Daniel Jones, Paul Passy, and the development of the cardinal vowel system

Beverley S. Collins and Inger M. Mees
University of Leiden | Copenhagen Business School
Summary

Developed in the first quarter of the present century, Daniel Jones’s (1881–1967) Cardinal Vowel theory has proved for many years to be the most popular and enduring model of vowel description. Only relatively recently have doubts about its shaky theoretical foundations – first expressed as early as 1928 by G. Oscar Russell – begun to impinge on the linguistic world. Paul Passy (1859–1940) emerges as the most significant direct influence on Jones, who modified Passy’s ideas and transformed them into a model for vowel description with notionally universal application. For some years, Jones appeared curiously reluctant to release full information about his scheme, probably because he was unable to obtain sufficient hard evidence in the form of radiological data to support his principle of equidistant articulatory steps between the Cardinal Vowels. Eventually, Jones was forced to retreat to a weaker version of his theory based on a combination of articulatory and auditory criteria.

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