• Daniel Jones died (4/12/1967)

    From Ross Clark@21:1/5 to All on Wed Dec 4 23:32:19 2024
    As I said in 2018:
    ---------------------------------------
    September 12 - Daniel Jones (1881)

    First learned phonetics from William Tilly (an Australian!)
    at Marburg, then from Paul Passy and Henry Sweet.

    1917: - first linguist in the western world to use the term
    "phoneme" in its current sense (in "The phonetic structure of the
    Sechuana Language")
    - first edition of _Pronouncing Dictionary of English_
    in which "Received Pronunciation" (RP) is described, and the
    Cardinal Vowel diagram first appears.

    "Collins and Mees [biographers] speculate that it is Jones,
    not as is often thought Henry Sweet, who provided George Bernard Shaw
    with the basis for his fictional character Professor Henry Higgins in Pygmalion.*

    He was still alive and working until 1967, when I was already a
    linguistics student.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Jones_(phonetician) ------------------------------------
    [2024 note:] The Collins/Mees book is called "The Real Professor
    Higgins". I haven't read it, but PTD had, and he was sure the issue was settled: Higgins was (based on) Jones. More recently I think I cited
    Sarah Ogilvie, in her 2023 book "The Dictionary People", saying that
    there was no single "real Higgins"; the character was a composite of
    various phoneticians Shaw had met, including Henry Sweet and A.J.Ellis.

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