Deaf Sentence Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a moulded earpiece not much bigger than an earplug. But you can still have misadventures with these, because they’re so small. A year or two ago when Fred was driving the car I took out an earpiece to change the battery and dropped it down between the seat and the door. We were on a motorway so Fred couldn’t stop. I groped for the earpiece under my seat and felt my fingers touch it but somehow I managed to push it through a small hole in the metal tracks on which the seat slides backwards and forwards and it disappeared into a cavity under the floor. I took the car into the service centre the next day and they had to remove the whole seat and part of the floor to recover it from the chassis. The man behind the counter in Reception was grinning from ear to ear as he gave me the bill and, sealed in a transparent sachet, the little plastic earpiece with a mechanic’s oily fingerprint on it. ‘This job was a first for us,’ he said. It cost me eighty-five pounds, but I had no option since each hearing instrument costs over a thousand. I use two, now, one in each ear. In the past I only needed one. My relationship with hearing aids has been a steady escalation of cost and technical refinement.
    The first in-the-ear one I bought had a fiddly volume control like a tiny studded wheel which you twisted with the tip of your forefinger, as if trying to insert a screw into your head, but they got more and more sophisticated over the years, and my latest one is digital, has three programs (for quiet conditions, noisy conditions and loop), adjusts itself automatically on the first two, or can be manually adjusted with a remote control concealed in my watch (very James Bond). Unfortunately the technology seems to have hit a ceiling and it’s unlikely that there’s going to be a great improvement in the near future. I read a report in a newspaper a year or two ago which gave me a spasm of hope, about people having their hearing restored by new techniques of surgical implants, but when I asked my GP about this treatment he told me that it only worked with a different type of deafness from mine, otosclerosis, where one of the bones in the middle ear that transmit vibrations to the inner ear becomes fixed, and can be artificially replaced. He asked around and discovered that experimental work is being done with implants in the inner ear, but with limited success, and you’d have to be in a pretty bad way to even try it. In short, there’s no cure for my kind of deafness, as Hopwood told me twenty years ago.
    As soon as he said ‘high-frequency deafness’ I knew it was bad news. ‘So that’s why I’m missing consonants,’ I said. ‘That’s right,’ he said, looking impressed. ‘How did you know?’ ‘I’m a linguist,’ I said. ‘Oh, are you? What languages?’ ‘Only the one,’ I said. (It’s a common mistake.) ‘I’m in Linguistics. Applied Linguistics to be exact.’ ‘You understand the problem then?’ he said.
    I did. Consonants are voiced at a higher frequency than vowels. I could hear vowels perfectly well - still can. But it’s consonants that we mainly depend on to distinguish one word from another. ‘“ Did you say pig or fig?” said the Cat . “ I said pig,” replied Alice .’ Maybe the Cheshire Cat was a bit deaf: it wasn’t sure whether Alice had used a bi-labial plosive or a labiodental fricative the first time she pronounced the word, and being a well-brought-upVictorian middle-class little girl she would have spoken very clearly. ‘F’ is called a labiodental fricative because you produce it by bringing your top teeth into contact with your bottom lip and allowing some air to escape between them. It’s also called a continuant because you can continue making the sound as long as you have breath: fffffffffffffffffffffffff . . . though I can’t imagine why you would want to, unless perhaps you started to say ‘Fuck’ and thought better of it. I have a smattering of phonetics, although