Alexander John Ellis
Alexander John Ellis FRS | |
---|---|
Hoxton, Middlesex, England | |
Died | 28 October 1890 Kensington, London, England | (aged 76)
Education | Shrewsbury School, Eton College |
Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
Occupation(s) | mathematician and philologist |
Alexander John Ellis FRS (14 June 1814 – 28 October 1890) was an English mathematician, philologist and early phonetician who also influenced the field of musicology. He changed his name from his father's name, Sharpe, to his mother's maiden name, Ellis, in 1825 as a condition of receiving significant financial support from a relative on his mother's side.[1] He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, London.
Biography
He was born Alexander John Sharpe in
Alexander was educated at
Ellis is noted for translating and extensively annotating Hermann von Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone. The second edition of this translation, published in 1885, contains an appendix which summarises Ellis' own work on related matters.
In his writings on musical pitch and scales,
In part V of his series On Early English Pronunciation, he distinguished forty-two different dialects in England and the Scottish Lowlands.[3] This was one of the first works to apply phonetics to English speech and has been cited continuously by linguists since publication.
He was acknowledged by George Bernard Shaw as the prototype of Professor Henry Higgins of Pygmalion (adapted as the musical My Fair Lady).[4] He was elected in June 1864 as a Fellow of the Royal Society.[5]
Ellis's son Tristram James Ellis trained as an engineer, but later became a noted painter of the Middle East.[6]
Phonetic alphabets
Ellis developed two phonetic alphabets, the English Phonotypic Alphabet (together with Isaac Pitman),[7] which used many new letters, and the Palaeotype alphabet, which replaced many of these with turned letters (such as ⟨ə⟩, ⟨ɔ⟩), small caps (such as ⟨ɪ⟩), and italics. Two of his novel letters survived: ⟨ʃ⟩ and ⟨ʒ⟩ were passed on to Henry Sweet's Romic alphabet and from there to the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Selected publications
- 1845, The Alphabet of Nature
- 1848, A Plea for Phonetic Spelling: or, The Necessity of Orthographic Reform
- 1869, On Early English Pronunciation, London: N. Trübner / reissued by Greenwood Press: New York (1968).
- 1899, On early English pronunciation : with especial reference to Shakspere and Chaucer, containing an investigation of the correspondence of writing with speech in England from the Anglosaxon period to the present day ...
- 1885, "On the Musical Scales of Various Nations"
- 1890, English Dialects – Their Sounds and Homes
Notes
- ISBN 978-0-415-97235-2.
- ^ Journal of the Society of Arts, Vol. 28, p. 295
- ^ An Atlas of Alexander J. Ellis's The Existing Phonology of English Dialects, http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/EllisAtlas/Index.html, has further details.
- ^ Ross Duffin, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, W.W. Norton and Co., 2007
- JSTOR 24681252.
- ^ Black, Helen C. (1896). Pen, pencil, baton and mask: biographical sketches. Spottiswoode. pp. 345–351.
- ISBN 978-0-19-507993-7.
References
- Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
- Carlyle, Edward Irving (1901). Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co. . In
- M. K. C. MacMahon, Ellis , Alexander John (1814–1890), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 14 June 2006
External links
- Works by or about Alexander John Ellis at Internet Archive
- Works by Alexander John Ellis at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)