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Daniel Jones (12 September 1881 – 4 December 1967) was a
London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
-born
British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...
phonetician Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
who studied under
Paul Passy Paul Édouard Passy (; 13 January 1859, Versailles21 March 1940, Bourg-la-Reine) was a French linguist, founder of the International Phonetic Association in 1886. He took part in the elaboration of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Early lif ...
, professor of phonetics at the École des Hautes Études at the
Sorbonne Sorbonne may refer to: * Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities. *the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970) *one of its components or linked institution, ...
(
University of Paris , image_name = Coat of arms of the University of Paris.svg , image_size = 150px , caption = Coat of Arms , latin_name = Universitas magistrorum et scholarium Parisiensis , motto = ''Hic et ubique terrarum'' (Latin) , mottoeng = Here and a ...
). He was head of the Department of Phonetics at
University College, London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget =  ...
.


Biography

In 1900, Jones studied briefly at William Tilly's Marburg Language Institute in
Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
, where he was first introduced to phonetics. In 1903, he received his BA degree in mathematics at
Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...
, converted by payment to MA in 1907. From 1905 to 1906, he studied in
Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
under
Paul Passy Paul Édouard Passy (; 13 January 1859, Versailles21 March 1940, Bourg-la-Reine) was a French linguist, founder of the International Phonetic Association in 1886. He took part in the elaboration of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Early lif ...
, who was one of the founders of the
International Phonetic Association The International Phonetic Association (IPA; French: ', ''API'') is an organization that promotes the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. The IPA's major contribution to phonetics is the Interna ...
, and in 1911, he married Passy's niece Cyrille Motte. He briefly took private lessons from the British phonetician
Henry Sweet Henry Sweet (15 September 1845 – 30 April 1912) was an English philologist, phonetician and grammarian.''Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language'', as hosted oencyclopedia.com/ref> As a philologist, he specialized in the Germanic lang ...
. In 1907, he became a part-time lecturer at
University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...
and was afterwards appointed to a full-time position. In 1912, he became the head of the Department of Phonetics and was appointed to a chair in 1921, a post he held until his retirement in 1949. From 1906 onwards, Jones was an active member of the International Phonetic Association, and was Assistant Secretary from 1907 to 1927, Secretary from 1927 to 1949, and President from 1950 to 1967. In 1909, Jones wrote the short ''Pronunciation of English'', a book he later radically revised. The resulting work, ''An Outline of English Phonetics'', followed in 1918 and is the first truly comprehensive description of British
Received Pronunciation Received Pronunciation (RP) is the Accent (sociolinguistics), accent traditionally regarded as the Standard language, standard and most Prestige (sociolinguistics), prestigious form of spoken British English. For over a century, there has been ...
, and the first such description of the standard pronunciation of any language. The year 1917 was a landmark for Jones in many ways. He became the first linguist in the western world to use the term
phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
in its current sense, employing the word in his article "The phonetic structure of the Sechuana Language". Jones had made an earlier notable attempt at a pronunciation dictionary but it was now that he produced the first edition of his famous ''
English Pronouncing Dictionary The ''English Pronouncing Dictionary'' (''EPD'') was created by the British phonetician Daniel Jones and was first published in 1917. It originally comprised over 50,000 headwords listed in their spelling form, each of which was given one or more ...
'', a work which in revised form is still in print. It was here that the
cardinal vowel Cardinal vowels are a set of reference vowels used by phoneticians in describing the sounds of languages. They are classified depending on the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth, how far forward or back is the highest po ...
diagram made a first appearance. The problem of the phonetic description of vowels is of long standing, going back to the era of the ancient Indian linguists. Three nineteenth-century British phoneticians worked on this topic. Alexander Melville Bell (1867) devised an ingenious iconic phonetic alphabet which included an elaborate system for vowels. Alexander Ellis had also suggested vowel symbols for his phonetic alphabets. Henry Sweet did much work on the systematic description of vowels, producing an elaborate system of vowel description involving a multitude of symbols. Jones however was the one who is generally credited with having gone much of the way towards a practical solution through his scheme of 'Cardinal Vowels', a relatively simple system of reference vowels which for many years has been taught systematically to students within the British tradition. Much of the inspiration for this scheme can be found in the earlier publications of Paul Passy. In the original form of the Cardinal Vowels, Jones employed a dual-parameter system of description based on the supposed height of the tongue arch together with the shape of the lips. This he reduced to a simple quadrilateral diagram which could be used to help visualize how vowels are articulated. Tongue height (close vs. open) is represented on the vertical axis and front vs. back on the horizontal axis indicates the portion of the tongue raised on the horizontal axis. Lip-rounding is also built into the system, so that front vowels (such as , e, a have spread or neutral lip postures, but the back vowels (such as , u have more marked lip-rounding as vowel height increases. Jones thus arrived at a set of eight "primary Cardinal Vowels", and recorded these on gramophone disc for HMV in 1917. Later modifications to his theory allowed for an additional set of eight "secondary Cardinal Vowels" with reverse lip shapes, permitting the representation of eight secondary cardinal vowels (front rounded and back unrounded). Eventually Jones also devised symbols for central vowels and positioned these on the vowel diagram. He made two further disc recordings for Linguaphone in 1943 and 1956. With the passing years, the accuracy of many of Jones's statements on vowels has come increasingly under question, and most linguists now consider that the vowel quadrilateral must be viewed as a way of representing auditory space in visual form, rather than the tightly defined articulatory scheme envisaged by Jones. Nevertheless, the International Phonetic Association still uses a version of Jones's model, and includes a Jones-type vowel diagram on its influential International Phonetic Alphabet leaflet contained in the "Handbook of the International Association". Many phoneticians (especially those trained in the British school) resort to it constantly as a quick and convenient form of reference. Although Jones is especially remembered for his work on the phonetics and phonology of English, he ranged far more widely. He produced phonetic/phonolological treatments which were masterly for their time on the sound systems of Cantonese,
Tswana Tswana may refer to: * Tswana people, the Bantu speaking people in Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and other Southern Africa regions * Tswana language, the language spoken by the (Ba)Tswana people * Bophuthatswana, the former ba ...
(Sechuana as it was then known), Sinhalese, and Russian. He was the first phonetician to produce, in his "Sechuana Reader", a competent description of an African tone language, including the concept of
downstep Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first. Two main kinds of downstep can be disting ...
. Jones helped develop new
alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syll ...
s for African languages, and suggested systems of romanisation for Indian languages and Japanese. He also busied himself with support for revised spelling for English through the Simplified Spelling Society. Apart from his own vast array of published work, Jones will be remembered for having acted as mentor to numerous scholars who later went on to become famous linguists in their own right. These included such names as
Lilias Armstrong Lilias Eveline Armstrong (29 September 1882 â€“ 9 December 1937) was an English phonetician. She worked at University College London, where she attained the rank of reader. Armstrong is most known for her work on English intonation as we ...
, Harold Palmer,
Ida Ward Ida Caroline Ward, (4 October 1880 – 10 October 1949) was a British linguist working mainly on African languages who did influential work in the domains of phonology and tonology. Her 1933 collaboration with Diedrich Hermann Westermann, ''Pr ...
, Hélène Coustenoble,
Arthur Lloyd James Arthur Lloyd James (21 June 1884 – 24 March 1943) was a Welsh phonetician who was a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the linguistic adviser to the British Broadcasting Corporation. His research was mainly on the phone ...
, Dennis Fry,
A. C. Gimson Alfred Charles "Gim" Gimson (; 7 June 1917 – 22 April 1985) was an English phonetician. Life Gimson was educated at Emanuel School London, and University College London, where later in 1966 he became Professor of Phonetics, and in 1971 head of ...
, Gordon Arnold, J.D. O'Connor,
Clive Sansom Clive Sansom (21 June 1910 – 29 March 1981) was an English-born Tasmanian poet and playwright. He was also an environmentalist, who became the founding patron of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society. Life and work Sansom was born in East Finchley, ...
, and many more. For several decades his department at University College was pivotal in the development of phonetics and in making its findings known to the wider world. Collins and Mees (1998) speculate that it is Jones, not as is often thought
Henry Sweet Henry Sweet (15 September 1845 – 30 April 1912) was an English philologist, phonetician and grammarian.''Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language'', as hosted oencyclopedia.com/ref> As a philologist, he specialized in the Germanic lang ...
, who provided
George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from ...
with the basis for his fictional character Professor Henry Higgins in ''
Pygmalion Pygmalion or Pigmalion may refer to: Mythology * Pygmalion (mythology), a sculptor who fell in love with his statue Stage * ''Pigmalion'' (opera), a 1745 opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau * ''Pygmalion'' (Rousseau), a 1762 melodrama by Jean-Jacques ...
''.Collins and Mees 1998: 97–103 After retirement, Jones worked assiduously at his publications almost up to the end of his long life. He died at his home in
Gerrards Cross Gerrards Cross is a town and civil parish in south Buckinghamshire, England, separated from the London Borough of Hillingdon at Harefield by Denham, south of Chalfont St Peter and north bordering villages of Fulmer, Hedgerley, Iver Heath and St ...
on 4 December 1967.


Notes


References

*Asher, R. E. (1994), ''Encyclopedia of language and linguistics'', Oxford: Pergamon Press. *Bell, A. Melville (1967), "Visible Speech", London: Simpkin Marshall; rpt in facsimile in B. Collins and I. Mees (2006), "Phonetics of English in the 19th Century", London: Routledge. *Collins, B. and I. Mees (1998), ''The Real Professor Higgins: The Life and Career of Daniel Jones'', Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. *IPA (1999), "Handbook of the International Phonetic Association", Cambridge: CUP. *Jones, D. (1909), "The Pronunciation of English", Cambridge: CUP; rpt in facsimile in Jones (2002). *Jones, D. (1917a), "An English Pronouncing Dictionary", London: Dent, rpt in facsimile in Jones (2002). 17th edn, P. Roach, J. Hartman and J. Setter (eds), Cambridge: CUP, 2006. *Jones, D. (1917b), The phonetic structure of the Sechuana language, Transactions of the Philological Society 1917–20, pp. 99–106; rpt in Jones (2002). *Jones, D. (1918), "An Outline of English Phonetics", Leipzig: Teubner; rpt in Jones (2002). *Jones, D. and Kwing Tong Woo (1912), "A Cantonese Phonetic Reader", London: University of London Press; rpt in Jones (2002). *Jones, D. and S. Plaatje (1916), "A Sechuana Reader", London: ULP; rpt in Jones (2002). *Jones, D. and H. S. Perera (1919), "A Colloquial Sinhalese Reader", Manchester: Manchester University Press; rpt in Jones (2002). *Jones, D. and M. Trofimov (1923), "The Pronunciation of Russian", Cambridge: CUP; rpt in facsimile in Jones (2002). *Jones, D. (2002), Daniel Jones: Selected Works, Vols. 1–8, ed. B. Collins and I.M. Mees, London: Routledge. *Michaelis, H. and D. Jones (1913), "A Phonetic Dictionary of the English Language", Hanover-Berlin: Carl Meyer and Gustav Prior; rpt in Jones (2002).


External links

*Ling Links, People, I-M
Section on Daniel Jones
*'The Daniel Jones Legacy', J. Windsor Lewi

*'Anniversary of the Death of Daniel Jones', J. Windsor Lewi

*'Daniel Jones b 12th Sept 1881', J. Windsor Lewi

(includes a recording of Jones speaking) {{DEFAULTSORT:Jones, Daniel 1881 births 1967 deaths University of Paris faculty Linguists from the United Kingdom Phoneticians Cantonese language Academics of University College London English-language spelling reform advocates Members of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin 20th-century linguists Alumni of King's College, Cambridge People educated at Ludgrove School University of Paris alumni British expatriates in France