UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Although the lab is only about 40 years young, phonetics has been studied at Oxford for about 800 years. In the early 13th century, Robert Grosseteste wrote about the different shapes of the mouth in pronouncing the vowels of Latin, and of the transmission of sound through the air. (In a 15th-century adaptation: "But for more cliere knowlache of þis part we shuln vndirstonde the nature of our lettris, and first of the v vowels the whiche han divers placis and dyvers maners of their generacioun...") Royal Society founders John Wilkins and John Wallis were among the 17th-century Enlightenment pioneers of the articulatory description and scientific classification of speech sounds. In the early 20th Century, Henry Sweet was Reader in Phonetics; in 1913-14, Daniel Jones had a visiting appointment as Taylorian Lecturer in Phonetics, and from 1930 to 1940, J. R. Firth was Lecturer in Phonetics at the Indian Institute. "A Brief History of Phonetics at the University of Oxford" prepared for the..

Primary location: Oxford United Kingdom