{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 306/1923-04-18/p033","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"If the letter forms have been gained through painting drawings and drawing paintings, and if one has gone on to a kind of phonetic or whole-word method—which is now appropriate because it leads the child to an appreciation of a wholeness, and prevents it from becoming too fixed in details—if all this has been done, there is still something else that has been overlooked in our materialistic climate. It is this: the single sound, by itself, the separate *M* or *P*, this also represents a reality. And it is important to see that, when a sound is part of a word, it has already entered the external world, already passed into the material and physical world. What we have in our soul are the sounds as such, and these depend largely on our soul nature. When we pronounce letters, such as the letter *M*, for example, we actually say “ *em*.” Ancient Greeks did not do this; they pronounced it “ *mu*.” In other words, they pronounced the auxiliary vowel *after* the consonant, whereas we put it *before* the consonant. In Middle Europe today, we make the sound of a letter by proceeding from the vowel to the consonant, but in ancient Greece only the reverse path was taken.[^2] This indicates the underlying soul condition of the people concerned.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"Lecture IV","site_heading":"Child Development and Waldorf Teaching Methods","site_heading_note":"A heading the site wrote for this unit from a summary of it; not in the edition, and not the words of Rudolf Steiner or of the translator. Cite the unit by its title and locus, never by this heading, and do not quote it.","date":"1923-04-18","location":null,"word_count":219,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/306/1923-04-18/p033","alignment_confidence":"low","alignment_reason":"count_diverges","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"scope":"unit","status":"established","translator":"Roland Everett","identified_edition":"RSP1988","book_title":"The Child's Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education","publisher":"Rudolf Steiner Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA306/English/RSP1988/19230418p01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","edition_basis":null,"is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/306/1923-04-18/p033"},{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/306/1923-04-18/p033"}],"record":{"record_type":"unknown","scope":"volume","note":"How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.","evidence":null,"evidence_translation":null,"evidence_source":null},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":1.04,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":10362,"original_word_count":9962,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"scope":"unit","status":"recorded","translator":"Roland Everett","identified_edition":"RSP1988","book_title":"The Child's Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education","publisher":"Rudolf Steiner Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA306/English/RSP1988/19230418p01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}