53 Facts About Lilias Armstrong

Lilias Eveline Armstrong was an English phonetician.

Lilias Armstrong worked at University College London, where she attained the rank of reader.

Lilias Armstrong provided some of the first detailed descriptions of tone in Somali and Kikuyu.

Lilias Armstrong graduated from the University of Leeds, where she studied French and Latin.

Lilias Armstrong 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.

Lilias Armstrong 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.

Lilias Eveline Armstrong was born on 29 September 1882 in Pendlebury, Lancashire, to James William Armstrong, a Free Methodist minister, and Mary Elizabeth Armstrong, nee Hunter.

Lilias Armstrong's upbringing led to her speech having certain Northern English characteristics.

Lilias Armstrong studied French and Latin at the University of Leeds, where she was a king's scholar.

In 1917, Lilias Armstrong received a Diploma with Distinction in French Phonetics; she got a Diploma with Distinction in English phonetics the following year.

Lilias Armstrong first taught phonetics in 1917 in Daniel Jones's summer course for missionaries; even before then, Jones had planned to give Lilias 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 Lilias Armstrong to receive a temporary, part-time lectureship, which she started in February 1918.

Lilias Armstrong became lecturer in 1920, senior lecturer in 1921, and reader in 1937.

When Jones had to take a leave of absence the first nine months of 1920, Lilias Armstrong became acting head of the department in his stead.

Lilias 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".

Lilias Armstrong led ear-training exercises, which were an important part of teaching at the University College Department of Phonetics.

In October 1922, Lilias Armstrong delivered a public lecture at University College about the use of phonetics in teaching French.

Lilias Armstrong travelled to Sweden in 1925 to deliver lectures on English intonation, going to Gothenburg in September and Stockholm in October.

Lilias Armstrong had several students who were well-known scholars and linguists themselves.

John Rupert Firth, who would later work at the University College Phonetics Department himself along Lilias Armstrong, was a student at University College from 1923 to 1924; the classes he took included Lilias Armstrong's course in French Phonetics.

Lilias 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.

Lilias Armstrong contributed several transcriptions of English texts throughout its volumes.

Lilias 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.

Lilias Armstrong 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.

Jones had encouraged Lilias Armstrong to write a phonetic reader of English in "narrow transcription".

Lilias Armstrong's second book for the series was a Burmese reader, co-written with the Burmese scholar Pe Maung Tin.

Lilias Armstrong and Pe Maung Tin developed the first transcription system for Burmese in accordance to principles of the International Phonetic Association; this was a "very detailed" transcription scheme, which made use of five diacritics for tone, some of which could be placed at multiple heights.

Lilias Armstrong and Ward themselves wrote that they were aware there is "a greater wealth of detail than [is] here recorded", but that "attention has been concentrated on the simplest forms of intonation used in conversation and in the reading of narrative and descriptive prose" since the book's intended reader was a foreign learner of English.

Lilias Armstrong published a Somali specimen for Le Maitre Phonetique in 1933, as well as a translation of "The North Wind and the Sun" for the 1933 Italian version of Principles of the International Phonetic Association, but her main work on Somali was "The Phonetic Structure of Somali", published in 1934.

Lilias Armstrong's research was based on two Somalis, and she gives their names as "Mr Isman Dubet of Adadleh, about 25 miles northeast of Hargeisa, and Mr Haji Farah of Berbera"; in Somali orthography, these names would be and.

Lilias Armstrong claimed that Armstrong's orthographic proposal for Somali vowels would be "too difficult for the general public to handle".

In 1981, American phonologist Larry Hyman called Lilias Armstrong's paper "pioneering"; she was the first to thoroughly examine tone or pitch in Somali.

Lilias Armstrong analyzed Somali as being a tone language with four tones: high level, mid level, low level, and falling, and she provided a list of minimal pairs which are distinguished by tone.

Lilias Armstrong called Armstrong's work "an excellent phonetic study", but argued that Somali was not a true tone language but rather a stress language.

Lilias Armstrong was the first to describe the vowel system of Somali.

Lilias Armstrong was the first to discuss vowel harmony in Somali; her vowel harmony analysis was praised by Italian Somalist Martino Mario Moreno.

Austro-Hungarian linguist Werner Vycichl wrote that Lilias Armstrong's study "opens a new chapter of African studies".

In 1992, Trinity College, Dublin linguist John Ibrahim Saeed said Lilias Armstrong's paper was "even now the outstanding study of Somali phonetics", and in 1996, Martin Orwin wrote that it "remains essential reading for anyone interested in pursuing any aspect of the sound system of Somali".

Lilias Armstrong's linguistic consultant was a man whom she refers to as Mr Mockiri.

Lilias Armstrong wrote a sketch on Luganda phonetics for this book.

The book was largely finished when Lilias Armstrong died; only Chapter XXII "Tonal Forms of Adjectives" remained to be written, although Lilias Armstrong had already written notes for it.

The book contains an appendix in which Lilias Armstrong proposes an orthography for Kikuyu.

Lilias Armstrong proposed that the seven vowels of Kikuyu be represented by the IPA symbols ; this followed the practical orthography, now known as the Africa Alphabet, devised by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures.

Lilias Armstrong proposed that the velar nasal be written with the letter and that the palatal nasal be written with the digraph.

Lilias Armstrong's book provided the first in-depth description of tone in any East African Bantu language.

American Canadian linguist William J Samarin noted Armstrong conflated tone and intonation for the most part; he claimed this led to "exaggerated complexities" in her description, particularly with respect to the final intonational fall in interrogatives.

When Lilias Armstrong wrote her manuscript, analysis of tone was a nascent field and the complex relationship between phonemic tonemes and phonetic pitch led phoneticians to analyze languages as having large numbers of tones.

Pratt noted Lilias Armstrong did not distinguish allophonically long vowels from vowels which are phonemically long.

Lilias Armstrong married Simon Charles Boyanus on 24 September 1926, although she still continued to go by "Miss Lilias Armstrong" professionally after marriage.

Lilias Armstrong came to the University College Phonetics Department in 1925, where he spent eight months learning English phonetics under Armstrong.

Lilias Armstrong was able to visit Boyanus in Leningrad on two occasions, and he was able to briefly return to London in 1928.

In November 1937, Lilias Armstrong became sick with a persistent bout of influenza.

Lilias Armstrong died at Finchley Memorial Hospital, Middlesex, on 9 December 1937, at age 55.