DANIEL JONES

A FAMOUS BRITISH
PHONETICIAN

Presentation is made by Oksana Kachulova

Bitrh

 Daniel Jones was born in

London, United Kingdom,
on September 12, 1881.
Education
 In 1900, Jones studied
briefly at William Tilly's
Marburg Language Institute
in Germany, where he was
first introduced to
phonetics.
 In 1903, he received his BA
degree in mathematics at
Cambridge, converted by
payment to MA in 1907.
Education
 From 1905 to 1906, he
studied in Paris under
Paul Passy, who was one
of the founders of the
International Phonetic
Association.
 He briefly took private
lessons from the British
phonetician Henry
Sweet.
Carrier
 In 1907, he became a part-time lecturer at
University College London and was
afterwards appointed to a full-time
position.
 In 1912, he became the head of the
Department of Phonetics and was
appointed to a chair in 1921, a post he held
until his retirement in 1949.
 From 1906 onwards, Jones was an active
member of the International Phonetic
Association, and was Assistant Secretary
from 1907 to 1927, Secretary from 1927 to
1949, and President from 1950 to 1967.
 After retirement, Jones worked assiduously
at his publications almost up to the end of
his long life.
Works

 In 1909, Jones wrote the short

Pronunciation of English, a book he
later radically revised. The resulting
work, An Outline of English
Phonetics, followed in 1918 and is
the first truly comprehensive
description of British Received
Pronunciation, and the first such
description of the standard
pronunciation of any language.
Works
 The year 1917 was a landmark for Jones
in many ways. He became the first linguist
in the western world to use the term
phoneme in its current sense, employing
the word in his article "The phonetic
structure of the Sechuana Language".
 Jones had made an earlier notable attempt
at a pronunciation dictionary but it was
now that he produced the first edition of
his famous English Pronouncing
Dictionary, a work which in revised form
is still in print. It was here that the
cardinal vowel diagram made a first
appearance.
 Achievements
 The problem of the phonetic description of vowels is of long standing, going back
to the era of the ancient Indian linguists. Three nineteenth-century British
phoneticians worked on this topic. Jones however was the one who is generally
credited with having gone much of the way towards a practical solution through his
scheme of 'Cardinal Vowels', a relatively simple system of reference vowels which
for many years has been taught systematically to students within the British
tradition.
Achievements
 Although Jones is especially remembered for his
work on the phonetics and phonology of English,
he ranged far more widely. He produced
phonetic/phonolological treatments which were
masterly for their time on the sound systems of
Cantonese, Tswana (Sechuana as it was then
known), Sinhalese, and Russian. He was the first
phonetician to produce, in his "Sechuana Reader",
a competent description of an African tone
language, including the concept of downstep.
Jones helped develop new alphabets for African
languages, and suggested systems of romanisation
for Indian languages and Japanese. He also busied
himself with support for revised spelling for
English through the Simplified Spelling Society.
Marriage

 He studied phonetics
under Paul Passy,
whose niece Cyrille
Motte he married in
1911.