Lilias Eveline Armstrong (29 September 1882 – 9 December 1937) was an English phonetician. She worked at University College London, where she attained the rank of reader. Armstrong is most known for her work on English intonation as well as the phonetics and tone of Somali and Kikuyu. Her book on English intonation, written with Ida C. Ward, was in print for 50 years. Armstrong also provided some of the first detailed descriptions of tone in Somali and Kikuyu.
Armstrong grew up in Northern England. She graduated from the University of Leeds, where she studied French and Latin. She taught French in an elementary school in the London suburbs for a while, but then joined the University College Phonetics Department, headed by Daniel Jones. Her most notable works were the 1926 book A Handbook of English Intonation, co-written with Ward, the 1934 paper "The Phonetic Structure of Somali", and the book The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Kikuyu, published posthumously in 1940 after she died of a stroke in 1937 at age 55.
She was the subeditor of the International Phonetic Association's journal for more than a decade, and was praised in her day for her teaching, both during the academic term and in the department's summer vacation courses. Jones wrote in his obituary of her that she was "one of the finest phoneticians in the world".
Early life Lilias Eveline Armstrong was born on 29 September 1882 in Pendlebury, Lancashire, to James William Armstrong, a Free Methodist minister, and Mary Elizabeth Armstrong (). Her upbringing led to her speech having certain Northern English characteristics.; Armstrong studied French and Latin at the University of Leeds, where she was a king's scholar. She received her B.A. in 1906, ; and . Compare , which gives 1908 as the year she got her B.A. and she was also trained as a teacher.
After graduating from Leeds, Armstrong taught French in East Ham for several years; she had success in this line of work, and was well on her way to becoming headmistress by the time she left this position in 1918.; . While she was Senior Assistant Mistress, she began studying phonetics in the evenings part-time at the University College Phonetics Department in order to improve her teaching of French pronunciation.; . In 1917, Armstrong received a Diploma with Distinction in French Phonetics; she got a Diploma with Distinction in English phonetics the following year.
Academic career Teaching and lecturing Employment history
Armstrong first taught phonetics in 1917 in Daniel Jones's summer course for missionaries; even before then, Jones had planned to give Armstrong a full-time position at the University College Phonetics Department. Those plans were temporarily put on hold when London County Council decided against a budgetary increase for the department in October, but in November 1917, Jones nominated Armstrong to receive a temporary, part-time lectureship, which she started in February 1918. She was finally able to work full-time at the start of the 1918–1919 academic year, becoming the Phonetics Department's first full-time assistant. Armstrong became lecturer in 1920, senior lecturer in 1921,; ; . Compare and , which say she became senior lecturer in 1920. and reader in 1937.; ; . Compare , which gives 1936 as the year she got readership. Her promotion to readership was announced in The Times and The Universities Review. Armstrong also occasionally taught at the School of Oriental Studies. . When Jones had to take a leave of absence the first nine months of 1920, Armstrong became acting head of the department in his stead. During this time, she interviewed and admitted students into the department. Other positions she held at University College were Chairman of the Refectory Committee and Secretary of the Women Staff Common Room. Learned societies Armstrong belonged to included the International Phonetic Association, the Modern Language Association, and the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.
Courses and lectures Armstrong taught classes on the phonetics of French, English,; . Swedish, and Russian, and, alongside Daniel Jones, a class on speech pathology titled "Lecture-demonstrations on Methods of Correcting Defects of Speech". Armstrong also led ear-training exercises, which were an important part of teaching at the University College Department of Phonetics.; ; and .
In addition, Armstrong was involved in the teaching of several vacation courses held at University College. In 1919, the Phonetics Department began teaching its popular vacation courses in French and English phonetics. In the inaugural 1919 course, Armstrong conducted daily ear-training exercises for a course intended for those studying and teaching French. Two readers of English Studies who had attended the 1919 summer course for English favourably described Armstrong's ear-tests as "a great help" and "splendid"; these ear-training exercises were praised by the journal . A Dutch participant in the 1921 session lauded Armstrong's ear-training classes and provided a description thereof. By the 1921 summer course, she not only conducted the ear-training exercises, but also lectured on English phonetics alongside Jones; she later gave lectures on English phonetics for a "Course of Spoken English for Foreigners", taught with Jones and Arthur Lloyd James during the summer of 1930. An advertisement for the 1935 summer course described the whole programme as being "under the general direction" of Jones and Armstrong; that year included lectures taught by Armstrong and John Rupert Firth as well as ear-training exercises led by Jones and Armstrong.
In October 1922, Armstrong delivered a public lecture at University College about the use of phonetics in teaching French. The Verse Speaking Fellowship invited her to speak at their annual conference in 1933. She travelled to Sweden in 1925 to deliver lectures on English intonation, going to Gothenburg in September and Stockholm in October. In April 1927, she gave a lecture on English intonation to a meeting of the of Helsinki, Finland. Other countries Armstrong travelled to in order to give lectures included the Netherlands and the Soviet Union.
Students Armstrong had several students who were well-known scholars and linguists themselves. Indian linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji studied at the University of London from 1919 to 1921 for his D.Litt.; while he was there, Armstrong and Ida C. Ward taught him phonetics and drilled him with ear-training and transcription exercises. John Rupert Firth, who would later work at the University College Phonetics Department himself along Armstrong, was a student at University College from 1923 to 1924; the classes he took included Armstrong's course in French Phonetics. In the summer of 1934, Scottish phonetician J. C. Catford, then age 17, took a class in French phonetics taught by Armstrong and Hélène Coustenoble. Armstrong taught advanced phonetics to American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner while he was doing postdoctoral research at the School of Oriental Studies from 1936 to 1937. Citing Turner. 1940. Proposals by Lorenzo Turner for a study of Negro speech in Brazil. January. Evanston: Northwestern University Library, Turner Collection. Citing Turner to Jones, 15 November 1936, Jones Collection, Box 42, Folder 10. French Canadian linguist Jean-Paul Vinay, who got his master's degree studying under Armstrong in 1937 and later worked alongside her, specifically pointed out Armstrong's kindness and articulatory prowess. While Australian literary scholar Robert Guy Howarth was studying for his doctorate in English from 1937 to 1938, he also got a certificate in phonetics and took "A Course of General Phonetics", taught by Armstrong and others.
Writing and research
The International Phonetic Association had suspended publication of its journal during World War I, but in 1921 it began producing a yearly publication ("Texts for our students"), which consisted of texts transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) from various languages,. such as English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Armstrong contributed several transcriptions of English texts throughout its volumes.
In 1923, resumed publication and started its third series. Armstrong was listed as the (subeditor) starting from the July–September 1923 issue (3rd Ser., No. 3); she held this position throughout the January–March 1936 issue (3rd Ser., No. 53). Armstrong had a significant role in the renewal of the journal and of the International Phonetic Association, whose activities depended on the journal's publication. She wrote various book reviews in the journal's (, "Reports") section, as well as phonetic transcriptions of English texts in its (, "Students' section").
's (, "Specimens") section consisted of phonetic sketches of less-studied languages accompanied by the phonetic transcription of a short text. For instance, one year had specimens of Gã, Biscayan, Japanese English, Poitevin, and Punjabi. Armstrong's first specimen was of Swedish and published in 1927; it consisted of an inventory of Swedish vowels and a transcription of "" (, "The man who dropped his axe"), a translation of "The Honest Woodcutter", as pronounced by Fröken Gyllander of Stockholm. Earlier, Swedish grammarian had thanked Armstrong for her assistance in describing the phonetics and sound-system of Swedish in his 1923 book Modern Swedish Grammar. Armstrong's second specimen, published in 1929, was of Russian and consisted of a transcription of an excerpt of Nikolai Gogol's "May Night, or the Drowned Maiden". Armstrong had also corrected the proof of M. V. Trofimov and Daniel Jones's 1923 book The Pronunciation of Russian. Armstrong also did research on Arabic phonetics, but never published anything on the subject, although she wrote a review of British missionary William Henry Temple Gairdner's book on Arabic phonetics for .
London Phonetic Readers Series Armstrong's first two books, An English Phonetic Reader (1923) and A Burmese Phonetic Reader (1925, with Pe Maung Tin), were part of the London Phonetics Readers Series, edited by Daniel Jones. Books in this series provided a phonetic sketch as well as texts transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Her English Phonetic Reader included transcriptions of passages written by Alfred George Gardiner, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, and John Ruskin. These transcriptions reflected Armstrong's own speech; she did not indicate variation due to different dialects or registers. Jones had encouraged Armstrong to write a phonetic reader of English in "narrow transcription".; . One of the chief distinctions of "narrow transcription" for English was the use of the additional phonetic symbols for vowels, such as (as in the RP pronunciation of ), (), and (). In the analysis behind a Jonesian "broad transcription" of English, the principal difference between those vowels and the vowels (), (), and (), respectively, was thought of as length instead of quality;; ; . accordingly, the absence or presence of a length diacritic was used to distinguish these vowels instead of separate IPA characters. Armstrong's narrow transcription for the reader used these extra vowel symbols and explicitly marked vowel length with the diacritics 'half-long' and 'long'. She also discussed the use of narrow transcription in her first paper for Le Maître Phonetique, published as one of its (, "Feature articles"); Armstrong implored the journal's readers to learn to use the extra symbols. Armstrong's An English Phonetic Reader, Armstrong and Ward's Handbook of English Intonation, and Ward's The Phonetics of English were the first to popularize this transcription system for English. The fourth and final impression of An English Phonetic Reader was printed in 1956.