Daniel Jones (phonetician)
| Daniel Jones | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 12, 1881 |
| Died | December 4, 1967 (aged 86) |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Phonetician |
| Known for | The cardinal vowel diagram |
| Notable work | The English Pronouncing Dictionary |
Daniel Jones (12 September 1881 – 4 December 1967) was a London-born British phonetician who studied under Paul Passy, professor of phonetics at the École des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne (University of Paris). He was head of the Department of Phonetics at University College, London.
In 1900, Jones studied briefly at William Tilly's Marburg Language Institute in Germany, where he was first introduced to phonetics. In 1903, he received his BA degree in mathematics at Cambridge, converted by payment to MA in 1907. From 1905 to 1906, he studied in Paris under Paul Passy, who was one of the founders of the International Phonetic Association, and in 1911, he married Passy's niece Cyrille Motte. He briefly took private lessons from the British phonetician Henry Sweet.
In 1907, he became a part-time lecturer at University College London 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, and indeed 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 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, a work which in revised form is still in print. It was here that the cardinal vowel diagram made a first appearance. A similar work for US English was published in 1944 by Kenyon and Knott.
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