Wiktor Jassem's short article on rhythm (‘Indication of speech rhythm in the transcription of educated Southern English’) was published in 1949 in Le Maître Phonétique, the ancestor of today's Journal of the International Phonetic Association. The author was a young man aged 27 at the time, who was working on a longer treatment of the intonation of conversational English which was to be published three years later (Jassem 1952), just 60 years ago this year. Despite his youth, and despite the fact that he was not a native speaker of English, Jassem did not hesitate to take on giants, and to suggest in this paper that his treatment of rhythm is superior to that of both Henry Sweet and Harold Palmer, as well, he adds in the 1952 book, as that of his mentor Daniel Jones.

Arabic has a vowel system with three long and three short monophthongs. One of the parameters that accounts for qualitative differences between long and short vowels across languages is tenseness/laxness of vowels located on the peripheral/non-peripheral tracks in the vowel space. The present study investigates acoustical cues (F1, F2, and duration) of vowels using the data obtained from 21 speakers of Qatari Arabic. The vowels were produced in four phonetic contexts: labial, alveolar, uvular, and pharyngeal. The results revealed considerable qualitative differences between long and short vowels. The long vowels were articulated at the periphery of vowel space; the short vowels occupied more centralized positions. The co-articulatory effect of the preceding consonant was more prominent in short vowels. Short high vowels /i u/ were lowered toward the mid position; short low /a/ was fronted; long low /aː/ was retracted and raised. The findings suggest that short vowels in Qatari Arabic are lax and non-peripheral.

Kejom [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m], the preferred autonym for the language more commonly known as Babanki, is a Central Ring Grassfields Bantu language (ISO 693-3: [bbk]) spoken in the Northwest Region of Cameroon (Hyman 1980, Hammarström et al. 2017, Simons & Fennig 2017). The language is spoken mainly in two settlements shown in Figure 1, Kejom Ketinguh [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m ↓kɘ́tÍⁿɡ̀uʔ] and Kejom Keku [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m ↓kɘ́k̀u], also known as Babanki Tungoh and Big Babanki, respectively, but also to some extent in diaspora communities outside of Cameroon. Simons & Fennig (2017) state that the number of speakers is increasing; however, the figure of 39,000 speakers they provide likely overestimates the number of fluent speakers in diaspora communities. The two main settlements’ dialects exhibit slight phonetic, phonological, and lexical differences but are mutually intelligible. The variety of Kejom described here is the Kejom Ketinguh variant spoken by the second author; all data and examples which we take into account are based on his speech.

Asturian (ISO 639), also known as Bable, Asturiano, Asturianu, Astur-Leonese or Leonese, is the vernacular language of Principality of Asturias, an autonomous community of just over one million inhabitants located in Northern Spain. Asturian is spoken by approximately 100,000 individuals within Asturias plus a few thousand more outside of this region. Historically, Astur-Leonese was spoken in parts of the Spanish provinces of León and Zamora and there are still remnants of it in Castilian Spanish. In addition, a variety of Asturian – called Mirandés – is currently spoken in the Portuguese province of Miranda de Douro, where it is a language co-official with Portuguese (Figure 1).