Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2009
From the time of the invention of alphabetic writing until the end of the nineteenth century, students of language unquestioningly accepted, the view that speech consisted of sequences of discrete sounds, strung together like the beads of a rosary. Speech has been traditionally looked at ‘as consisting of segments, each one of which represents a phoneme, which are put together to build up speech.… Each segment is envisaged as a posture of the vocal organs, and these postures are joined together by means of glides, which take us from one to the next’ (Abercrombie, 1965: 121).