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MATERIAALI: Kemp, J. Alan (2001). The development of phonetics from the late 18th to the late 19th century. Teoksessa S. Auroux, E.F.K. Koerner, H.-J. Niederehe & K. Versteegh (toim.), History of the Language Sciences. An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present, 1468–1480. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. MacMahon, Michael K. C. (2001). Modern language instruction and phonetics in the later 19th century. Teoksessa S. Auroux, E.F.K. Koerner, H.-J. Niederehe & K. Versteegh (toim.), History of the Language Sciences. An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings to the Present, 1585–1595. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

XXVIII. The Analysis of Speech and Unwritten Languages in the 19th Century and its Continuation in the 20th Century Die Erforschung der lautlichen Äußerung und nicht verschrifteter Sprachen im 19. und ihre Fortsetzung im 20. Jahrhundert L’e´tude de la parole et des langues non-e´crites pendant le XIXe sie`cle et sa continuation au XXe sie`cle

178. The development of phonetics from the late 18th to the late 19th century

1. Introduction speech sounds were John Wallis (1616Ϫ1703) 2. Early treatments of non-segmental features the famous mathematician and William 3. The vowel triangle Holder (1616Ϫ1698). At the end of the cen- 4. The beginnings of experimental phonetics tury the Swiss-born doctor, Conrad Amman 5. Developments in traditional approaches Ϫ 6. Germany: communication theory and a new (1669 1730) was working in the Netherlands terminology and published works on speech. All of the 7. The International Phonetic Association and last three mentioned were motivated in part its founders by their work as teachers of the deaf. In the 8. Conclusion early 18th century Denys Dodart (1634Ϫ 9. Bibliography 1707) and Antoine Ferrein (1693Ϫ1769) gave perceptive accounts of the mechanism of 1. Introduction phonation, till then little understood. (For further accounts of these early works The period dealt with by this section saw see Kemp 1994: 3102 ff. and biographical ar- enormous strides forward in knowledge of ticles in Asher 1994. A recent bibliography of the speech mechanism and ways of describing works relating to the history of phonetics it and of recording speech sounds. Neverthe- may be found in E. F. K. Koerner’s introduc- less, one must not forget the valuable work tion to the two works reproduced in Pan- done in earlier centuries, notably in the 17th concelli-Calzia 1940. These works of Pan- century, when scientific research flowered in concelli-Calzia are particularly informative in many areas and saw the founding of acade- tracing the development of early experimen- mies and societies, such as the Royal Society tal phonetic techniques.) in England, intended to further this research. Even before that there were perceptive accounts of the formation of speech, for in- 2. Early treatments of non-segmental stance by John Hart († 1574) in England, and features by the Dane, Jacob Madsen (1538Ϫ1586). Petrus Montanus (1594/95Ϫ1638) in the Thus by the late 18th century many of the Netherlands published his De Spreeckonst in elements of a proper science of phonetics 1635, though it remained little known until were already present. However, one area relatively recently (see Hulsker 1988). Fore- which had hitherto only received rather sum- most among English 17th-century writers on mary treatment was the analysis of non-seg- 178. The development of phonetics from the late 18th to the late 19th century 1469 mental features, such as rhythm and intona- 2.2. Another stimulus to phonetics came tion. from the elocutionists. Public speaking had deteriorated to a disastrous degree, and in 2.1. At the age of 75 Joshua Steele (1700Ϫ addition, there was increasing pressure in 1791) wrote a remarkable work on the non- Britain (notably in Scotland) for educated segmental aspects of speech (Steele 1775). people to speak with an English accent, con- One of his chief contributions was to clarify forming to what was established as the presti- and expand the use of certain terms: ‘accent’, gious accent of the time. The Irish actor ‘quantity’ ‘pause’, ‘emphasis’, also called Thomas Sheridan (1719Ϫ1788), father of the ‘poise’ or ‘cadence’, and ‘force’. Steele uses playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and a musical notation to record many of these Walker (1732Ϫ1807), who also started his ca- features. ‘Quantity’ (ϭ duration) is shown by reer as an actor, both taught elocution. Sheri- semiquavers, quavers, etc., and ‘accent’ (ϭ dan’s contribution to phonetics lies partly in pitch variation) by rising or falling oblique the description of speech contained in his lines attached to the stems of these notes, very popular Lectures on Elocution (1762) corresponding to the ‘slides’ which the voice and partly in his General Dictionary of the makes in speech. Steele suggested some of the English Language (1780). Like Steele, he was functions of pitch patterns Ϫ a final fall for concerned to emphasise the importance of completion, and a rise for non-completion. the non-segmental features of speech, which An increase in the extent of a movement he rightly believed were crucial to effective could indicate greater emotional involve- public speaking, and much of the Lectures is ment. ‘Pause’ is indicated by musical rests. concerned with the proper use of intonation. ‘Emphasis’ is more complex. Speech, he says, The importance of the Dictionary for phonet- is made up of ‘cadences’ or emphatical divi- ics lies in his attempt to record pronuncia- sions, each cadence, like a musical bar, being tions, with the idea of establishing a standard marked by a pulsation or ‘thesis‘ followed by accent which would replace local varieties. an ‘arsis’ or remission. The pulsation may This required him to develop a system of sometimes fall on a pause rather than a sylla- transcription, which consisted in a respelling ble, and be followed by one or more syllables of each word, using numeral diacritics to dis- in the remission. He marks the thesis with a ambiguate confusable letters. Walker’s Ele- small triangle and the unemphatic syllables ments of Elocution (1781) adopts a much with two or three dots. The speaker/hearer more formal approach than Sheridan in pre- instinctively feels the pulsations, and the al- senting rules for the use of intonation in Eng- ternation of ‘heavy’ and ‘light’, or emphatic lish, relating it to pauses and to grammatical and non-emphatic. Emphasis is not the same constructions. He was almost certainly influ- as ‘force’ (ϭ loudness) because it may fall on enced by knowledge of Steele’s work. His pause (i. e., silence) or on a whispered sylla- Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791) had ble. The following is one of his examples: outstanding success, and provides invaluable Oh, ͉happiness ͉ our evidence as to what Walker considered a ͉D ͉D .. І ͉ D І ‘proper’ pronunciation at that time. tbeings ͉end and ͉aim ͉D І ͉D І ͉D 3. The vowel triangle In the third cadence the thesis falls on a pause and the syllable our is in the arsis. In By the middle of the 19th century it had be- spite of the varying number of syllables each come fairly common to show the relationship cadence has the same quantity. What Steele of vowels to each other by using a diagram calls the ‘measure’ of speech or ‘rhythmus’ Ϫ most commonly in the form of a triangle. consists of the number of cadences in a line One of the earliest examples of this in print or sentence. Steele’s attempt at analysis of appeared in the Dissertatio physiologico-me- non-segmental features is ahead of its time, dica de Formatione Loquelae (1781) by Chri- and in spite of some inconsistencies it de- stoph Friedrich Hellwag (1754Ϫ1835) Ϫ (see serves to be accorded an important place in Vie¨tor 1886). Hellwag took *a+ to be the phonetic history, notably in its ‘temporal’ ap- principal vowel. In 1780 he had presented the proach to rhythm, hotly disputed by some diagram with *a+ to the left and a branching traditional prosodists. path extending to the right and ending in *u+ 1470 XXVIII. The Analysis of Speech and Unwritten Languages in the 19th and 20th Century

u ü i (e. g., by Dodart and Ferrein in the early 18th century, using excised larynxes) it was not till the end of that century that pioneering ex- o ö e periments were made in an attempt to produce speech sounds artificially. The appara- å ä tus devised by Christian Gottlieb Kratzen- stein (1723Ϫ1795) and Wolfgang von Kem- a pelen (1734Ϫ1804) is described elsewhere (J Art. 180). By the early 19th century, with the Fig. 178.1: Hellwag’s vowel triangle of 1781. advent of more sophisticated apparatus, it had become increasingly possible to analyse speech experimentally. and *i+ (see Fig. 178.1). In between these three vowels are six others, said to be equally 4.1. Investigations of the acoustics of speech spaced from each other. In 1781 he turned sounds the diagram to put *a+ at the bottom. Hell- Early descriptions of speech tend to identify wag claimed that his order and positioning of different vowel sounds either by reference to the vowels was not only auditory in its basis the aperture of the lips or the internal cavity but also physiological, and gave short de- of the mouth, or to give them auditory labels scriptions of the tongue and lip positions. such as ‘thin’, ‘fat’, ‘clear’, ‘dark’. Hellwag The vowels *ü+ and *ö+ are placed centrally, had recognised that vowels have a character- * + * + sharing as they do with i and e respec- istic musical ‘pitch’, as had others prior to * + tively the same tongue position and with u the 19th century, but a theory to account for * + and o the same lip position. it was lacking. The German physicist Ernst Hellwag allows that an infinite number of Florens Friedrich Chladni (1756Ϫ1827) pub- other vowels may be interpolated between lished his important Die Akustik in 1802. One those symbolised, and envisages the possi- should also note his Über die Hervorbringung bility of a mathematical model of all the vow- der menschlichen Sprache (On the Production els that the human vocal apparatus can produce. Interestingly, in describing *u+ he of Human Language) published in 1824, noted that it can be produced without the which is one of the earliest works to attempt normal close lip rounding if the root of the to set out an articulatory theory of phonetics tongue is retracted to constrict the pharynx. (MacMahon 1984). He also observed that if the vowels are whis- After a general account of the numerical pered one can detect a musical scale (corre- aspects of vibrations and an explanation of sponding to what are later called ‘formants’) terms he goes on to describe the vibrations of extending from low to high in *u, o, a˚,a,ä, resonating strings and air, and in due course e, i+, which is noticeably altered if the vowels to vowel sounds. His ten vowels are arranged are pronounced with the velum open. Many in three series, the first involving a pro- of the later vowel diagrams retain the trian- gressive narrowing of the lips, the second a gular form with *a+ at one angle and *i+ and progressive narrowing of the interior cavity *u+ at the others, but with different orienta- of the mouth, and the third combining the tions, and they often appear to have become characteristic of the other two. They are ar- conventionalised, and to reflect simply an au- ranged digrammatically in a similar form to ditory impression rather than a physiological Hellwag’s, but vertically reversed. Chladni relationship. For a robust critique of these di- discusses the vibrations of closed and open agrams in the light of X-ray investigation see pipes and concludes that their shape is unim- Russell (1928, Chap. 13), and for examples of portant. He examines the vibrations of analogies of vowel sounds with colours see plates, and the nodal lines involved, and fi- Ϫ Lepsius (1981 [1863], 51* 55*). nally discusses the propagation of sounds and the sensation of sound. 4. The beginnings of experimental Robert Willis (1800Ϫ1875) and Charles Ϫ phonetics Wheatstone (1802 1875), both British physi- cists, pursued further investigations. Willis While simple experiments to investigate as- (1830) fitted a cylindrical tube with a reed, pects of speech had been carried out earlier and by attaching further tubes to it was able 178. The development of phonetics from the late 18th to the late 19th century 1471 to vary the total length. In this way he dis- pharynx and the other to the mouth cavity. covered that a simple increase in the length These correspond closely to modern defini- could produce the series of vowels *i, e, a, o, tions of the first two formants. Helmholtz u+, without any change in the diameter or then synthesised the vowels by combining the shape of the tubes. Moreover, he observed output of the appropriate tuning forks. This that the quality of the vowel was independent was the earliest effective speech synthesis of the note produced by the reed and con- using acoustic methods, and exercised a ma- cluded that it derived from damped vibrations jor influence on later acoustic research (Kö- resulting from the reflections of the original ster 1973: 159 ff.). A device called a ‘phonau- wave at the extremity of the tube. This theory tograph’ was invented by E´ douard Le´on came to be known as the ‘inharmonic’ or Ϫ Scott in 1857 (see Fig. 178.3). This enabled ‘transient’ theory. Wheatstone (1837 38), on the investigator to record graphically the fre- repeating Willis’s experiments, found that quency vibrations produced by tuning forks there was not only one resonance per vowel and by the vocal cords, for instance during but several. The column of air in the tubes the production of various vowel sounds. An- vibrated not only when it was capable of pro- other such device was the manometric flame ducing the same sound as the reed, but also developed by Rudolf Koenig from 1862 when the number of vibrations it was capable of producing was any simple multiple of the (Koenig 1872), which was connected to reso- vibration produced by the reed Ϫ i. e. when nators and produced varying patterns on a it corresponded to a harmonic of the original mirror according to the resonances of the sound. The same was true of the cavity of the sounds detected see Fig. 178.4). In 1889 Ludi- Ϫ mouth acting as a resonator, responding to mar Hermann (1838 1914) published Phono- the vibrations of the vocal cords. Wheat- photographische Untersuchungen, in which he stone’s theory appears to be the origin of the analysed the wave forms of vowels, support- ‘harmonic cavity tone’ theory, later developed ing the ‘inharmonic’ theory proposed by by Helmholtz. Wheatstone also constructed a Willis as opposed to Helmholtz’s ‘harmonic’ speaking machine on the basis of von Kem- theory. He is credited with the invention of pelen’s description, with some modifications. the term ‘formant’. Work on consonants His account of the vowels takes the “aw” progressed more slowly, but during the 1870s vowel in fall as his starting point, and con- the significance of the vowel like transition structs three series, not far different from associated with consonants was realised, and Chladni’s. Hermann von Helmholtz (1821Ϫ Charles Rosapelly (ca. 1850Ϫ1913) coined 1894) published his Die Lehre von den To- the name ‘vocaloid’ for it. By the end of the nempfindungen in 1863 (translated into Eng- century more sophisticated devices had been lish by A. J. Ellis Ϫ cf. 5.1.). He had pre- developed to give graphic representations of viously experimented with cylindrical resona- the acoustics of speech sounds (Marey 1878; tors, but later substituted spherical ones Wendeler 1887; Pipping 1890). See further in made of glass or of brass, with two openings, Tillmann (1995: 414). one with a neck which could be inserted into the ear (see Fig. 178.2). Using the resonators and tuning forks he analysed the components of the German vowels, separating them into two classes Ϫ *u, o, a+ specified by one resonance, and *ü, ö, ä, i, e+ specified by two resonances, one of which he attributed to the

Fig. 178.2: A. Helmholtz resonator (from Rous- Fig. 178.3: Scott’s phonautograph (from Rous- selot 1897Ϫ1908: 162). selot 1897Ϫ1908: 110). 1472 XXVIII. The Analysis of Speech and Unwritten Languages in the 19th and 20th Century

Fig. 178.4: Koenig’s manometric flame apparatus (from Rous- selot 1897Ϫ1908: 164).

4.2. Instrumental investigation of speech had been wiped off after a particular sound articulations had been produced, and transferred the Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles pattern to a pre-prepared drawing of the pal- Darwin, in his book Temple of Nature (1803) ate and tongue (see Fig. 178.5). However his described how he inserted cylinders made of knowledge of phonetics was insufficient to al- tinfoil in the mouth, and deduced from the low him to obtain convincing results. Pala- impressions made on them the part of the tography became a popular technique in the mouth involved in the formation of each latter part of the century, being used, among vowel. This technique was an anticipation of others, by Paul Grützner, Rudolf Lenz, the form of palatography first developed in Friedrich Techmer, and Abbe´ Rousselot, and 1879 by the New York dentist Norman Wil- has remained a useful method of investiga- liam Kingsley (1829Ϫ1913), using an artifi- tion through the 20th century. It has been cial palate. The palate was painted with a largely replaced in recent years by electropa- substance which was wiped off when the in- latography, which also uses an artificial pal- formant produced an utterance. The palate ate, but gives a much more detailed picture could then be removed and the wipe-off ex- of speech, including the precise timing of ar- amined and related to the articulations. It re- ticulations. (See further on these techniques quired a careful selection of the utterance, Abercrombie 1957; Hardcastle et al. 1989.) and a fair degree of practice with the palate Similar investigations were made of tongue to allow a reasonably natural articulation. contacts with the palate by painting the Some seven years earlier a London dentist, tongue itself to give linguograms (Grützner James Oakley Coles (1845Ϫ1906), had solved 1879). Palatography in its early stages was part of this problem by painting a mixture of confined to the examination of carefully se- gum and flour directly on the roof of his lected brief utterances. In order to be able to mouth. He then observed where the mixture observe continuous speech, and to make 178. The development of phonetics from the late 18th to the late 19th century 1473

Fig. 178.5: Examples of Oakley Coles’s palatograms (from Panconcelli-Cal- zia 1940: 55). quantitative observations and measurements an analogue on paper of the variations in air of it, a way of converting it into a continuous pressure during speech over time, conveyed graphic form was needed. In 1734 a clock- to membranes via tubes from mouth and work device had been invented to record nose. Attached to the membranes were scrib- wind speeds by means of a scriber resting on ers which were moved by the air to give continuous sheets of paper on a revolving curves on a revolving drum covered in drum. Some hundred years later Karl Ludwig smoked paper (see Fig. 178.6). The technique used a similar device to record the pattern was widely used by Pierre Jean Rousselot of respiration, and the technique, known as (1846Ϫ1924), both in his dissertation on the kymography, provided a vital step forward in Gallo-Roman dialect, and in his Principes de investigating various aspects of speech over phone´tique expe´rimentale (1897Ϫ1908), but it time. The precise methodology varied, but in had its limitations and these were carefully its developed form it consisted in obtaining analysed by E. A. Meyer (1898). By the mid-

Fig. 178.6: Kymographic apparatus for recording mouth airstream and glottal vibration (from Panconcelli-Calzia. 1924. Die experimentelle Phonetik in ihrer Anwendung auf die Sprachwissenschaft. Berlin: de Gruyter). 1474 XXVIII. The Analysis of Speech and Unwritten Languages in the 19th and 20th Century

19th century devices had been invented to reservations (Sievers 1876; Jespersen 1904). observe the operation of the vocal cords. The However, Rousselot was certainly well aware Spanish singing teacher Manuel Garcia de- of the limitations of experimental techniques, monstrated a method of observing his own and in retrospect one can see that the opposi- vocal cords in 1855, using a dentist’s mirror. tion of the traditional phoneticians may have Within the next few years Johann Czermak unduly delayed the development of the new (1828Ϫ1873) developed an apparatus en- techniques and the funding of phonetic labo- abling him to observe other people’s vocal ratories. cords by the use of reflected artificial light, and published his results, including the first diagrams of the activity of the vocal cords 5. Developments in traditional in living informants, and also photographs of approaches them. This marked a major advance in the The contribution of the physiologists in con- understanding of the functioning of the tinental Europe, notably Rapp, Merkel, mechanism of phonation. By the last quarter Brücke and Sievers, to phonetic research in of the century the stroboscope had been en- the 19th century is discussed elsewhere (J listed to make observation of vocal cord ac- Art. 180). Within Britain phonetics developed tivity easier. in a more linguistic context, with strong em- An important development was the foun- phasis on the practical applications. dation of periodicals devoted to phonetic re- Ϫ search. In the 1880s Wilhelm Vie¨tor (1850 5.1. Alexander John Ellis (1814Ϫ1890) came 1918) founded the Zeitschrift für Ortho- of a middle class family, and was fortunate graphie Phonetische Studien and (later entit- enough to have an independent income as a led Die neueren Sprachen), and Friedrich result of a legacy, which allowed him to pur- Techmer (1843Ϫ1891) founded the Interna- sue his own research. He graduated with a tionale Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Sprachwis- first class degree in mathematics from Cam- senschaft (1884), which regrettably ceased bridge, but his many interests included music publication on his death. The rapid development of the natural sciences in the 19th cen- and phonetics. He grew up in a part of Lon- tury with the consequent emphasis on experi- don where Cockney was heard every day, and mentation gave a great impetus to those who his time at Shrewsbury School and at Cam- believed that this was the way ahead for pho- bridge exposed him to other more prestigious netic research. However, some had reserva- accents. It was a trip to Italy which made him tions. We find these expressed in the article conscious of the need for a system to record for the 11th edition of Encyclopædia Britan- dialectal differences in a consistent way. He nica (1911) by Henry Sweet. Having men- decided to study the available works on pho- tioned such techniques as laryngoscopy and netics, and to extend his knowledge of lan- palatography he goes on: guages. He was particularly influenced by Karl Moritz Rapp’s (1803Ϫ1883) Versuch “The methods hitherto considered are all compara- einer Physiologie der Sprache (1836Ϫ41), tively simple. They require no special knowledge or training, and are accessible to all. But there are which combined a physiological basis with a more elaborate methods Ϫ with which the name wide knowledge of modern languages and a ‘experimental phonetics’ is more specially con- very keen ear for phonetic distinctions. In nected Ϫ giving special training in practical and 1843 Ellis got to know of the work of Isaac theoretical physics and mathematics, and requiring Pitman directed at developing a system of the help of often complicated and costly, and not shorthand, and also the reform of English easily accessible apparatus […]. Although their respelling. By 1845 he was in a position to pro- sults are often of value, they must always be re- duce a major work on phonetics Ϫ The Al- ceived with caution: the sources of error are so nu- Ϫ merous […]. It cannot be too often repeated that phabet of Nature intended to contribute instrumental phonetics is, strictly speaking, not towards a more accurate analysis and sym- phonetics at all. It is only a help: it supplies materi- bolisation of speech. Three years later he als which are useless till they have been tested and published The Essentials of Phonetics, printed accepted from the linguistic phonetician’s point of throughout in the Phonotypic transcription view. The final arbiter in all phonetic questions is which Ellis and Pitman had devised. This the trained ear of a practical phonetician.” (Hen- also focuses chiefly on the problem of devis- derson 1971: 37) ing a universal alphabet. (Further details of Eduard Sievers (1850Ϫ1932) and Otto Jes- his partnership with Pitman and his develop- persen (1860Ϫ1943) had expressed similar ment of new systems of transcription are to 178. The development of phonetics from the late 18th to the late 19th century 1475 be found in Art. 186.) Ellis defined phonetics phonetics perhaps lies more in the stimulus as a branch of acoustics, and acknowledged he gave to later workers in the field than in a debt to von Kempelen, Willis and Wheat- his own ideas, but there is no questioning his stone, and also to Robert Gordon Latham’s broad scholarship and meticulous research. (1812Ϫ1888) Handbook of the English Lan- guage (1st ed., 1841). Willis is quoted at 5.2. The practical aspect of phonetics is no- length. In his description of speech sounds where more evident than in the life and work Ellis praises Rapp’s account of the vowels, of Alexander Melville Bell (1819Ϫ1905). His which displayed them in a triangular diagram contribution to the development of an iconic of 11 vowels, with the open vowel *a+ at the system of transcription is described elsewhere bottom, and three series radiating from it, (J Art. 207). Bell was a teacher of elocution, similar to earlier diagrams (cf. 3.). However, like his father before him Ϫ a Scot, who prac- his Urvokal (“basic vowel”) *e+ is immedi- tised in Edinburgh and London between 1843 ately above *a+, in the centre of the diagram, and 1870, and subsequently in the USA and representing “unentwickelte Indifferenz” (ab- Canada. His pupils included native English sence of differentiating form) Ϫ that is, a speakers and foreigners from various parts of neutral (schwa-like) form as opposed to the the world, including some who suffered from distinct vowels which surrounded it. Ellis’s speech defects. The fund of practical experi- diagram contains 17 vowels, and he places ence resulting from his acquaintance with his ‘original’ vowel (symbolised *e¨+)atthe such a wide range of speech sounds stim- base while retaining the three series radiating ulated Bell to produce a new and improved from it, which he relates to Willis’s acoustic method of describing and transcribing them. scale. The division of vowels into long, brief The scope of phonetics for him was not con- (short in an open syllable) or stopped (short fined to the traditional vowels and conso- in a closed syllable) is clearly English-based nants but included “all oral effects in speech (see Kelly 1981: 254 ff.). Ellis’s classification and their graphic representation”. His major of consonants shows few advances on 17th- contribution, apart from the new system of century systems such as that of Wallis (1653). transcription, was in his description of vow- The terms ‘spoken’ and ‘whispered’ are used els. In his early work he had followed in the to separate voiced and voiceless. There are tradition of previous descriptions, dividing some oddities, such as his description of *l+ his 22 vowels into three parallel groups of 7: as having vibration of the sides of the tongue. ‘labial’, ‘lingual’ and ‘labio-lingual’, together Clucks (ϭ clicks) are described as produced with the vowel “ah”. Bell was dissatisfied by “smacking the tongue”. In 1849 Ellis be- with this scheme, and in his major work Visi- came prostrated by overwork but he later ble Speech (1867) he presented a revised produced further publications on transcrip- analysis. His earlier description had recog- tion (J Art. 186). However, the work which nised the part played in vowel formation by has brought him the most attention and re- the height of the tongue and the shape of the cognition is the five-part Early English Pro- oral aperture, but he now specifies the precise nunciation (1869Ϫ89). In his later years he point at which the tongue is at its highest, had become deeply involved with the history emphasising the fact that the whole of the of English pronunciation, and this work was oral passage is involved in vowel production. an attempt to give an account of it from me- Three horizontal positions are defined, la- dieval times up to his own time. It contains belled “front’, ‘back’ and ‘mixed’ (midway a fascinating collection of data, much of it between front and back), and three vertical derived from a large army of informants in grades of height: ‘high’, ‘mid’ and ‘low’. This Britain and abroad, and goes well beyond gave nine ‘cardinal degrees’, as he described anything attempted before in the field of them. All of these vowels, irrespective of their English dialectology, though in many cases it tongue position, were subject to “rounding”, is far from easy to interpret Ellis’s transcrip- which involved a modification of the guttural tions in his Palaeotype system (see Local passage and the buccal cavities as well as the 1983; Shorrocks 1991). Ellis’s expertise in the lips. Bell also introduced a distinction la- area of acoustics and music is exemplified by belled ‘primary’ and ‘wide’. Primary vowels his edition of Helmholtz’s Die Lehre von den were nearest to consonants, involving a nar- Tonempfindungen, under the title On the Sen- rowing of the pharynx, whereas for the wide sations of Tone (2nd ed., 1885) which in- vowels the pharynx and guttural passage cluded much original work by Ellis. His con- were fully expanded. This gave 36 vowels in tribution to the development of theoretical all. He also ordered the vowels acoustically, 1476 XXVIII. The Analysis of Speech and Unwritten Languages in the 19th and 20th Century according to their ‘pitch’, but it was his refin- Kenneth Pike (1943: 78) later introduced the ing of the physiological basis which consti- terms ‘vocoid’ and ‘contoid’ precisely to solve tuted a major contribution and influenced all this problem. Bell recognised that clicks in- subsequent descriptions. In the light of later volve suction, and identified four types. experimental research the extent to which Modifiers are provided for nasalisation, trill- Bell’s description tallies with the physiologi- ing, protrusion, accent, hiatus etc., and also cal facts has been called into question, but marks for five tonal variants. Ellis’s approval even accepting that his analysis had an audi- of Bell’s Visible Speech is quoted at length by tory or proprioceptive basis, the framework Bell in his 1867 book. In 1880 Sweet gave a he provided proved to be an effective practi- detailed account of it with critical comments cal tool. In 1880 Sweet commented: before setting out his revised version of it Ϫ the Organic Alphabet (Henderson 1971: “Bell’s analysis of the vowels is so perfect that after Ϫ ten years’ incessant testing and application to a 256 270). variety of languages, I see no reason for modifying its general framework.” (Henderson 1971: 241). 5.3. Apart from his fame as inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell (1847Ϫ Bell also revised his earlier consonant 1922) deserves mention for his work in teach- scheme, basing it on five places of articula- ing the deaf using the Visible Speech method tion Ϫ throat (ϭ glottal), back (ϭ velar), invented by his father. He was also inspired front or top (ϭ palatal), point (ϭ dental/alve- by seeing the operation of Wheatstone’s re- olar), lip (ϭ labial). In terms of manner of construction of the speaking machine in- articulation he divided into primary (ϭ vented by Wolfgang von Kempelen to con- central oral), divided (ϭ lateral oral), nasal, struct a complex physiologically based au- and shut (ϭ stop). He wrongly classed [f, v, tomaton of his own, which could apparently h, d] as ‘divided’ (i. e., lateral consonants). produce vowels and nasals and a few simple Sweet attributed this to “an attempt to up- utterances. In 1879 he published a paper enti- hold the symmetry of the system, even where tled “Vowel Theories”. its ground plan is defective”, pointing out that if Bell had provided a sign for the teeth- 5.4. Henry Sweet (1845Ϫ1912) was in his position [h] and [f] would fall into their natu- early twenties when Bell’s Visible Speech was ral places ‘point-teeth’ and ‘lip-teeth’ respec- published, and it stimulated what was al- tively. ‘Mixed’ consonants are those said to ready a strong interest in languages. He took have a compression at two points. One exam- lessons from Bell, and was well acquainted ple given is [s], described as ‘front-mixed’, be- with the earlier tradition in phonetics. In cause both the front and the point of the 1877 he published his Handbook of Phonetics, tongue are raised. Apart from ‘breath’ and which had a major impact on phonetics in ‘voice’, modifications at the larynx include Britain, and an even greater one on the conti- aspiration, whisper, hoarseness, and the nent of Europe. He placed phonetics firmly “catch” (ϭ [?]). Like Ellis, Bell introduces in the context of language study rather than “glides” as a third category, intermediate to adopting the physiological approach charac- vowels and consonants, said to be formed terising many continental writers (J Art. 180 and MacMahon 1991). In his view it was “the “when the configurative channel is so far expanded as to remove compression or buzzing from the indispensable foundation of all study of voice […] These elements are only transitional language” (1877: v), and he himself acquired sounds. If they had a fixed configuration, they a wide knowledge of the phonetics of lan- would be vowels, and would form syllables.” (Hen- guages, particularly those of northern derson 1971: 265) Europe. The system he put forward in the Handbook differed from Bell’s in a number of Having quoted this passage Sweet comments ways. We saw that he corrected Bell’s faulty “This view of ‘glides’ being intermediate to conso- analysis of [f, v, h, d], by adding the category nants and vowels is the result of confusion between “teeth”. He also took issue with Bell’s distinc- the two distinct divisions of sounds, namely, that tion of ‘primary’ and ‘wide’ vowels, attrib- of syllabic and non-syllabic and that of consonant uted to a change in the shape of the pharynx. and vowel. The latter is entirely the result of the position of the organs, while the former is purely Sweet substituted the terms ‘narrow’ and relative, dependent mainly on stress, secondarily ‘wide’, extending them to consonants, and re- on quantity. Any sound, whether consonant or lating the distinction to the shape of the vowel, may be either syllabic, that is, a syllable for- tongue rather than the pharynx. For narrow mer, or the contrary.” (Henderson 1971: 266) sounds the tongue is said to be under tension, 178. The development of phonetics from the late 18th to the late 19th century 1477 and relatively convex through being ‘bunched in the Handbook. Instead of the Roman- up lengthwise’, narrowing the oral passage, based phonetic notation of the Handbook whereas for wide sounds it was relaxed and (‘Romic’), he now uses his revised version of flattened. Sweet emphasised that this did not Bell’s Visible Speech Ϫ the Organic Alphabet depend on tongue height. He contrasted the (J Art. 186, for further descriptions of these high-front-narrow vowel in French si with the notations). However, the most striking high-front-wide vowel in English bit. How- change came in the 1906 edition of the ever, one of his major innovations in the Hand- Primer. Sweet decided that the 36 vowel clas- book is the introduction of a broad division sification did not account satisfactorily for into analysis and synthesis. He writes: the way certain vowel sounds were produced. “Analysis regards each sound as a fixed, stationary His earlier assumption had been that the point, synthesis as a momentary point in a stream back vowels had a backward slope of the of incessant change. Synthesis looks mainly at the tongue, and the front vowels a forward slope, beginning and end of each sound, as the points while for the mixed vowels the tongue was where it is linked on to other sounds, while analysis flat. Now he became persuaded that for some concerns itself only with the middle of the fully de- vowels the tongue was ‘shifted’ forwards or veloped sound.” (Henderson 1971: 44) backwards while retaining the slope. Thus, And later: the mixed vowel could be shifted back while retaining its flatshape, the back vowel could “From a purely phonetic point of view words do be shifted forward while retaining its back not exist […] We see, then, that there are two ways of dealing with languages: (1) the synthetic, which slope, and the front vowel shifted back, re- starts from the sentence; (2) the analytic, which taining its front slope. This gave him a system starts from the word.” (Henderson 1971: 43) of 72 vowels. Sweet’s objective was to give precise instructions for producing the sounds Glides are an essential aspect of synthesis. concerned, though he may well have origi- Sweet rejected Bell’s classification of glides as nally identified them by a combination of au- a third category alongside vowels and conso- ditory, tactile and proprioceptive sensations. nants, and confined the term ‘glide’ to the Later experimental investigations have vowels. Diphthongs are held to be a combi- shown that many of the articulatory descrip- nation of glide vowel and full vowel, or possi- tions found in Bell, Sweet and others do not bly of two full vowels. Other aspects of syn- tally with the picture as revealed by X-rays thesis are: force, which he later called stress, (e. g., Russell 1928; Wood 1982). quantity or length, syllable division, and into- Sweet’s cautionary remarks about the tech- nation. In the Handbook Sweet confesses to niques of experimental phonetics have al- a lack of competence to deal with intonation ready been quoted (cf. 4.2.), and perhaps it is (Henderson 1971: 175), but he does his best regrettable that he was not more receptive to to grapple with it, and with stress and tone. them. However, now that the instrumental, Word-tone in languages such as Chinese is and particularly the acoustic, aspects of pho- distinguished from the sentence-tone of Eng- netics have come almost to dominate the lish, and word-stress from sentence-stress (ϭ scene, it is salutary to remind ourselves of the tonic placement). In spite of the emphasis insights that are to be found in the Handbook which Sweet gave to synthesis most of his and the Primer. Sweet’s achievements in ad- successors tended to neglect it. Another of his vancing phonetic theory, in the study of the innovative terms, “organic basis”, is a partic- English language and in the practical teach- ularly interesting phenomenon. To quote ing of languages were given more ready re- him: cognition during his lifetime outside Britain “Every language has certain general tendencies than within it, but there can be few who which control its organic movements and posi- would now question his crucial influence in tions, constituting its organic basis or basis of ar- the development of the science of phonetics. ticulation. A knowledge of the organic basis is a great help in acquiring the pronunciation of a language.” Henderson 1971: 184Ϫ185) 6. Germany: communication theory and a new terminology These tendencies were largely ignored prior to the appearance of Beatrice Honikman’s ar- 6.1. Friedrich Techmer’s (1843Ϫ1891) scien- ticle “Articulatory Settings” in 1964. tific background, together with his wide In 1890 Sweet published his Primer of Pho- knowledge of languages, made him particu- netics, clarifying and expanding the material larly suited to undertake the reconciliation of 1478 XXVIII. The Analysis of Speech and Unwritten Languages in the 19th and 20th Century the different traditions in phonetics, classical guages. Further details of its origin and and experimental. His foundation of the In- growth can be found in MacMahon (1986). ternationale Zeitschrift für allgemeine Sprach- However, it may be appropriate to include wissenschaft was mentioned earlier. Volume 1 here some brief remarks on the contributions (pp. 69Ϫ192) contained a valuable survey of to phonetic theory of several of those who the various experimental techniques used to were instrumental in the establishment of the investigate speech, a set of German technical IPA, namely Johan Storm, Otto Jespersen, terms for phonetics, and also an attempt to Wilhelm Vie¨tor and Paul Passy. Their contri- formulate a scientific theory to deal with all butions to the application of phonetics to phonetic speech communication, covering language teaching and their involvement in analysis and synthesis. He distinguished seven the IPA are dealt with in detail in art. 208. interrelated stages dealing with speech, pro- Henry Sweet’s work is described in 5.4. ceeding first from outside to inside Ϫ a physi- above. Johan Storm (1836Ϫ1920) was a bril- cal-acoustic analysis, then from inside to out- liant practical phonetician, who developed a side Ϫ an anatomical and a physiological-pro- new system for transcribing the dialects of his ductive analysis. Physiologically sounds are native country Norway, still in use today. He divided into ‘mouth-openers’ (Mundöffner) was a close friend of Henry Sweet, and en- and ‘mouth-closers’ (Mundschließer), physi- couraged him to produce a new work giving cally they are either “noises” (Geräuschlaute) the main results of Bell’s investigations with or ‘tones’ (Klanglaute), and perceptually they suitable additions and alterations. This re- are either syllabic (Phon) or non-syllabic sulted in Sweet’s Handbook (cf. 5.4.). How- (Symphon). So, for instance, vowels are char- ever, Storm lacked Sweet’s ability to set out acterised as ‘mouth-openers, tones and sylla- his investigations in a systematic way, and his bic’. Techmer was highly critical of mistakes wider reputation rests on his undoubtedly he claimed to have detected in Melville Bell’s strong influence on contemporary phoneticians, notably Sweet and Eduard Sievers. The and Paul Passy’s work, and in turn came under Ϫ attack from Sweet and Storm, who asserted Danish scholar Otto Jespersen (1860 1943) that he provided too little evidence for his the- made important contributions to many as- ory from languages, and failed to explain the pects of linguistics. Influenced by Sweet’s Handbook theory adequately. and by his Norwegian friend Jo- han Storm he developed an early interest in Ϫ phonetics. In 1889 he published his analpha- 6.2. Moritz Trautmann (1842 1920) pub- J lished his book Die Sprachlaute im Allge- betic system for phonetic transcription ( meinen und die Laute des Englischen, Franzö- Art. 186), involving a detailed analysis of the sischen und Deutschen im Besonderen (The various sound types. His book Fonetik Ϫ Pho- Sounds of Speech in general and in particular (1897 1898; republished in German as netische Grundfragen Lehrbuch der Pho- the sounds of English, French and German) and netik about the same time as Techmer’s theory of , both 1904) gives a thorough account of descriptive phonetics, based on his own per- speech communication (1884Ϫ86). One of his sonal observations. The Danish edition pro- objectives was to provide the basis for a Ger- vides a new set of phonetic terms for Danish. man school of phonetics, introducing new Like Sweet he was not an advocate of the terminology and putting the emphasis on an new experimental methods in phonetics, be- acoustic approach to vowel description ing particularly critical of those who fa- rather than the articulatory one adopted by voured an acoustic approach over the articu- the British and Scandinavian phoneticians. latory one. He made important contributions Unfortunately his presentation is often ob- to the phonetics of Danish, including the in- scure and lacking in the exemplification from vention of a dialect alphabet ‘Dania’, which languages which could have clarified it, espe- is still in use in Denmark. A planned English cially considering that he intended it for use edition of his textbook on general phonetics by language teachers. never reached fruition (Rischel 1989: 56). Wilhelm Vie¨tor (1850Ϫ1918) was a pioneer 7. The International Phonetic of reform in language teaching, and made an Association and its founders important contribution to the study of phonetics in Germany. He founded the periodical It is well known that the International Pho- Phonetische Studien, later continued as Die netic Association (IPA) sprang out of an as- Neueren Sprachen, published a textbook in sociation concerned with the teaching of lan- phonetics containing a valuable summary of 178. The development of phonetics from the late 18th to the late 19th century 1479 the work of his predecessors (Vie¨tor 1884), Ϫ. 1848. The Essentials of Phonetics. London: and was one of the founder members of the F. Pitman. IPA. Paul Passy (1859Ϫ1940) like Vie¨tor was Grützner, Paul. 1879Ϫ83. “Physiologie der Stimme a founder member of the IPA Ϫ and also und Sprache”. Hermanns Handbuch der Physiolo- shared with him the determination to reform gie. Band I. Teil II. Leipzig: Vogel. the teaching of languages and in particular Hardcastle, William et al. 1989. “New Develop- their phonetic aspect. His doctoral thesis on ments in Electropalatography: A state-of-the-art historical phonetics won the Prix Volney report”. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics (Passy 1890), and his brilliant teaching 3:1.1Ϫ38. brought him a wide influence both within Hellwag, Christoph F. 1781. Dissertatio physiolo- and outside France. gico-medica de Formatione Loquelae. Tübingen. Helmholtz, Hermann. 1863. Die Lehre von den Ton- 8. Conclusion empfindungen. Braunschweig: Vieweg. (English transl., by A. J. Ellis On the Sensations of Tone, 2nd The 19th century, and particularly the second ed. London: Longmans Green 1885.) half, was an exciting and stimulating time for Henderson, Euge´nie J. A. 1971. The Indispensable those working in the field of phonetics. It saw Foundation: A selection from the writings of Henry the establishment of the traditional side, with Sweet. London: Oxford Univ. Press. its auditory/articulatory theory, as a disci- Honikman, Beatrice. 1964. “Articulatory Settings”. pline, and the rapid development of the ex- In Honour of Daniel Jones,73Ϫ84. London: Long- perimental approach, in spite of the scepticism mans. of many phoneticians. Any attempt in a lim- Hulsker, J. L. M. 1988. “Petrus Montanus as a ited space to summarise these developments Phonetician and Theoretician”. Historiographia will inevitably leave gaps. The birth and Linguistica 15:1/2.85Ϫ108. growth of phonology is closely linked with Jespersen, Otto. 1904. Lehrbuch der Phonetik. the study of phonetics, but falls outside the Leipzig & Berlin: Teubner. scope of this article. The focus is concen- trated, one hopes not unduly, on western Kemp, J. Alan. 1994. “Phonetics: Precursors of Modern Approaches”. Koerner & Asher 1995. Europe and the USA, as it was there that the Ϫ major developments took place. 371 388. König, Rudolf. 1872. “Die manometrischen Flam- men”. Annalen der Physik und Chemie 146.161 ff. 9. Bibliography Koerner, E. F. K. & R. E. Asher, eds. 1995. Concise Abercrombie, David. 1957. “Direct Palatography”. History of the Language Sciences. Oxford & New Zeitschrift für Phonetik 10.21Ϫ25. (Repr. in Studies York: Pergamon. in Phonetics and Linguistics by D. Abercrombie, Köster, Jens-Peter. 1973. Historische Entwicklung 125Ϫ130. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965.) von Syntheseapparaten. Hamburg: Buske. Asher, Ronald E., ed. 1994. The Encyclopedia of Lepsius, Carl Richard. 1981 [1863]. Standard Al- Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon Press. phabet for Reducing Unwritten Languages and For- Austerlitz, Robert. 1975. “Historiography of Pho- eign Graphic Systems to a Uniform Orthography in netics: A bibliography”. Current Trends in Linguis- European Letters. 2nd rev. ed. prepared by J. Alan tics ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, vol. XIII: Historiog- Kemp. Amsterdam: Benjamins. raphy of Linguistics, 1179Ϫ1209. The Hague: Mou- ton. Local, John K. 1983. “Making a Transcription: The evolution of A. J. Ellis’s Palaeotype”. Journal of the Bell, Alexander Melville. 1867. Visible Speech: The International Phonetic Association 13:1.2Ϫ12. Science of Universal Alphabetics. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. MacMahon, Michael K. C. 1984. “Phonetics and Medicine in the Early 19th Century (Abstract)”. Breymann, Hermann. 1897. Die phonetische Li- Henry Sweet Society Newsletter No. 2, Nov. 1984, teratur von 1876Ϫ1895: Eine bibliographisch-kriti- p. 16. Oxford. sche Übersicht. Leipzig: A. Deichert. Ϫ Chladni, E. F. F. 1802. Die Akustik. Leipzig: Breit- . 1986. “The International Phonetic Association: kopf & Härtel. The first 100 years”. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 16.30Ϫ38 (1987). Danielsson, Bror, ed. 1955. John Hart’s Works. Ϫ Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. . 1991. “Sweet, Europe and Phonetics”. Henry Sweet Society Newsletter No. 17, Nov. 1991, 12Ϫ18. Darwin, Erasmus. 1803. The Temple of Nature or the Origin of Society. London: J. Johnson. (Fac- Marey, E´ tienne Jules. 1878. La me´thode graphique simile repr., Menston: Scolar Press 1973). dans les sciences expe´rimentales. Paris: Masson. Ellis, Alexander J. 1845. The Alphabet of Nature. Meyer, Ernst Alfred. 1898. “Die Silbe”. Die neueren Bath: I. Pitman. Sprachen 6.479Ϫ493. 1480 XXVIII. The Analysis of Speech and Unwritten Languages in the 19th and 20th Century

Panconcelli-Calzia, Giulio. 1940. Quellenatlas zur Tillmann, Hans Günter. 1995. “Phonetics: Early Geschichte der Phonetik. Hamburg: Hansischer modern, especially instrumental and experimental Gildenverlag. (Repr., together with Panconcelli- work”. Koerner & Asher 1995.401Ϫ416. Calzia (1941), and an English introduction by Vie¨tor, Wilhelm. 1884. Elemente der Phonetik des Konrad Koerner, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Ben- Deutschen, Englischen und Französischen. Heil- jamins, 1993.) bronn: Gebr. Henninger. (4th ed., 1898.) Ϫ . 1941. Geschichtszahlen der Phonetik: 3000 Jahre Ϫ, ed. 1886. Christoph Friedrich Hellwag: Disser- Phonetik. Hamburg: Hansischer Gildenverlag. (Re- tatio inauguralis physiologico-medica de formatione printed in the 1993 ed. of Panconcelli-Calzia 1940.) loquelae. New edition of 1781 Univ. of Tübingen Passy, Paul. 1890. E´ tudes sur les changements pho- thesis, with commentary. Heilbronn: Gebr. Hen- ne´tiques. Paris: Firmin-Didot. ninger. Pipping, Hugo. 1890. Om Klangfärgen hos sjungna Walker, John. 1781. Elements of Elocution. 2 vols. vokaler. Helsingfors: Frenkell & Son. (Transl. into London: Robinson. (Facsimile repr. Menston: Sco- German as “Zur Klangfarbe der gesungenen Vo- lar Press, 1969.) kale”, Zeitschrift für Biologie 27, 1890, 77 ff.) Ϫ. 1791. A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Ex- Rapp, Karl M. 1836Ϫ41. Versuch einer Physiologie positor of the English Language. London: der Sprache. 4 vols. Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta. G. G. J. & J. Robinson. (Facsimile repr., Menston: Scolar Press, 1968.) Rischel, Jørgen. 1989. “Otto Jespersen’s Contribu- tion to Danish and General Phonetics”. Otto Jes- Wendeler, Paul. 1887. “Ein Versuch die Schallbe- persen: Facets of his life and work ed. by Arne wegung einiger Konsonanten und anderer Ge- Juul & Hans F. Nielsen, 43Ϫ60. Amsterdam & räusche mit dem Hensen’schen Sprachzeichener Philadelphia: Benjamins. graphisch darzustellen”. Zeitschrift für Biologie 23.303Ϫ320. Rousselot, Pierre Jean. 1897Ϫ1908. Principes de phone´tique expe´rimentale. 2 vols. Paris: Welter. Wheatstone, Charles. 1837Ϫ38. Review of Willis (1830), Le me´canisme de la parole by W. von Kem- Sheridan, Thomas. 1780. A General Dictionary of pelen and Tentamen coronatum de voce by C. G. the English language. London: Dodsley. (Facsimile Kratzenstein. London & Westminster Review 28 ed. Menston: Scolar Press, 1967.) (1837), 27Ϫ41, and 29 (1838), 27. Shorrocks, Graham. 1991. “A. J. Ellis as Dialectol- Willis, Robert. 1830. “On the Vowel Sounds, and Ϫ ogist”. Historiographia Linguistica 18:2/3.321 334. on Reed Organ Pipes”. Transactions of the Cam- Sievers, Eduard. 1876. Grundzüge der Lautphysio- bridge Philosophical Society 3.231Ϫ268. logie. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Wood, Sidney. 1982. X-Ray and Model Studies of Steele, Joshua. 1775. An Essay towards Establishing Vowel Articulation. Lund: Dept. of Linguistics, the Melody and Measure of Speech. London: J. Al- Univ. of Lund. mon. (2nd ed. Prosodia Rationalis, 1779; Facsimile ed., Menston: Scolar Press, 1969.) J. Alan Kemp, Edinburgh (Great Britain)

179. Field work and data-elicitation of unwritten languages for descriptive and comparative purposes: Strahlenberg, Sjögren, Castre´n, Böhtlingk

1. Before 1800 guage. However, it was largely an individual 2. The Finnish tradition matter and not a part of the methodology of 3. Otto Böhtlingk linguistics. This applies also to the intensive 4. Field work and comparative Indo-European activity Ϫ largely by missionaries Ϫ after 1500 linguistics to learn and describe the numerous indigenous 5. Bibliography language of Africa, the Americas, Asia and later on Oceania (cf. Wonderly & Nida 1963; 1. Before 1800 Hovdhaugen 1996). Many of these missionary linguistics were first class field linguists (and of Field work and data elicitation from infor- course, many others failed on almost every mants (cf. Samarin 1967) are probably as old paragraph in the non-existing handbook). as any human engagement in the study of lan- Nonetheless, they did not consider this as a 187. Modern Language Instruction and Phonetics in the Later 19th Century 1585

187. Modern Language Instruction and Phonetics in the Later 19th Century

1. Laying the foundations: the 1870s and early xiii). He also notes that if the spelling of Eng- 1880s lish were to be reformed, then school-inspec- 2. The establishment of the IPA and the tors would in future be “examin[ing] not in consequences spelling but in pronunciation, elocution, and 3. ‘Quousque Tandem’: Person, pamphlet, pressure-group and periodical intelligent reading”. These, he adds, are “sub- 4. Felix Franke jects which are now absolutely ignored as 5. The Phonetic Method of Language Teaching branches of general education” (p. 196). and Henry Sweet’s ‘Elementarbuch’ Another major contribution to general 6. After the ‘Elementarbuch’ phonetics was Friedrich Techmer’s (1843Ϫ 7. Texts for students 1891) 2-volume Phonetik, published in 1880. 8. Phonetics on vacation Although not dealing specifically with pho- 9. Paul Passy and French by the Phonetic netics in relation to language teaching and Method learning, the work was, like Sievers’s and 10. Sweet’s ‘The Practical Study of Languages’ 11. Conclusions Sweet’s, important for helping to provide the 12. Bibliography intellectual foundations on which the study of the application of phonetics in modern language teaching contexts could be built. 1. Laying the foundations: the 1870s Within a short time, Sievers, Sweet, and and early 1880s Techmer were being quoted as the authorities on phonetics to whom the classroom-teacher Great strides were made in Europe during the could turn for necessary information on the 1870s in the study of language and languages, pronunciation of various languages. most notably by the Neogrammarians in their 1884 saw the publication of two other hypothesis concerning the regularity of works, adding to the growing literature on sound-change. There were, however, other phonetics: the first part of Moritz Traut- developments afoot, some of which would mann’s (1842Ϫ1920) Die Sprachlaute im All- not come to fruition until the 1880s. In 1876, gemeinen, and Wilhelm Vie¨tor’s (1850Ϫ1918) the German phonetician Eduard Sievers Elemente der Phonetik und Orthoepie des Deut- (1850Ϫ1932) published his Grundzüge der schen, Englischen und Französischen. Both Lautphysiologie (later to be re-titled Grund- books were quickly recognised, alongside züge der Phonetik in the 1881 and subsequent those of Sievers, Sweet and Techmer, as intelli- editions; J Art. 198). The following year, in gible and accessible accounts of phonetic the- Britain, Henry Sweet (1845Ϫ1912) published ory Ϫ although each had an identifiable draw- his Handbook of Phonetics (1877). Both he back: the absence of any agreement on the type and Sievers tackled questions of general pho- of phonetic notation that should be used by netics, of phonetic analysis and categorisa- phoneticians and language-teachers (cf. Brey- tion, of phonetic notation, and of the place mann 1897: 27Ϫ29). of phonetics within science and the humani- In retrospect, one sees, from the mid-1870s ties. Both works were aimed at diverse read- onwards, publications on phonetic topics in erships. five different, but sometimes overlapping, In Sweet’s Handbook, there are strong areas. Firstly, ‘general phonetics’ Ϫ though hints of another topic, which he does not deal the term was understood in a wider sense with explicitly in the work. They anticipate than it is today, to take account also of clin- what was shortly to be a relatively new devel- ical and pathological phonetic phenomena. opment in applying a knowledge of phonet- Secondly, descriptions for the general public ics. In the Preface, he writes that no-one of the phonetics of individual languages; the should “delude himself with the idea that he main languages were English, French, and has already acquired French pronunciation German. Thirdly, descriptions of the pronun- at school or elsewhere: in nine cases out of ciation of a particular language for the ex- ten a little methodical study of sounds will press use of schoolchildren. Fourthly, equiva- convince him that he does not pronounce a lent descriptions for their teachers. And single French sound correctly” (Sweet 1877: lastly, phonetics for those wishing to teach 1586 XXVIII. The Analysis of Speech and Unwritten Languages in the 19th and 20th Century themselves the pronunciation of a language. them in France. Word soon spread, however, By far the largest number of publications across Europe and beyond about the Associ- were in ‘general phonetics’ (as defined ation’s activities, and the membership figures above), followed by descriptions of French, quickly rose. By 1914, the high point of the German and English. Less frequent were Association’s existence in terms of member- publications on the phonetics of other lan- ship and influence in educational circles, guages, such as Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, there were more than 1750 members in 40 Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese and Hung- countries. The majority of them were lan- arian. (See the entries in Breymann 1897 and guage-teachers in schools. (For the changing MacMahon [forthcoming].) patterns of membership between 1886 and The problem of phonetic notation, which 1906, see the tabular summary in Le Maıˆtre until the mid-1880s was a matter of personal Phone´tique 1906: 58.) preference, had still not been resolved. Writ- The Association’s first journal was Dhi Fo- ers could choose from a variety of systems ne`tik Tıˆtcer (FT), the mainstay of the Associ- of British, European and American origins, ation’s activities from May 1886 onwards. So including Sweet’s ‘Romic’ systems, the ‘Visi- much material was being offered for publica- ble Speech’ system of Alexander Melville Bell tion that for many years the journal appeared (1819Ϫ1905), the various ‘Glossic’ systems of monthly. In January 1889, its name was Alexander Ellis (1814Ϫ1890), the ‘Standard changed to Le Maıˆtre Phone´tique, at the same Alphabet’ of Richard Lepsius (1810Ϫ1884), time as French became the Association’s offi- and the ‘Analytic Orthography’ of Samuel cial language. In 1971 the title was changed Ϫ Haldeman (1812 1880). Luckily, the emer- again, to the Journal of the International Pho- gence and relatively rapid development of netic Association. what is now the International Phonetic Asso- From 1886 until 1970, almost all of the ciation, together with its associated Alphabet, journal was printed in various types of pho- narrowed the choice of notational systems netic notation, since this was regarded as and provided a rallying-point for the growing both the key to a conscious appreciation of number of language-teachers who professed what normal adult pronunciation sounded varying degrees of interest in phonetics. like and the means by which learners could improve their own pronunciation. The pro- 2. The establishment of the IPA and viso ‘various types of phonetic notation’ is the consequences important. Phonetic notation was seen as a flexible tool; at least in the early days of the The Association was founded in Paris in 1886 Association, teachers experimented with a and was initially called Dhi Fone`tik Tıˆtcerz’ large variety of phonetic notations Ϫ depend- Aso´cie´con (i. e., the Fonetic Teachers’ Associ- ing on the language being taught, the level ation Ϫ FTA). In 1889, it became L’Associa- of the child or adult learners, and their lin- tion Phone´tique des Professeurs de Langues guistic, particularly orthographic, back- Vivantes (AP), and, in 1897, L’Association grounds. Phone´tique Internationale (API) Ϫ in English, Parallel to the application of phonetic the International Phonetic Association (IPA). principles in the classroom was a second con- There were two aims: firstly, to encourage cern for the Association, namely the estab- teachers to use phonetic notation as a way of lishment of an agreed set of phonetic symbols helping young children to read. Secondly, to to be used as an international standard for press for phonetic notation to be used in the notation of speech, of whatever language, schools to help children acquire realistic pro- dialect or accent. Eventually, this factor, the nunciations of foreign languages. On the his- development of the International Phonetic Al- tory of the IPA generally, see Albright (1958) phabet (IPA), was to overshadow the original and MacMahon (1986). The founder and do- motivations for the Association. Academic minant personality in the Association for phonetics, with its interests in describing lan- many years was Paul Passy (1859Ϫ1940), a guages and developing a theory of general language-teacher and phonetician in Paris phonetics, became gradually more central to (see, further, Section 9. below). the Association’s activities than the language- In its first month of its existence, the Asso- teaching concerns which had given rise to the ciation had only eleven members, most of Association in the first place. 187. Modern Language Instruction and Phonetics in the Later 19th Century 1587

3. ‘Quousque Tandem’: Person, reformers. For the wider historical back- pamphlet, pressure-group and ground to the changes he and his colleagues had been advocating, including antecedents periodical in earlier centuries, see Vie¨tor (1902), Wid- Wilhelm Vie¨tor (1850Ϫ1918), a German pho- gery (1888). netician and later to be professor of English An example of a somewhat unsuccessful at the University of Marburg, had seen, and attempt to apply phonetics was August West- heard, for himself the limitations of contem- ern’s (1856Ϫ1940) textbook on English pro- porary language-teaching theories and meth- nunciation. The first edition appeared in ods, both as a learner and as a teacher. He 1882, in Norwegian, and was sub-titled ‘for decided to take a stand in favour of radical skoler’ (i. e., for schools); the second ap- change. In 1882 he published pseudony- peared in 1885, in German, and was ‘for stu- mously a pamphlet Der Sprachunterricht muß dents and teachers’. (Some copies of the Nor- umkehren! (‘Language teaching must start wegian edition of 1882 have ‘for Studerende afresh!’), in which he argued passionately for og Lærere’, i. e., for students and teachers, as the teaching of modern languages in German the sub-title.) Although phonetic notation is schools to be fundamentally restructured. used, language is regarded mainly as lists of Phonetics should play a major roˆle in direct- words; their pronunciation is explained at ing attention away from the written, espe- some length but is categorised according to cially literary, language and onto the contem- the orthography. In the 1882 edition, there porary spoken language. By ‘spoken lan- are no texts in a phonetic notation Ϫ but guage’, he meant not the translation of iso- there are two pages of personal and geo- lated words or short sentences, but genuine graphical names. The 1885 edition is margin- communication between speakers. (For an ally better: over five pages of names and two- English version of the pamphlet, see Howatt and-a-half pages of texts! 1984: 340Ϫ363.) Arnold Schröer’s (1857Ϫ1935) publica- Vie¨tor’s pseudonym was ‘Quousque Tan- tion, Einleitung und Paradigmen zur Lehre dem’ (i. e., ‘How much longer’), a phrase von der Aussprache und Wortbildung (1885), from one of Cicero’s speeches. In the summer based on his own experiences of teaching in of 1886, just two months after the founding both class-rooms and lecture-rooms, reflects of the FTA, a group of Scandinavian teach- Vie¨tor’s thinking more fully. It begins with a ers and phonetician-linguists established a so- description of the organs of speech, followed ciety, also called Quousque Tandem, whose by sections on vowels, consonants, and gram- aims were very similar to Vie¨tor’s. In 1888, mar (especially morphology). There are lists their society’s periodical, Quousque Tandem of words in a phonetic notation. But a mix- Revy, began publication. ture of roman and italic fonts are used for In his pamphlet, Vie¨tor castigated the er- the symbols; some have diacritics positioned rors of his contemporaries in the language- above and below them. The result is visually teaching world in terms which left little to the complex and, to the unskilled reader, poten- imagination: “appalling confusion […] non- tially confusing. sense […] rubbish […] wrongheadedness […] dreadful methods […] gruesome […] fraudu- lent […] stupidity […] rubble of the past” 4. Felix Franke (Howatt 1984: 345 et passim). Howatt’s summary of contemporary language-teaching 1884 saw the publication of the short but sig- books (at least in England) expresses the nub nificant work Die praktische Spracherlernung of the problem thus: there was “a jungle of auf Grund der Psychologie und der Physiolo- obscure rules, endless lists of gender classes gie der Sprache dargestellt by a young Ger- and gender-class exceptions, self-conscious man language-teacher from Sorau in Silesia ‘literary’ archaisms, snippets of philology, (now Zary in western Poland), Felix Franke and a total loss of genuine feeling for living (1860Ϫ1886). An indication of both its popu- language” (Howatt, p. 136). Vie¨tor, despite larity and the importance of its content is his accurate diagnosis of the state of lan- that it passed through several editions (in- guage-teaching, did not provide any detailed cluding a Danish translation by Otto Jesper- model syllabi for a truly ‘reformed’ language- sen); the last was in 1927. Franke, like Vie¨tor, learning class. These were to follow in his argued for a major revision of the methodol- later publications and in those of his fellow- ogy of foreign-language teaching. There 1588 XXVIII. The Analysis of Speech and Unwritten Languages in the 19th and 20th Century should be only a minimal amount of gram- English orthography. Instead, all English mar, he said, and in any case it should be words are in a phonemic transcription Ϫ relevant to the learner’s needs; translation even those in the Glossary. (The German work was acceptable, but it should be kept to equivalents of the English words are, how- a minimum. Phonetic terminology and pho- ever, given in orthographic German.) Sweet netic notation, on the other hand, should be says that his aim is “das rein practische stu- consciously used in the class-room. An il- dium des gesprochenen Englisch”, i. e., a lustration of his theory was his Phrases de thoroughly practical study of spoken English tous les jours (1886), which was quickly (1885: iii). He deliberately avoids anything adopted as a standard item for teaching that is linguistically idiosyncratic or unusual, French in the class-room. The work passed and he aims to introduce the learner to the through 12 editions between 1886 and 1928. commonest idiomatic expressions, all logi- On Franke’s contributions to language teach- cally organised. ing, see Jespersen (1995 [1938]: 47Ϫ52). The introductory phonetics section in Sweet’s book covers the essential points about the speech organs, quantity, stress, 5. The Phonetic Method of Language pitch, articulatory basis, vowels, consonants, Teaching and Henry Sweet’s liaison, strong and weak forms, and intona- ‘Elementarbuch’ tion. His phonemic transcription, although at times somewhat out-of-line with what one Vie¨tor’s ‘Quousque Tandem’ pamphlet and would expect to see nowadays, involves the Franke’s Die praktische Spracherlernung have use of only seven non-roman symbols. It is always been regarded as the starting-points much easier on the eye than the one Schröer for the so-called ‘Phonetic Method’ (or ‘Re- had used in his Einleitung. (See the repro- form Method’) of modern-language teaching ductions of two pages from the book in Ath- in the late 19th century; a more extensive for- erton 1996: 4Ϫ5.) mulation of the background to the method Sweet placed great stress on the series of can be found in the historical review of lan- texts in the book, 40 pages in all, which are guage-teaching methodologies (1888) by Wil- transcribed phonemically, with stress and liam Widgery (1856Ϫ1891), a language- various intonation features also being added. teacher and philologist in London, who was Traditional word-division is illusory: a white highly active on behalf of the Phonetic space before a ‘word’ normally means that Method. (See also Breymann 1895; Howatt the following string of phonemic units is 1984: 336Ϫ337.) stressed. Thus confronted with the following It was Henry Sweet who was to publish sentence in a (modernised) phonemic tran- the most influential textbook of the refor- scription, /si6 si6mzte sınkmc6renmc6rıntede mers, the Elementarbuch des gesprochenen wc6te, tıletla6stwi6kensi6 nvh=nbetde tAp- Englisch of 1885. The work provides a practi- se(v)de ma6sts/ in traditional orthography, cal exemplification of the theory Ϫ although “she seems to sink more and more into the much of the thinking is attributable to Sweet water, till at last we can see nothing but the alone and antedates the 1880s, having its ori- tops of the masts” (Sweet 1885: 1), a child gins in his own experiences of language- would know (a) which syllables to stress, (b) learning and language-teaching. Ironically, which sounds to make, and (c) which words the experience of teaching English to non-na- require a weak, not a strong, form (i. e., ‘to’, tive speakers was limited to adult (or near- ‘the’, ‘at’, ‘can’, ‘but’, ‘of’). Since the essential adult) learners, mostly university students features of the intonation pattern are also in- from outside Britain who took private les- cluded as diacritics within the transcription sons with him. Ϫ they are not marked here Ϫ a learner Even though the Clarendon Press in Ox- could be expected to achieve even greater re- ford, arguably the world’s most distinguished alism in his or her pronunciation of English. publishing-house at that time, were the pub- Throughout, the emphasis is on getting the lishers, the work rejects the traditional and learner to communicate in sentences (or even hallowed methods of teaching languages. It larger units), using the real-world pronuncia- is truly radical: it turns the learning of Eng- tions of middle-class Londoners. The con- lish on its head. Students do no translation trast could not be starker between this and work; nor are there any grammar exercises. the older method, with its emphasis on gram- There is not even one word in traditional mar and translation, which meant that most 187. Modern Language Instruction and Phonetics in the Later 19th Century 1589 children would have got as far as reproduc- Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Spain, Den- ing Ϫ usually badly Ϫ lists of isolated words mark and Finland; and further afield, from or short syntactic strings. Madagascar, Japan, the United States of Reaction to Sweet’s book was mixed. America, Brazil and Chile. However, the sys- There were those Ϫ not all of them pedants tem was used for teaching only three lan- or prescriptivists Ϫ who condemned the style guages: English, French and German. of pronunciation that Sweet had used. It was One of the class-room teachers who did ‘slovenly’; “no teacher should use [it] as a most to espouse the Phonetic Method and to model”; it was “a blow aimed at correctness publicise its clear advantages over more of speech” (see Breymann 1897: 107Ϫ108). traditional techniques, especially the Gram- Others enthusiastically embraced both the mar-Translation method, was Hermann theoretical orientation and the contents of Klinghardt (1847Ϫ1926), a teacher in Rei- the work. Epithets such as ‘trail-blazing’ and chenbach, south of Leipzig. In a series of ‘epoch-making’ were used (see Breymann, publications (e. g., Klinghardt 1888, 1892), he ibid.). In Passy’s opinion, the book summed described the success of his language-teach- up the views of allegedly many practising ing methods, which were based mainly on teachers: Sweet’s methodology. He had been given the opportunity, in an enlightened educational I would say […] that whoever has gone through the 40 pages of texts once or twice has done more, setting, to use Sweet’s Elementarbuch. His su- by this practical work, to perfect his pronuncia- periors backed him, especially when they saw tion, especially as regards tone and stress, than he Ϫ and heard Ϫ for themselves the speed and could have done with the best theoretical books, fluency in English achieved by 16 year-old and learned more than the best native English schoolchildren (cf. Klinghardt 1891: 12; Ho- teacher could have taught him. (Passy 1886: [4]) watt 1984: 173Ϫ175; Kohler 1981: 170Ϫ174). Ϫ Many years later, in 1938, Jespersen went so Max Walter (1857 c. 1935), a teacher in far as to say that the Elementarbuch had “not Kassel and Frankfurt, was also an enthusias- [been] surpassed by any book on any major tic supporter of the Phonetic Method. Like language” (Jespersen 1995 [1938]: 50). An several of his contemporaries, he published a English translation of much of the substance textbook on teaching English by the method (Walter 1899). His colleague, Karl Quiehl of the Elementarbuch can be found in Sweet’s Ϫ Primer of Spoken English (1890). (1857 post 1912) was the author of a very popular course on French (for German students) based on practical experience of using 6. After the ‘Elementarbuch’ the Phonetic Method in the classroom (Quiehl 1889). The Phonetic Method was practised by only Otto Jespersen was a committed supporter a minority of teachers; educational politics, of Sweet’s ideas (cf., e. g., Jespersen 1886), rather than ignorance of the theory, may maintaining that a thorough training in have prevented some of the others from using sounds, backed up by a simple, systematic it. Otto Jespersen (1860Ϫ1943), writing in transcription, was the essential first step in 1889, some 4 years after the publication of teaching a foreign language. In his view, pho- the Elementarbuch, pointed out that he ap- nemic transcription should continue to be peared to be the only teacher using it in Den- used for at least a year before traditional or- mark: he had five pupils studying English thography was introduced to school-children. (Jespersen 1889: 18). In France, on the other Like Sweet, he argued for natural sentences hand, 165 pupils were using it Ϫ although in to be included within inherently interesting only three schools (Passy 1889: 94Ϫ95). Re- connected texts. Grammar, he said, should gardless of numbers, the enthusiasm of the not be taught formally, but left to the deduc- language-teachers and phoneticians remained tive powers of the learners to establish for high. The methodology was discussed, modi- themselves. fied, and incorporated into school textbooks Inspired by the example of Sweet, the Ϫ the term ‘Reformlesebuch’, for example, Austrian language-teacher Wilhelm Swoboda became popular in Germany. In the pages of (fl. 1888Ϫ1899) produced in 1889 his Eng- The Phonetic Teacher and Le Maıˆtre Phone´- lische Leselehre nach neuer Methode, which tique, colleagues reported successes from var- was closely modelled on the Elementarbuch. ious countries, mostly in Western Europe: Approximately half of it is devoted to texts from Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, in phonemic transcription, the remainder to 1590 XXVIII. The Analysis of Speech and Unwritten Languages in the 19th and 20th Century phonetic theory (consonants, vowels, stress, that game” (p. 73). The English primary intonation). Words are assigned to stress- school-teacher, Laura Soames (1840Ϫ1895), a groups (as in Sweet 1885), but, within these, late convert to phonetics, found phonetic no- the orthographic units are also shown. The tation to be of greatest use in the teaching of glossary, too, makes a concession to orthog- reading to young children (cf. MacMahon raphy, listing the phonemic form, then the or- 1994). thographic, then the German translation of each word. Swoboda’s aim was, simply, to make phonetics more accessible to the 7. Texts for students schoolchild (and teacher!) than Sweet’s Ele- The relative absence of texts in phonemic no- mentarbuch had done, for in his opinion: tation in many of the publications was “Die Phonetik wird zur Zeit noch als ein Ges- quickly remedied by the format of The Pho- penst gefürchtet” (Swoboda 1889: iv). netic Teacher and its successor Le Maıˆtre The Australian-born phonetician and lan- Phone´tique. In practically every issue, from guage-teacher William Tilly (earlier: Tilley, 1886 to as late as 1966, transcriptions were 1860Ϫ1935) established his ‘Institut Tilly’ in published of texts specially selected as being Germany, first in Marburg, then in Berlin appropriate for language-teaching in schools and other cities. It taught foreign languages and, later, universities; they were known sim- (mainly to native English speakers) by the ply as ‘spećimens’. Passy set aside space for Phonetic Method (cf. Jones 1935, Glass them in what he called the “Learners’ Cor- 1977). The British phonetician Daniel Jones ner” (subsequently re-named “Partie des was first taught phonetics by Tilly. In 1918, e´le`ves”) of the journal. In the first year (May Tilly was appointed professor of phonetics at 1886 to April 1887), only texts in English Columbia University, New York City. were published; from May 1887 onwards, Inevitably, not all language-teachers who texts in French and German were added. sympathised with the concept of a phoneti- These three languages were to provide the cally-inspired course were in agreement with bulk of the transcriptions for 80 years, up un- the views of writers such as Sweet, Jespersen til 1966 when the “Partie des e´le`ves” ceased and Klinghardt. For example, Charles Col- to be included in the journal. The content beck (1847Ϫ1903), a teacher at Harrow varied from nursery rhymes and songs to ex- School in England, was in favour of reading tracts from books on history and geography; being taught before children attempted pro- some passages were simply re-prints from nunciation (Colbeck 1887). Johan Storm textbooks written by phonetician/language- (1836Ϫ1920), professor of English in Oslo, teachers. A mark of the importance attached although a committed phonetician, favoured to phonemic texts for language-learners, at an intermediate position between the old least 70 and more years ago, was the series school of grammar-translation and the Pho- of Textes pour nos e´le`ves which the IPA pub- netic Method (Storm 1887). François Guex lished in pamphlet form between 1921 and (b. 1861) reported on his idiosyncratic use of 1925. the Phonetic Method (1890) Ϫ modified so Between 1886 and 1896, many more lan- that it contained no phonemically-transcribed guages than English, French and German ap- texts. He had decided to avoid them for fear of peared in the “Learners’ Corner”. The list in- his learners confusing orthography and pho- cludes Moroccan Arabic, Armenian, Manda- netic symbols. Johann Zimmermann (1819Ϫ rin Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hung- post 1889) rejected phonetic notation on the arian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Span- grounds that the results in the classroom did ish and Swedish. Altogether, between 1886 not justify the time and effort that went into and 1966, over a thousand such ‘spećimens’ learning it (Zimmermann 1889: v). Many for language-learners were published. years later, the British phonetician Elizabeth Robson (fl. 1903Ϫ1939) was to make the shrewd remark that a principal fault to be 8. Phonetics on vacation avoided by the teacher using phonetics was “to put some funny little squiggle on the B[lack] Phonetics was part of the curriculum for B[oard] and imagine that you have thereby modern-language teachers in training, at corrected a sound” (Robson 1929: 70). Simi- least in certain countries (cf., e. g., Althaus larly: “never teach a phonetic script as a new 1911 for details of the curricula in England). and queer spelling; I have caught students at Vacation courses provided a further opportu- 187. Modern Language Instruction and Phonetics in the Later 19th Century 1591 nity for practising teachers to acquaint them- obviously modelled, both in title and content, selves with the new methodology, or to un- on Sweet’s Elementarbuch of 1885. It was co- dertake refresher courses in it. Numerous authored with Franz Beyer (1849Ϫ1927), a such vacation courses were held, particularly language-teacher (latterly ‘königlicher Pro- in the 1890s and 1900s, in Britain, France, fessor’) in Munich. Beyer had himself pub- Germany and Switzerland. The programme lished a work on French phonetics in 1887, for the one held at Amherst College in Mas- Das Lautsystem des Neufranzösischen, which sachusetts, U.S.A., in 1888, noted that Passy regarded as the first systematic descrip- the time is coming when a knowledge of the man- tion of French pronunciation that had yet ner in which sounds are produced will be required appeared. Its sub-title (“Kapitel über Aus- of every teacher of modern languages. Not only sprachereform und Bemerkungen für die Un- must the ear be trained to distinguish between cor- terrichtspraxis”) indicates its relevance to the rect and incorrect sounds, but the teacher must be teacher and learner of French from a Ger- able to describe to the learner the position that the man perspective (cf. also Beyer 1888). organs of speech must take in order to pronounce Another collaborator with Passy was the correctly. (Spanhoofd 1888: 315) Oslo school-teacher Thalla Tostrup (fl. In the summer of 1913, no less than 16 such 1894Ϫpost 1901). Together they produced courses were held at which phonetics in rela- numerous French ‘spećimens’ in phonemic tion to language-teaching was discussed and transcription for the benefit of Norwegian demonstrated: in London, Ramsgate, St schoolgirls learning French. These were seri- Malo, St Servan, Caen, Honfleur, Le Havre, alised in Le Maıˆtre Phone´tique, and later pub- Boulogne-sur-Mer, Lisieux, Paris, Versailles, lished separately as Passy & Tostrup (1895). Rouen, Marburg, Jena, Neuchaˆtel, and Ge- Like many of the other University aca- neva (Le Maıˆtre Phone´tique 1913: 77). demics who involved themselves in the Pho- netic Method, Krystoffer Nyrop (1858Ϫ 9. Paul Passy and French by the 1931), professor of Romance languages at Copenhagen, was first and foremost an his- Phonetic Method torical linguist. His Kortfattet Fransk Lydlœre It is impossible to overestimate the contribu- (1893), written for Danish teachers and tion that Paul Passy made, both to the devel- learners of French, followed what was by opment of phonetics in the later 19th century now a familiar Sweetian pattern: introduc- and to the methodology of language teaching tory materials on the speech organs, conso- (cf. Gimson 1977; Galazzi 1992, 1995). His nants, vowels, suprasegmentals and assimila- prodigious physical and mental energies were tion and liaison, followed by texts in a pho- devoted to many issues Ϫ not all of them lin- nemic notation marked with an appropriate guistic. He was involved from the very start intonation pattern. in the International Phonetic Association, and for many years was the editor of its journal. He published extensively within the 10. Sweet’s ‘The Practical Study of wider field of linguistics, his work covering a Languages’ wide range of topics such as historical sound- change, the comparative phonetics of the ma- The Practical Study of Languages (1899) is jor European languages, spelling reform, the distillation of Sweet’s thinking over more French dialects, Old Norse, and the teaching than twenty years about “the whole field of of reading to young children. The driving- the practical study of languages” (Sweet force in his life was, ironically, not phonetics 1899: v). During the late 1870s, he had or linguistics, but Christianity. reached certain conclusions on how lan- Passy’s major description of French pro- guages should be studied Ϫ and, in particu- nunciation was Les sons du français (1887), lar, taught. In his Presidential address to the which had been preceded in 1885 by a selec- Philological Society in 1877, for example, he tion of extracts, clearly drawing on the had highlighted some of the deficiencies in pattern of the Phonetic Method, Le Français language-teaching, and had argued that im- parle´, morceaux choisis a` l’usage des e´trangers provements would only come about by mak- avec la prononciation figureé. The clearest ex- ing the central concept of language-teaching ample of his work in the tradition of the Pho- the “natural sentence, which will […] be pre- netic Method, however, was his Elementar- sented in a purely phonetic form” (Sweet buch des gesprochenen Französisch (1893), so 1877Ϫ79: 15). The antithesis of the natural 1592 XXVIII. The Analysis of Speech and Unwritten Languages in the 19th and 20th Century sentence was the “arithmetical sentence” in nique 1992: 177Ϫ182). His ideas in the fifteen which words were simply added to one an- years since the Elementarbuch had clearly un- other to form such curiosities as “The philo- dergone some revision. sopher pulled the lower jaw of the hen” (an example from Sweet’s schooldays studying Greek). Various papers on ‘the practical 11. Conclusions study of languages’ followed over the next 18 Jespersen writes of a “campaign waged over years, but it was not until 1899 that he set several years” to change the methodology of out his ideas in their fullest form. modern-language teaching (Jespersen 1995 Sweet takes the subject in a wide sense, to [1938]: 47). Facing the reformers were the twin include not only the teaching of West-Euro- forces of pedagogical tradition and questions pean languages in schools and universities, of school management. Many schoolteachers but also Oriental languages and dead lan- held firmly to the view that since English, Ger- guages, as well as the analysis of hitherto un- Ϫ man, French, etc. were languages with similar- written languages the sort of tasks that ities to Latin and Greek, they should be taught missionaries were confronted with. His in similar ways to Latin and Greek. The central dictum is that the study of any lan- Grammar-Translation method seemed to guage has to be based on phonetics, in the work successfully for Latin and Greek: ergo,it sense that, since other elements of language- would work for English and the other lan- structure make direct reference to sound- guages too. What is more, any intended up- structure, phonetics has to take precedence heaval in modern-language teaching methods Ϫ over them (cf. Sweet 1899, Chaps. 2 7, pas- in schools would bring logistical problems in sim). its wake: the training of the teachers, the as- In the context of language-teaching, this sessment of the subject-matter, the provision means that a learner has to be provided with of appropriate materials, etc. an appropriate phonetic transcription so that Ranged against the conservatives were the s/he will appreciate the “significant sound- reformers. For them, the essential features of distinctions” as Sweet calls them (i. e., the the Phonetic Method which made it superior phonemic contrasts). The learner should not to traditional styles of teaching were: a delib- be expected to try to imitate the pronuncia- erately heavy emphasis on the conversational tion (even of a native speaker) on the off- registers of spoken language, often to the ex- chance that s/he will somehow achieve an clusion Ϫ at least in the early stages of learn- acceptable pronunciation. Instead, the pho- ing Ϫ of the written language; the employ- nemic transcription will give specific guid- ment in the classroom of certain aspects of ance on those features to pay particular at- articulatory phonetic theory; the use of a tention to. Predictably, Sweet argues strongly phonetic notation which pointed up the pho- for the spoken language to be taught before nemic contrasts of the language; a minimal the written. Furthermore, he draws attention amount of overt grammatical instruction; to the need to clarify what style or styles of and relatively little translation work. the spoken language are to be acquired by The problem remained, however, of how the learner. On the question of audio-visual to persuade sceptical teachers that a con- aids in the class-room, he is fairly circum- scious knowledge, on the part of themselves spect Ϫ in part because of the quality of the and their pupils alike, of such things as the apparatus then available. Phonetic dictation action of the soft palate, fricatives, plosives, in the foreign language is, he believes, an ad- back vowels and rising intonation patterns mirable way of training the learner’s ear and could Ϫ and would Ϫ lead to a significant should be regarded as an integral part of the improvement in the foreign-language skills of teaching and learning process. the learners. With hindsight, the reformers On certain matters, he adopts a middle-of- never appeared to have answered this criti- the-road view (“a mean between unyielding cism in such a way that it ceased to become conservatism on the one hand and reckless an obstacle to change. On the other hand, the radicalism on the other” [Sweet 1899: vii]), relatively rapid agreement that emerged on preferring, contrary to some of his younger the format of the International Phonetic Al- colleagues, to include both translation work phabet in the late 1880s meant that one of and the formal exposition of grammatical the objections to the Phonetic Method, structures in the learning process (cf. Ve´ro- namely its reliance on many apparently self- 187. Modern Language Instruction and Phonetics in the Later 19th Century 1593 contradictory and arcane notational systems, ally achievable by dint of audio-visual tech- quickly disappeared. Furthermore, since the nologies rather than by the conscious deploy- Phonetic Method was used almost exclusively ment of phonetic terminology and notation. with only three languages, English, French and German, there was the potential for al- 12. Bibliography most all schoolchildren or students studying a foreign language, at least in Western Albright, Robert W. 1958. The International Pho- Europe, to benefit from its practices. netic Alphabet: Its backgrounds and development. Despite opposition, the proponents of the (ϭ Publication of the Indiana University Research Phonetic Method did achieve a considerable Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, amount. In this, they were helped by the un- 7); also Part III of International Journal of Ameri- can Linguistics, Vol. 24, No. 1. B. swerving commitment to their cause of able and strong-willed individuals: academics Althaus, L. H. 1911. “The Means of Training in such as Sweet, Passy, and Vietor, and teach- Phonetics Available for Modern Language Teach- ¨ ers”. Modern Language Teaching 7.39Ϫ58. (Repr. ers holding senior positions in schools or edin Le Maıˆtre Phone´tique, Supplement to juillet- ucational organisations such as Klinghardt, aouˆt 1911.1Ϫ28.) Walter, and Widgery. Inevitably, local dis- Atherton, Mark. 1996. “Being Scientific and Rele- agreements arose as to how precisely the vant in the Language Textbook: Henry Sweet’s Method was to be realised in practical primers for learning colloquial English”. Para- schoolroom situations, but the fundamental digm 20.1Ϫ20. loyalty to the ‘cause’ remained unchanged. Beyer, Franz. 1887. Das Lautsystem des Neufranzö- Few teachers, it seems, recanted and rejoined sischen. Mit einem Kapitel über Aussprachereform the conservative side. und Bemerkungen für die Unterrichtspraxis. Cö- Of critical importance in promulgating the then: Otto Schulze. thesis of the Phonetic Method, as well as in Ϫ. 1888. Französische Phonetik für Lehrer und Stu- maintaining its momentum, was the founding dierende. Cöthen: Otto Schulze. and development of the International Pho- Ϫ & Paul Passy. 1893. Elementarbuch des gespro- netic Association and, especially, its journal. chenen Französisch. Cöthen: Otto Schulze. An extensive network existed of like-minded Breymann, Hermann. 1895. Die Neusprachliche colleagues in schools and universities. Passy Reformliteratur von 1876Ϫ1895: Eine bibliogra- regularly published lists of members, thus phisch-kritische Übersicht. Leipzig: A. Deichert. providing information about who in the next Ϫ. 1897. Die Phonetische Literatur von 1876Ϫ1895: town, city or even country might be con- Eine bibliographisch-kritische Übersicht. Leipzig: sulted for advice and support. The monthly A. Deichert (Georg Böhme.) issues of The Phonetic Teacher and Le Maıˆtre Colbeck, Charles. 1887. On the Teaching of Modern Phone´tique ensured that teachers across Languages in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: many countries in Europe and beyond were Cambridge Univ. Press. kept up-to-date with details of experiments in Franke, Felix. 1884. Die praktische Spracherler- the use of the Phonetic Method, and with the nung auf Grund der Psychologie und der Physiologie latest publications aimed at the schoolroom. der Sprache dargestellt. Leipzig: Reisland. World War I and its aftermath wreaked Ϫ. 1886. Phrases de tous les jours: Dialogues jour- havoc with the Association and its work. The naliers avec transcription phone´tique. Heilbronn: membership figures declined rapidly; many Henniger fre`res. of the leading lights from the 1880s had Galazzi, Enrica. 1992. “1880Ϫ1914: Le combat des either died or had retired from active teach- jeunes phone´ticiens: Paul Passy”. 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