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Historiographia Linguistica
Vol. 28:3 (2001) ► pp.289–330

Phonetics and speaking machines

On the mechanical simulation of human speech in the 17th century

| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This paper shows that in the 17th century various attempts were made to build fully automatic speaking devices resembling those exhibited in the late 18th-century in France and Germany. Through the analysis of writings by well-known 17th-century scientists, and a document hitherto unknown in the history of phonetics and speech synthesis, an excerpt from La Science universelle (1667[1641]) of the French writer Charles Sorel (1599–1674), it is argued that engineers and scientists of the Baroque period have to be credited with the first model of multilingual text-to-speech synthesis engines using unlimited vocabulary.

Published online: 13 June 2002
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.28.3.02fag
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