predecessors Edmond Willis; each consonant was represented by an arbitrary but simple symbol, while the five vowels were represented by the relative positions of the surrounding consonants. Thus the symbol for B with symbol for T drawn directly above it represented "bat", while B with T below it meant "but". A vowel at the end of a word was represented by a dot in the appropriate position, while there were additional symbols for initial vowels; this basic system was supplemented by further symbols representing common suffixes. One drawback of Shelton's system was that there was no way to distinguish long and short vowels or diphthongs; the reader needed to u
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born scientist, inventor and innovator, credited with inventing and patenting the first practical telephone. He founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885. Bell's father and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing Bell's life's work, his research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which culminated in Bell being awarded the first U. S. patent for the telephone in 1876. Bell considered his invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study. Many other inventions marked Bell's life, including groundbreaking work in optical telecommunications and aeronautics. Although Bell was not one of the 33 founders of the National Geographic Society, he had a strong influence on the magazine while serving as the second president from January 7, 1898, until 1903. Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847.
The family home was at South Charlotte Street, has a stone inscription marking it as Alexander Graham Bell's birthplace. He had two brothers: Melville James Bell and Edward Charles Bell, both of whom would die of tuberculosis, his father was Professor Alexander Melville Bell, a phonetician, his mother was Eliza Grace. Born as just "Alexander Bell", at age 10, he made a plea to his father to have a middle name like his two brothers. For his 11th birthday, his father acquiesced and allowed him to adopt the name "Graham", chosen out of respect for Alexander Graham, a Canadian being treated by his father who had become a family friend. To close relatives and friends he remained "Aleck"; as a child, young Bell displayed a natural curiosity about his world, resulting in gathering botanical specimens as well as experimenting at an early age. His best friend was Ben Herdman, a neighbour whose family operated a flour mill, the scene of many forays. Young Bell asked, he was told wheat had to be dehusked through a laborious process and at the age of 12, Bell built a homemade device that combined rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes, creating a simple dehusking machine, put into operation and used for a number of years.
In return, Ben's father John Herdman gave both boys the run of a small workshop in which to "invent". From his early years, Bell showed a sensitive nature and a talent for art and music, encouraged by his mother. With no formal training, he became the family's pianist. Despite being quiet and introspective, he revelled in mimicry and "voice tricks" akin to ventriloquism that continually entertained family guests during their occasional visits. Bell was deeply affected by his mother's gradual deafness, learned a manual finger language so he could sit at her side and tap out silently the conversations swirling around the family parlour, he developed a technique of speaking in clear, modulated tones directly into his mother's forehead wherein she would hear him with reasonable clarity. Bell's preoccupation with his mother's deafness led him to study acoustics, his family was long associated with the teaching of elocution: his grandfather, Alexander Bell, in London, his uncle in Dublin, his father, in Edinburgh, were all elocutionists.
His father published a variety of works on the subject, several of which are still well known his The Standard Elocutionist, which appeared in Edinburgh in 1868. The Standard Elocutionist appeared in 168 British editions and sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States alone. In this treatise, his father explains his methods of how to instruct deaf-mutes to articulate words and read other people's lip movements to decipher meaning. Bell's father taught him and his brothers not only to write Visible Speech but to identify any symbol and its accompanying sound. Bell became so proficient that he became a part of his father's public demonstrations and astounded audiences with his abilities, he could decipher Visible Speech representing every language, including Latin, Scottish Gaelic, Sanskrit reciting written tracts without any prior knowledge of their pronunciation. As a young child, like his brothers, received his early schooling at home from his father. At an early age, he was enrolled at the Royal High School, Scotland, which he left at the age of 15, having completed only the first four forms.
His school record was undistinguished, marked by lacklustre grades. His main interest remained in the sciences biology while he treated other school subjects with indifference, to the dismay of his demanding father. Upon leaving school, Bell travelled to London to live with Alexander Bell. During the year he spent with his grandfather, a love of learning was born, with long hours spent in serious discussion and study; the elder Bell took great efforts to have his young pupil learn to speak and with conviction, the attributes that his pupil would need to become a teacher himself. At the age of 16, Bell secured a position as a "pupil-teacher" of elocution and music, in Weston House Academy at Elgin, Scotland. Although he was enrolled as a student in Latin and Greek, he instructed classes himself in return for board and £10 per session; the following year, he attended the University of Edinburgh. In 1868, not long before he departed for Canada with his f
Gardiner Greene Hubbard
Gardiner Greene Hubbard was an American lawyer and community leader. He was a first president of the National Geographic Society. One of his daughters, Mabel Gardiner Hubbard became the wife of Alexander Graham Bell. Hubbard was born and educated in Boston, Massachusetts to Samuel Hubbard, a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, Mary Greene, his younger brother was Charles Eustice Hubbard, who became the first secretary and clerk of the Bell Telephone Company. Hubbard was a grandson of Boston merchant Gardiner Greene, he was a descendant of Lion Gardiner, an early English settler and soldier in the New World who founded the first English settlement in what became the State of New York, whose legacy includes Gardiners Island which remains in the family. He attended Phillips Academy and graduated from Dartmouth in 1841, he studied law at Harvard, was admitted to the bar in 1843. He first joined the Boston law firm of Benjamin Robbins Curtis. There he became active in local institutions. Hubbard helped establish a city water works in Cambridge, was a founder of the Cambridge Gas Co. and organized a Cambridge to Boston trolley system.
Hubbard played a pivotal role in the founding of Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was the first oral school for the deaf in the United States, Hubbard remained a trustee for the rest of his life. Hubbard entered the national stage by become a proponent for the nationalization of the telegraph system under the U. S. Postal Service stating in an article: "The Proposed Changes in the Telegraphic System", "It is not contended that the postal system is free from defects, but that it removes many of the grave evils of the present system, without the introduction of new ones. During the late 1860s, Hubbard lobbied Congress to pass the U. S. Postal Telegraph Bill known as the Hubbard Bill; the bill would have chartered the U. S. Postal Telegraph Company that would be connected to the U. S. Post Office, but the bill did not pass. To benefit from the Hubbard Bill, Hubbard needed patents which dominated essential aspects of telegraph technology such as sending multiple messages on a single telegraph wire.
This was called acoustic telegraphy. To acquire such patents and his partner Thomas Sanders financed Alexander Graham Bell's experiments and development of an acoustic telegraph, which led to his invention of the telephone. Following Curtis's retirement, Hubbard relocated to Washington, D. C. where he continued to practice law for 5 more years. In 1876, he was appointed by President Grant to determine the proper rates for railway mail and he served as a commissioner to the Centennial Exposition. Hubbard organized the Bell Telephone Company on July 9, 1877, with himself as president, Thomas Sanders as treasurer and Bell as'Chief Electrician'. Two days he became the father-in-law of Bell when his daughter, Mabel Hubbard, married Bell on July 11, 1877. Gardiner Hubbard was intimately connected with the Bell Telephone Company, which subsequently evolved into the National Bell Telephone Company and the American Bell Telephone Company, merging with smaller telephone companies during its growth; the American Bell Telephone Company would, at the end of 1899, evolve into AT&T, at times the world's largest telephone company.
Hubbard has been credited as the entrepreneur. Hubbard became a principal investor in the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company; when Edison neglected development of the phonograph, which at its inception was functional, Hubbard helped his son-in-law, Alexander Graham Bell, organize a competing company in 1881 that developed wax-coated cardboard cylinders and disks for used on a graphophone. These improvements were invented by Alexander Bell's cousin Chester Bell, a chemist, Charles Sumner Tainter, an optical instrument maker, at Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C. Hubbard and Chester Bell approached Edison about combining their interests, but Edison refused, resulting in the Volta Laboratory Association merging the shares of their Volta Graphophone Company with the company that evolved into Columbia Records in 1886. Hubbard was interested in the public side of science. After his move to Washington, he was one of the founders and the first president of the National Geographic Society, serving in that capacity from 1888-1897.
Today, the Hubbard Medal is given for distinction in exploration and research. In 1897, he helped to rescue the A. A. A. S, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1848, from financial peril and extinction by enabling its purchase of the "Science" magazine, which he founded, in 1883, he served as a trustee of Columbian University from 1883 until his death. He was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution, he created a large collection of etchings and engravings, which were given by his widow to the Library of Congress with a fund for additions. In 1894, Hubbard was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society In 1846, Hubbard married Gertrude Mercer McCurdy (182
Phonology
Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in spoken languages and signs in sign languages. It used to be only the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but it may cover any linguistic analysis either at a level beneath the word or at all levels of language where sound or signs are structured to convey linguistic meaning. Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages; the building blocks of signs are specifications for movement and handshape. The word'phonology' can refer to the phonological system of a given language; this is one of the fundamental systems which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax and its vocabulary. Phonology is distinguished from phonetics. While phonetics concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning.
For many linguists, phonetics belongs to descriptive linguistics, phonology to theoretical linguistics, although establishing the phonological system of a language is an application of theoretical principles to analysis of phonetic evidence. Note that this distinction was not always made before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid 20th century; some subfields of modern phonology have a crossover with phonetics in descriptive disciplines such as psycholinguistics and speech perception, resulting in specific areas like articulatory phonology or laboratory phonology. The word phonology comes from phōnḗ, "voice, sound," and the suffix - logy. Definitions of the term vary. Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Grundzüge der Phonologie defines phonology as "the study of sound pertaining to the system of language," as opposed to phonetics, "the study of sound pertaining to the act of speech". More Lass writes that phonology refers broadly to the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language, while in more narrow terms, "phonology proper is concerned with the function and organization of sounds as linguistic items."
According to Clark et al. it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Early evidence for a systematic study of the sounds in a language appears in the 4th century BCE Ashtadhyayi, a Sanskrit grammar composed by Pāṇini. In particular the Shiva Sutras, an auxiliary text to the Ashtadhyayi, introduces what may be considered a list of the phonemes of the Sanskrit language, with a notational system for them, used throughout the main text, which deals with matters of morphology and semantics; the study of phonology as it exists today is defined by the formative studies of the 19th-century Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, who shaped the modern usage of the term phoneme in a series of lectures in 1876-1877. The word phoneme had been coined a few years earlier in 1873 by the French linguist A. Dufriche-Desgenettes. In a paper read at the 24th of May meeting of the Société de Linguistique de Paris, Dufriche-Desgenettes proposed that phoneme serve as a one-word equivalent for the German Sprachlaut.
Baudouin de Courtenay's subsequent work, though unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He worked on the theory of phonetic alternations, may have had an influence on the work of Saussure according to E. F. K. Koerner. An influential school of phonology in the interwar period was the Prague school. One of its leading members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose Grundzüge der Phonologie, published posthumously in 1939, is among the most important works in the field from this period. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, although this concept had been recognized by de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy developed the concept of the archiphoneme. Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson, one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century. In 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for generative phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features.
These features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a universally fixed set, have the binary values + or −. There are at least two levels of representation: underlying representation and surface phonetic representation. Ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation. An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a theory based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969 and in 1979. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological p
Hangul
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, has been used to write the Korean language since its creation in the 15th century by King Sejong the Great. It may be written as Hangeul following the standard Romanization, it is the official writing system of Korea, both North. It is a co-official writing system in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County in Jilin Province, China, it is sometimes used to write the Cia-Cia language spoken near the town of Indonesia. The Hangul alphabet consisted of 28 letters with 17 consonant letters and 11 vowel letters when it was created; as four became obsolete, the modern Hangul consists of total 24 letters with 14 consonant letters and 10 vowel letters. In North Korea the total is counted 40, it consists of 19 consonant letters and 21 vowel letters as it additionally includes 5 tense consonants and 20. The Korean letters are written in syllabic blocks with each alphabetic letter placed vertically and horizontally into a square dimension.
For example, the Korean word for "honeybee" is written 꿀벌, not ㄲㅜㄹㅂㅓㄹ. As it combines the features of alphabetic and syllabic writing systems, it has been described as an "alphabetic syllabary" by some linguists; as in traditional Chinese writing, Korean texts were traditionally written top to bottom, right to left, are still written this way for stylistic purposes. Today, it is written from left to right with spaces between words and western-style punctuation; some linguists consider it among the most phonologically faithful writing systems in use today. One interesting feature of Hangul is that the shapes of its consonants mimic the shapes of the speaker's mouth when pronouncing each consonant; the Korean alphabet was called Hunminjeong'eum, after the document that introduced the script to the Korean people in 1446. The Korean alphabet is called hangeul, a name coined by Korean linguist Ju Si-gyeong in 1912; the name combines the ancient Korean word han, meaning "great", geul, meaning "script".
The word han is used to refer to Korea in general, so the name means "Korean script". It has been romanized in multiple ways: Hangeul or han-geul in the Revised Romanization of Korean, which the South Korean government uses in English publications and encourages for all purposes. Han'gŭl in the McCune–Reischauer system, is capitalized and rendered without the diacritics when used as an English word, Hangul, as it appears in many English dictionaries. Hānkul in the Yale romanization, a system recommended for technical linguistic studies. In North Korea it is called Chosŏn'gŭl after Chosŏn, the North Korean name for Korea after the old name of Korea; the McCune–Reischauer system is used there. Until the mid-20th century, the Korean elite preferred to write using Chinese characters called Hanja, they referred to Hanja as jinseo or "true letters". Some accounts say the elite referred to the Korean alphabet derisively as'amkeul meaning "women's script", and'ahaetgeul meaning "children's script", though there is no written evidence of this.
Supporters of the Korean alphabet referred to it as jeong'eum meaning "correct pronunciation", gukmun meaning "national script", eonmun meaning "vernacular script". Before the creation of the new Korean alphabet, Koreans wrote using Classical Chinese alongside native phonetic writing systems that predate the modern Korean alphabet by hundreds of years, including Idu script, Hyangchal and Gakpil. However, due to fundamental differences between the Korean and Chinese languages, the large number of characters, many lower class Koreans were illiterate. To promote literacy among the common people, the fourth king of the Joseon dynasty, Sejong the Great created and promulgated a new alphabet; the Korean alphabet was designed so that people with little education could learn to write. A popular saying about the alphabet is, "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; the project was completed in late December 1443 or January 1444, described in 1446 in a document titled Hunminjeong'eum, after which the alphabet itself was named.
The publication date of the Hunminjeongeum, October 9, became Hangul Day in South Korea. Its North Korean equivalent, Chosŏn'gŭl Day, is on January 15. Another document published in 1446 and titled Hunminjeong'eum Haerye was discovered in 1940; this document explains that the design of the consonant letters is based on articulatory phonetics and the design of the vowel letters are based on the principles of yin and yang and vowel harmony. The Korean alphabet faced opposition in the 1440s by the literary elite, including politician Choe Manri and other Korean Confucian scholars, they believed. They saw the circulation of the Korean alphabet as a threat to their status. However, the Korean alphabet entered popular culture as King Sejong had intended, used by women and writers of popular fiction. King Yeonsangun banned the study and publication of the Korean alphabet in 1504, after a document criticizing the king entered the public. King Jungjong abolished the Ministry of Eonmun, a governmental institution related to Hangul research, in 1506.
The late 16th century, saw a revival of the Korean alphabet as gasa and sijo poetry flourished. In the 17th century, the Korean alphabet novels became a major genre. However, the use of the Korea
David Fairchild
David Grandison Fairchild was an American botanist and plant explorer. Fairchild was responsible for the introduction of more than 200,000 exotic plants and varieties of established crops into the United States, including soybeans, mangos, dates and flowering cherries. Certain varieties of wheat and rice became economically important. Fairchild was born in Lansing and was raised in Manhattan, Kansas, he was a member of descendants of Thomas Fairchild of Stratford, Connecticut. He graduated from Kansas State College of Agriculture where his father, George Fairchild, was president, he continued his studies at Iowa State and at Rutgers with his uncle, Byron Halsted, a noted biologist. He received an honorary D. Sc. degree from Oberlin College in 1915. Barbour Lathrop, a wealthy world traveler, persuaded Fairchild to become a plant explorer for the US Department of Agriculture. Lathrop and another wealthy patron, Allison Armour, financed some of Fairchild's many explorations for new plants to be introduced into the U.
S. Fairchild was the author of a number of popular books on his plant collecting expeditions. Of those early travels, Fairchild wrote, "I am glad that I saw a few of the quiet places of the world before the coming of automobiles...". For many years Fairchild managed the Office of Seed and Plant Introduction of the U. S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D. C. One accomplishment was to help introduce the cherry trees from Japan to Washington, he is credited with introducing kale and avocados to Americans. In 1898 he established the introduction garden for tropical plants in Florida. In 1905 he married younger daughter of Alexander Graham Bell. Fairchild was a member of the board of trustees of the National Geographic Society, an officer in what is now called the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. In 1926, the Fairchilds built a home on an 8-acre parcel on Biscayne Bay in Florida, they named it "The Kampong", after similar family compounds in Java, where Fairchild had spent so many happy days collecting plants.
He covered this property with an extraordinary collection of rare tropical trees and plants and wrote a book about the place, entitled "The World Grows Round my Door". In 1984, The Kampong became part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. In 1938, he was honored by having the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables named after him. Fairchild was a member of the board of regents of the University of Miami from 1929 to 1933. For three of those years he was chairman of the board. In 1933 he was awarded the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, his son, Alexander Graham Bell Fairchild lived and worked as a research entomologist for 33 years at the Gorgas Memorial Laboratory in the Republic of Panama. A daughter, Nancy Bell, married another entomologist, Marston Bates, author of many books on natural history, she herself wrote a book about living in rural Colombia during the 1940s: "East of the Andes and West of Nowhere". Fairchild is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of Anolis fairchildi.
Fairchild wrote four books that describe his extensive world travels and his work introducing new plant species to the United States. Beside sharing his legendary tropical botanical expertise, Fairchild provided graphic accounts of native cultures he was able to see before their modernization, he illustrated these books himself. The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer. Garden Islands of the Great East: Collecting Seeds from the Philippines and Netherlands India in the Junk'Chêng ho; the World Grows Round My Door. Exploring for Plants.. The World Was My Garden won a National Book Award as the Bookseller Discovery of 1938, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association; the Discovery was "the most deserving book which failed to receive adequate sales and recognition". In addition Fairchild and his wife Marian wrote an early book on macro photography of insects titled Book of Monsters. Fairchild wrote numerous monographs about plants, plant exploring, the transportation and cultivation of new plants in the United States.
The Kampong, the home and personal introduction garden of David Grandison Fairchild Notes Bibliography Douglas, Marjory Stoneman. Adventures in a Green World: the Story of David Fairchild and Barbour Lathrop, Coconut Grove, Florida: Field Research Projects, 1973 "Fairchild, David", Current Biography, 1953: 190-193. "Fairchild, David", Current Biography, 1954: 266. "Fairchild, David Grandison." American National Biography. 7:680-681. "Fairchild, David Grandison." National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. C:253-254 Stone, D. "The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats", Dutton Complete bibliography David Grandison Fairchild and The Kampong Works by David Fairchild at Project Gutenberg Works by or about David Grandison Fairchild at Internet Archive David Fairchild at Find a Grave
Spectrogram
A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time. When applied to an audio signal, spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams; when the data is represented in a 3D plot they may be called waterfalls. Spectrograms are used extensively in the fields of music, sonar and speech processing and others. Spectrograms of audio can be used to identify spoken words phonetically, to analyse the various calls of animals. A spectrogram can be generated by an optical spectrometer, a bank of band-pass filters, by Fourier transform or by a wavelet transform. A spectrogram is depicted as a heat map, i.e. as an image with the intensity shown by varying the colour or brightness. A common format is a graph with two geometric dimensions: one axis represents time or RPM, the other axis is frequency. There are many variations of format: sometimes the vertical and horizontal axes are switched, so time runs up and down; the frequency and amplitude axes can be either linear or logarithmic, depending on what the graph is being used for.
Audio would be represented with a logarithmic amplitude axis, frequency would be linear to emphasize harmonic relationships, or logarithmic to emphasize musical, tonal relationships. Spectrograms of light may be created directly using an optical spectrometer over time. Spectrograms may be created from a time-domain signal in one of two ways: approximated as a filterbank that results from a series of band-pass filters, or calculated from the time signal using the Fourier transform; these two methods form two different time–frequency representations, but are equivalent under some conditions. The bandpass filters method uses analog processing to divide the input signal into frequency bands. Creating a spectrogram using the FFT is a digital process. Digitally sampled data, in the time domain, is broken up into chunks, which overlap, Fourier transformed to calculate the magnitude of the frequency spectrum for each chunk; each chunk corresponds to a vertical line in the image. These spectrums or time plots are "laid side by side" to form the image or a three-dimensional surface, or overlapped in various ways, i.e. windowing.
This process corresponds to computing the squared magnitude of the short-time Fourier transform of the signal s — that is, for a window width ω, s p e c t r o g r a m = | S T F T | 2. From the formula above, it appears that a spectrogram contains no information about the exact, or approximate, phase of the signal that it represents. For this reason, it is not possible to reverse the process and generate a copy of the original signal from a spectrogram, though in situations where the exact initial phase is unimportant it may be possible to generate a useful approximation of the original signal; the Analysis & Resynthesis Sound Spectrograph is an example of a computer program that attempts to do this. The Pattern Playback was an early speech synthesizer, designed at Haskins Laboratories in the late 1940s, that converted pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech back into sound. In fact, there is some phase information in the spectrogram, but it appears in another form, as time delay, the dual of the Instantaneous Frequency.
The size and shape of the analysis window can be varied. A smaller window will produce more accurate results in timing, at the expense of precision of frequency representation. A larger window will provide a more precise frequency representation, at the expense of precision in timing representation; this is an instance of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that the product of the precision in two conjugate variables is less than or equal to a constant. Early analog spectrograms were applied to a wide range of areas including the study of bird calls, with current research continuing using modern digital equipment and applied to all animal sounds. Contemporary use of the digital spectrogram is useful for studying frequency modulation in animal calls; the distinguishing characteristics of FM chirps, broadband clicks, social harmonizing are most visualized with the spectrogram. Spectrograms are useful in assisting in overcoming speech deficits and in speech training for the portion of the population, profoundly deaf The studies of phonetics and speech synthesis are facilitated through the use of spectrograms.
By reversing the process of producing a spectrogram, it is possible to create a
