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EARLY CONTRIBUTORS to phonetics

المؤلف:  Parviz Birjandi

المصدر:  AN INTRODUCTION TO PHONETICS

الجزء والصفحة:  C1-P1

2026-06-28

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EARLY CONTRIBUTORS to phonetics

The earliest contributions to phonetics were made more than 2000 years ago by Sanskrit scholars such as the grammarian Panini in the 400s who dealt with articulation to keep the pronunciation of ancient rituals unchanged. The first phonetician of the modern world was Dane J. Matthias, author of De Litteris (1586). English mathematician John Wallis, who instructed deaf-mutes, was the first to classify vowels, in 1653, according to their place of articulation. The vowel triangle was invented in 1781 by C. F. Hellwag from Germany. Ten years later, Austrian mechanician Wolfgang von Kempelen invented a machine that produced speech sounds. German physicist Hermann Helmholtz, who wrote Sensations of Tone (1863), inaugurated the study of acoustic phonetics. Frenchman Abbé Jean Pierre Rousselot pioneered in experimental phonetics.

 Late in the 19th century, the theory of the phoneme was advanced by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay from Poland and Ferdinand de Saussure from Switzerland. In the United States, linguist Leonard Bloomfield and anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir contributed greatly to the phonetic theory. Linguist Roman Jakobson developed a theory of the universal characteristics of all phonemic systems. Perhaps Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist, has provided the clearest ideas about phonetics. His book Memoir on the Original Vowel System in the Indo-European Languages (1879) is an important work on the vowel system of Proto-Indo European—considered the parent language from which the Indo-European languages descended.