Lilias Armstrong

Lilias Eveline Armstrong (29 September 1882 – 9 December 1937) was an English phonetician who worked at University College London. Her father was James William Armstrong, a Free Methodist minister and her mother was Mary Elizabeth Armstrong, née Hunter. She graduated from the University of Leeds in 1908 and initially taught French at an elementary school in East Ham. She started working at UCL in 1918; she was appointed senior lecturer in 1921 and reader in 1936.

She married Simeon Karlovitch Boyanus (1871 – 1952) in 1926. He was a professor of English philology at the University of Leningrad and later became a lecturer in Russian at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

Following a stroke, she died at Finchley Memorial Hospital, Middlesex at the age of 55.

Daniel Jones (1938:2) wrote in his obituary of her that she was one of the finest phoneticians in the world, and John Catford (1998:7) wrote that he thought her (1932) book was ″the best practical introduction to French phonetics.″

Selected works

Books

Armstrong, L. E. (1923). An English phonetic reader. London: University of London Press.

Armstrong, L. E. (1932). The phonetics of French. London: Bell.

Armstrong, L. E. (1934). The phonetic structure of Somali. Berlin: Mitteilungen des Seminars für orientalische Sprachen. [Reprinted 1964, Farnborough: Gregg].

Reviewed by J. Lukas. (1938). Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 11(1):121-122. JSTOR 1155231

Armstrong, L. E. (1940). The phonetic and tonal structure of Kikuyu. London: International African Institute

Reviewed by I. C. Ward. (1941). Journal of the Royal African Society 40(159):179-180. JSTOR 717899

Armstrong, L. E. & Pe Maung Tin (1925). A Burmese phonetic reader. London: University of London Press.

Reviewed by R. Grant Brown. (1925). Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland No. 4. pp. 737–738. JSTOR 25220835

Armstrong, L. E. & Ward, I. C. (1926). Handbook of English intonation. Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner; Cambridge: Heffer.

Reviewed by M. B. Ruud. (1928). Modern Language Notes 43(8):567–568. JSTOR 2914433

Coustenoble, H. N. & Armstrong, L. E. (1934). Studies in French intonation. Cambridge: Heffer

Papers

Armstrong, L. E. (1923). "A narrower transcription for English", Le Maître Phonétique (3) 1:17-19.

Armstrong, L. E. (1926). "The B.B.C. Committee on Pronunciation", Le Maître Phonétique (3) 4:34-35.

Reviews

Armstrong, L. E. (1927). [Review of The Phonetics of the Zulu Language by Clement M. Doke (1926)]. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 4(3)670-671. doi:10.1017/S0041977X00103283

Sources

R. E. Asher. (2004). ′Armstrong, Lilias Eveline (1882–1937)′, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/69787

B. S. Collins and I. M. Mees. (1999). The Real Professor Higgins: The Life and Career of Daniel Jones. Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin.

B. S. Collins and I. M. Mees. (2006). ′Armstrong, Lilias Eveline (1882–1937)′, Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, 2nd Edition. Ed. Keith Brown. Vol I, Pages 478–479. doi:10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/02428-7

Daniel Jones. (1938). ′Lilias Armstrong′, Le Maître phonétique 3rd ser. Vol 61. Page 2.

Obituary in Nature 141, p. 17. (1 January 1938) doi:10.1038/141017b0

Obituary in The Times p. 1 (11 December 1937).

John C. Catford. (1998). ″Sixty Years in Linguistics″ In First Person Singular III Ed. E. F. K. Koerner. Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, Vol 88. John Benjamins: Amsterdam/Philadelphia. doi:10.1075/sihols.88.02cat