Peter Ladefoged

Peter Ladefoged, the most influential phonetician of his generation, died in London on January 24, 2006, at the age of eighty. He was returning to Los Angeles from fieldwork in India when he suffered a stroke at Heathrow airport. He was taken to Hillingdon Hospital where he suffered a subsequent massive, and fatal, stroke.

Peter was born on September 17, 1925, at Sutton, Surrey (now part of Greater London), in England. His father, Niels Ladefoged, was successfully involved in the business of importing Danish cheeses and bacon to Britain in association with branches of the family in Denmark (the name Ladefoged is a Danish compound meaning ‘steward of the barn’). Peter was educated at Haileybury College, one of the more prestigious ‘public’ (i.e. private) schools in England, and then spent a year at Caius College of Cambridge University before joining the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1944 in the final year of the second World War. After serving in Italy and Malta he was demobilized in 1947 and later resumed his academic career, this time at Edinburgh University in Scotland. Because of postwar emergency regulations, Peter was able to complete his first degree in two rather than the normal three years, obtaining an M.A. in 1951. Peter had originally studied English, with the notion of writing poetry himself. He would often explain his shift to an interest in phonetics by saying that he wanted to understand why what Keats or Shelley wrote sounded better than what he was able to write.

At Edinburgh, Peter undertook a year’s postgraduate work in phonetics in the Department of Phonetics led by David Abercrombie. At the end of that year he was offered employment there as a laboratory assistant with duties that included making recordings on vinyl discs, and in 1953 he was promoted to Assistant Lecturer in Phonetics. In the same year he married Jenny MacDonald, beginning a partnership much admired by those fortunate enough to enjoy the friendship of the family through the years. They had met as part of the backstage crew putting on a production of the celebrated melodrama Maria Marten, or the murder at the red barn, when Peter was stage manager and Jenny in charge of props. At this time he began work on vowel quality, laying the foundation for one of his life-long convictions—that articulatory and acoustic-perceptual characteristics should be given equal priority in accounting for phonetic patterns. As he succinctly put it, ‘Some patterns can be explained in terms of acoustic events, others in terms of articulatory events’ (Ladefoged 1971:4).

Abercrombie had arranged for Peter to work with the then-doyen of British phonetics, Daniel Jones, founder of the method of describing vowels by reference to prototypes he called the ‘cardinal vowels’. Peter recorded the cardinal vowels as produced by former students of Jones’s, many of them distinguished phoneticians in their own right, and had Jones rate the production as correct or not. The results showed some systematic individual shifts, but also considerable idiosyncratic effects. From this and his other work on vowels in this period (see Ladefoged 1962a, generally cited as such, though it may bear an imprint date of 1960), Peter drew the conclusion that the traditional description of vowels based on the presumed location of the highest point of the tongue (which he dismissed as ‘articulatory fiction’) must be abandoned and a new basis found. In his own summary of his career posted on his website (http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/ladefoge/), Peter reports an interesting anecdote that suggests Jones was aware of the problem:

Jones never defined what he meant by saying that the cardinal vowels were acoustically equidistant. He thought that the tongue made equal movements between each of them, even after the publication of x-ray views of the 8 primary cardinal vowels produced by his colleague Stephen Jones showed that this was not the case (Jones, 1929). Daniel Jones himself published photographs of only four of his own cardinal vowels, although, as he told me in 1955, he had photographs of all 8 vowels. When I asked him why he had not published the...