Obit: Peter Ladefoged

[Paul B. Gallagher]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/arts/08ladefoged.html>

February 8, 2006
PETER LADEFOGED, 80, LINGUIST WHO WAS IMMERSED IN SPEECH, IS DEAD
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By Margalit Fox

Peter Ladefoged, an internationally renowned linguist who spent his life 
blissfully awash in the whistles, murmurs, pops, clicks and trills that 
make up the world's spoken languages, died on Jan. 24 in London. 
Professor Ladefoged, who was returning to his home in Aliso Viejo, 
Calif., from fieldwork in India, was 80.

The cause was a stroke, said a spokesman for the University of 
California at Los Angeles, where he was distinguished professor emeritus 
of phonetics.

Professor Ladefoged was widely regarded as the world's foremost 
phonetician, a scholar who studies the acoustics and physiology of 
speech -- the precise interplay of tongue, lung and larynx that creates 
the inventory of noises we use in the everyday business of talking.

His job recalled that of a modern-day Henry Higgins, and in fact, 
Professor Ladefoged, who was born in England and to the end of his life 
retained its plummy tones, was the resident phonetics expert on the set 
of the movie version of "My Fair Lady," released in 1964.

In more scholarly work, he made significant contributions to forensic 
phonetics, the science of speech as used by the police and in courts of 
law. (His work included studies demonstrating the unreliability of voice 
identification by ear alone.) He also documented endangered languages 
around the world.

Professor Ladefoged was known in particular for his widely used textbook 
"A Course in Phonetics" (Thomson/Wadsworth), published in its fifth 
edition this year. With Ian Maddieson, he wrote "The Sounds of the 
World's Languages" (Blackwell, 1996), considered the definitive catalog 
of the consonants and vowels of the world's 6,000 tongues. His family 
name, Danish in origin, is pronounced "LAD-uh-foe-gid."

Language is a symbolic code, designed to convey meaning from one human 
mind to another. In spoken language, the code is realized as sound 
waves, produced when air is forced from a speaker's lungs past the vocal 
cords and out of the mouth.

The ear converts these vibrations into electrical impulses, which are 
relayed to the speech-processing centers of the brain.

These little disturbances of air were Professor Ladefoged's lifework. 
How many speech sounds, he wondered, are humanly possible? What parts of 
the anatomy -- tongue, teeth, lips and hard and soft palates -- can be 
used to make them? Which noises are deployed as linguistic code in a 
particular language, which are not, and what accounts for the difference?

Armed with tape recorder, oscilloscope and equipment for measuring air 
flow, he traveled to remote villages around the globe, recording what he 
found there in all its noisy variety.

He liked to paint speakers' palates with a concoction of olive oil and 
powdered charcoal, which let him photograph the precise spot at which 
the tongue made contact with the roof of the mouth (thereby wiping away 
some charcoal) as a particular sound was made.

In an autobiographical essay on his Web site, Professor Ladefoged 
recounted the singular pleasures of the phonetician's life. (The passage 
describes communities in Botswana, Tanzania, Brazil, India and Taiwan, 
respectively):

"Another delight of fieldwork is the charm of the people one meets," he 
wrote. "The !Xóõ, who were willing to have tubes put through their 
noses; the Hadza, who have fewer possessions than anyone I know, except 
perhaps the Pirahã, who live with little thought for the morrow; the 
Toda, whose courtesy and helpfulness were unparalleled; the Tsou, who 
could not understand why anyone would come to their mountain to record 
their sounds."

Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was born in Sutton, England, on Sept. 17, 1925. 
His undergraduate work was interrupted by World War II, in which he 
served in Italy with the Royal Sussex Regiment.

Resuming his studies, he earned a master's degree from the University of 
Edinburgh in 1951 and a doctorate in 1959. After teaching at Edinburgh 
and in Nigeria, he joined the U.C.L.A. faculty in 1962.

Professor Ladefoged is survived by his wife, the former Jenny Macdonald, 
whom he married in 1953; two daughters, Lise Friedman, of Culver City, 
Calif., and Katie Bottom, of Nashville; a son, Thegn, of Auckland, New 
Zealand; and five grandchildren.

Not long after he went to California, Professor Ladefoged was hired by 
the director George Cukor to teach Rex Harrison how to behave like an 
Edwardian-era phonetician.

"He had been playing the role of Professor Higgins on stage for a while 
but nobody could see if he was pointing to the right phonetic symbols on 
charts, or using equipment correctly," Professor Ladefoged told The 
Express of London in 2004. "But on screen he knew there was nowhere to 
hide and wanted to get it right."

Despite his efforts, he told The Express, the result was "a very 
entertaining film -- but a poor piece of science."

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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