The appearance of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association offers a natural opportunity for taking both a look backward and a look forward in the field of phonetics. Ever since the publication of The Phonetic Teacher in 1886 and through the long period of Le Maître Phonétique, the organ of the Association has continued to appear, even if during war years the interval between successive numbers may sometimes have been long. It now comes in a new guise, the major change being the setting of the body of the journal in orthography instead of in phonetic transcription, and this is a suitable moment at which to ask what this change, a far from superficial one, betokens: what kind of scholars were the men who formed the Association and guided its early years, was their work of lasting value, what fresh light has been shed on the field in the intervening period, where do we stand now and what guesses can we make about the sort of work our successors will be doing?

Tous les efforts qui se sont poursuivis depuis le début de ce siècle pour tenter de simplifier l'orthographe du français ont paru sombrer dans l'indifférence générale et se solder par autant d'échecs. On pourrait donc croire que les Français et les francophones en général sont satisfaits de leur orthographe ou qu'en tout cas, ils ne désirent pas que soit reposé le problème de la graphie de leur langue. Or, il semble bien qu'il n'en soit rien. Si l'opinion publique, inconsciente de l'existence d'un problème parce que ne distinguant pas entre langue et graphie, n'est pas touchée, le monde des éducateurs, aussi bien ceux de l'enseignement du second degré que les instituteurs, s'est montré ces dernières années fort sensible aux critiques dont l'orthographe a été l'objet. Dans les contacts qui se multiplient et s'intensifient, à l'heure actuelle, entre linguistes professionnels et enseignants avides de “recyclage”, la question de l'orthographeest celle qui paraît susciter l'intérêt le plus vif. Sensibilisés par l'insuffisance flagrante des résultats obtenus par tous les efforts faits pour inculquer l'orthographe à leurs élèves, instituteurs et professeurs prennent conscience du fait que l'orthographe française est inadaptée aux conditions du monde d'aujourd'hui, à supposer que le système graphique du français, qui doit tant de ses traits à l'intervention de beaux-esprits, ait jamais, depuis quatre cents ans, été adapté aux besoins réels de la société française. Pour être sûr que l'ensemble de la population scolaire qui doit poursuivre des études au-delà des éléments ait acquis un maniement simplement satisfaisant de l'orthographe, il faudrait probablement que, pendant cinq ans, la moitié du temps disponible à, l'école soit consacré à, des exercices visant à, ce but.

One of the most distinguished members of our Association has, since our last issue, celebrated his eightieth birthday. Roger Kingdon's earliest connections were with the West Country and London. He was born in the borough of Greenwich and went to the City of London School. His working career began at Plymouth on the Western Morning News in 1908, but by 1912 he had begun at Barcelona his long series of stays abroad. During the first world war he enlisted in the Artists' Riflės and was later commissioned in the Royal Engineers. Between 1920 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War he spent much of his time teaching English in Barcelona. In the session of 1936–37 he was a student at University College, London, Phonetics Department, staying on two further years to teach in the Department.

Most intonation analysts would consider it a truism to insist that any model of the formal properties of a language's intonation system has to be relativistic in character. By this one would mean that the linguistic constants in the system are the contrasts between the features involved (pitch, loudness, or whatever) and not the values of the features themselves, as defined in any absolute, physical way. The point hardly needs quotation to support it, but it will be useful to refer to one person's formulation of the relativity claim as a reminder of how the position is typically presented. Abercrombie, for example, says (1967: 107):

There are many unsolved problems concerning the linguistic interpretation of intonation curves obtained instrumentally. Among the major ones are (1) How accurate must the instrumental data be to make sure that no linguistically relevant information is missed? (2) Which of the details of the intonation curve are linguistically relevant? (3) How should the graph be scaled? (4) How should the curves be normalized so as to neutralize individual (speaker-dependent) differences?

As Chomsky and Halle point out (1968: 318), the specification of [1] in terms of the continuant-noncontinuant scale is problematic. At first sight one would consider it [+ continuant], since there is no total blockage of air flow through the mouth. It can, however, be taken as [— continuant] if the defining criterion of “stop” (= “noncontinuant”) is stated as the blockage of air flow past the primary stricture, i.e. a complete closure in the sagittal plane of the oral cavity. Evidence exists in support of both points of view; Chomsky and Halle adduce data from Chippewyan in favour of treating [1] as continuant and data from “certain dialects of English spoken in Scotland” in favour of taking it as noncontinuant. For the latter they refer to Lloyd, 1908, as attesting the use of “lax diphthongs” before noncontinuants and [1], but “tense diphthongs” before continuants and [r].

The dialect of Western Pennsylvania is one of the chief varieties of American English and may be considered a subdialect of the so-called General American speech. The dialect has Pittsburgh for its focal point and extends for a radius of probably no more than 200 miles around that city.

1. What follows is a sketch of the phonology of the English spoken in Emper, Co. Westmeath. Emper is a pocket of fertile country partly enclosed in a loop of the River Inny and situate some eleven or twelve miles to the north-west of Mullingar. The population, fluctuating about two hundred souls, is composed mostly of farmers and farm labourers. They are engaged in mixed farming, that is tillage, stock-raising, and dairying; and are a settled community in that the farms in most cases have been occupied by the same families for generations. It is difficult to say at what date exactly the people of Emper ceased to speak Irish and became English speakers. The evidence is scanty and entirely oral, yet sufficient to warrant the conclusion that at some time after the middle of the eighteenth century, and certainly before 1800, Emper had become English speaking. The findings and conclusions below are based on my own (dialect) pronunciation and my memory of auditory observation of the speech of the older stratum of the inhabitants, and especially of those born before 1900. This is my vernacular speech and I have never lost touch with it.

Although Hindi is a major world-language, with well over a hundred million speakers, the description of its prosodic features has been neglected. Like most other present-day Indo-European languages, it is a non-tone language, with sentence intonation and a stress accent. Stress occurs on syllables within words (word-stress) and on words within sentences (sentence-stress). By confining ourselves in the first instance to single-word utterances we may formulate some rules for word-stress, as a preliminary to a discussion of sentence-stress and intonation.

Anglo-Saxon had a word œrs, meaning ‘rump, podex, buttocks,’ which evolved into Early Modern English arse, pronounced approximately [aɹs]. Normally, this evolution would have eventually produced a word spelled arse and pronounced [ɑːs] in Southern British and [ɑɹs] in General American. In Southern British, this development followed its normal course. In Anglophone North America, however, the word developed differently. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a tendency appeared in America to level the combination ar = [aɹ], when followed by a voiceless lingual in certain combinations, with ‘short a’ = [æ]. Hence, for cartridge, hearth, parcel, appeared the pronunciations [ˈkætrιdƷ, hæθ, ].

Speech perception is of interest to linguists and psychologists alike. Psychologists seek for linguistic units to enable them to explain processes involved in speech; linguists try to establish what these units may be, whether distinctive features, phonemes, syllables, words or even larger units. Although the phoneme was for some time considered to be the most likely candidate, experimental evidence is increasingly pointing to some larger unit, particularly in view of the fact that no one-to-one acoustic correlation with the phoneme nor with distinctive features can be found (cf. Reddy, 1967: 336, Ladefoged, 1967: 146, Denes, 1963: 892). Furthermore, if the phoneme were to be the unit of perception, in any sort of processing involving matching a perceived pattern with one already stored, far too many operations would be involved because of the large size of vocabularies and large number of sentence types in a language; such processing would have to be too rapid to be feasible, bearing in mind the constraints of memory span. There is now more sympathy for the syllable or larger stretch as the unit of perception (e.g. Laver, 1970: 68, Maclay and Osgood, 1959, Ladefoged, 1959: 402), and there seems to be good evidence for the planning of speech to be in stretches longer than a word, e.g. Ladefoged's experiments with placing ‘dot’ at different parts of a sentence (Ladefoged, 1959).