Daniel Jones

Daniel Jones was a British phonetician (1881 - 1967). He was a disciple of Paul-Edouard Passy. He wrote The Pronunciation of English in 1909 and The outline of English Phonetics in 1918. This is considered to be the first comprehensive description of Received Pronunciation. He uses the term phoneme in the current sense.

Jones uses in his theory a two-parameter diagram to visualize how vowels are produced and he promoted the term cardinal vowel. The two parameters are tongue height and lip-shape. Many later models at the end of the twentieth century are still based on this model.

Jones studied the phonetics of various languages. In particular for example he did an analysis of the tone in Tswana. He developed new alphabets for African and Indian languages.

Source: R. E. Asher, The encyclopedia of language and linguistics, Pergamon Press, 1994

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Daniel Jones (1912 - 1993) was a Welsh composer; see Daniel Jones (composer).