Peter Nielsen Ladefoged (1925-2006)

Peter Nielsen Ladefoged (1925-2006) Peter Ladefoged, Professor Emeritus of Phonetics at the University of California at Los Angeles was born in Surrey to a family of Danish extraction. He was educated at Haileybury School, Cambridge University (1943-44) and, after war service in the Royal Sussex Regiment, he completed a PhD at Edinburgh University under the supervision of David Abercrombie on the nature of vowel quality. After an eight-year Lectureship in Phonetics at Edinburgh, he began in 1962 an association with UCLA that was to last the rest of his life. He established and directed the world-famous Phonetics Laboratory in the UCLA Department of Linguistics, and supervised a series of 20 PhD students, the very large majority of whom have gone on to professorial appointments in diverse countries. All of his students and many of his colleagues reflect the profound influence of a scholar committed to the mutual illumination of meticulously observed data and stringently formulated theory. Peter Ladefoged’s personality was generous, charismatic and liberal. He had endless professional curiosity and boundless energy. He exercised an extraordinary influence on his subject worldwide, through his teaching, his students, his research, and his support of colleagues in the profession of phonetics. His own research was oriented initially to speech science, and latterly to the phonetic and linguistic characteristics of the world’s languages. While at Edinburgh, he collaborated with the physiologist David Whitteridge on respiratory aspects of speech, then with the Cambridge psychologist Donald Broadbent on the perception of speech, and then with Walter Lawrence, the inventor of the Parametric Artificial Talker, one of the very first acoustic speech synthesizers. At UCLA, he published extensively with his PhD students. His own publications were on speech acoustics, experimental phonetics, phonetic and phonological features, and on endangered languages. He specialized in field linguistics, taking heavy analytic equipment with him into virgin linguistic territory into 19 countries in every inhabited continent. His views on endangered languages were unusual, robust, and characteristically independent. He believed these languages should be researched by linguists, but not officiously preserved. He thought that the decision to try to preserve a dying language was the prerogative of the speakers themselves, not of outsiders. He also thought that the resources directed to preservation might often be more useful for local development, and that preserving an endangered language attracted the risk of encouraging tribalism and weakening national unity. However, he was deeply committed to the investigation of endangered languages, and with his colleague Ian Maddieson was personally responsible for more extensive linguistic research on them, in the field and the laboratory, than any other person in history. Professor Ladefoged was elected to a Corresponding Fellowship of the Society in 2001. His election recognized a life devoted to the study of speech and the spoken languages of the world. He published ten books, four of which were worldwide standards in many editions, and over 140 other publications in the subject’s most prestigious scientific journals. He was without question the world’s leading phonetician, laden with academic honours. He was President of the Linguistic Society of America (1978), the Permanent Council for the Organization of Phonetic Congresses (1983-91), and the International Phonetic Association (1987-91), which awarded him a Gold Medal in 1991. He held Fellowships of the Acoustical Society of America, which awarded him a Silver Medal in 1994, the American Speech and Hearing Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Honorary degrees were bestowed on him by the University of Edinburgh (DLitt, 1993) and Queen Margaret University (DSc, 2002). But perhaps the honour he most enjoyed was his role in 1964 as consultant to the film director George Cukor during the production of ‘My Fair Lady’, guiding the actor Rex Harrison through the intricacies of a performance as a phonetician. Professor Ladefoged died suddenly in London in January 2006, at the age of 80, while returning to his home in Los Angeles from a field research trip in India. He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Jenny, three grown-up children, Lise, Thegn and Katie, and five grandchildren. John Laver 2 Peter Nielsen Ladefoged MA, PhD (Edinburgh), Hon DLitt (Edinburgh), Hon DSc (QMUC), FASA, FASHA, FAAAS, CorrFBA, ForMem Royal Danish Academy of Sciences & Letters. Born 17 September 1925, elected CorrFRSE 5 March 2001, Died 25 January 2006. 2.

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