The fate of Pronouncing Dictionaries
Today I was in a frenzy, trying to discard books I no longer read or consult... and I came across one that gave me a lot of food for thought, about the passing of time and how everything changes and grows old. I know these are trivial and commonplace musings, but as I was, and am, in a brown study and I thought I would share my ruminations with you. The book in question is a classic, Everyman´s English Pronouncing Dictionary , by Daniel Jones . Here, and using the International Phonetic Alphabet we can learn how to pronounce words in English. There are no definitions and no notes, just phonetics (written phonetics). Daniel Jones was a British phonetician (1881-1967), inventor of the cardinal vowel diagram. He sponsored the British Received Pronounciation and set the foundations of Standard English for the UK. Yet his dictionary has become useless, worthless. The copy I have was issued in 1972. What a pity... technology has rendered his magnum opus obsolete and discardable. ...