The following two texts were published by the predecessor of our journal over half a century ago and illustrate the characteristic nature of its publications at that time.
The journal, which first appeared in 1886 under the title The Phonetic Teacher Dhi Fonètik Tîtcer, was renamed Le Maître Phonétique lə mɛːtrə fɔnetik in 1889. In 1971, after a lengthy debate with its readers, its name was changed to Journal of the International Phonetic Association. Le Maître Phonétique was edited by Paul Passy until 1927, when he was succeeded by Daniel Jones. It originally appeared in four issues a year, reduced to two a year from 1942.
The official language of the journal was French, so the list of contents was given in that language, although by the time of our two samples, a large number of the papers, like these two, were in English. With a few exceptions, the contributions were written in a phonetic transcription of the author's choosing – often to reflect his or her linguistic background. It is to be noted that, unlike modern practice, the phonetic transcription is accompanied by normal punctuation, and also that all proper names are transcribed orthographically.
The journal published general articles (articles de fond /artiklə də f
/), reviews (comptes rendus /ktrãdy/) and specimens of phonetic transcription of different languages (spécimens /spesimɛn/), as well as material for students (partie des élèves /parti dez elɛːv/) and administrative material (partie administrative /parti administratiːv/).
Our first text, written by J. C. Catford,Footnote 1 entitled ‘On the classification of stop consonants’, is from the 1939 January–March issue (vol. 65) and is an example of the article de fond type of contribution.
The second text, entitled ‘Dutch’, is from the 1948 January–June issue (vol. 89), and illustrates the spécimen type of contribution. It was written by Eli Fischer-JørgensenFootnote 2 and J. G. Talma-Schilthuis.Footnote 3 The description is brief compared to current practice, with, for example, no list of words illustrating the sounds. Unlike many of the spécimen contributions which (still today) traditionally illustrate their description with a reading of Aesop's fable ‘The North Wind and the Sun’, this contribution gives a transcription of a recording of colloquial speech, a telephone conversation between two Dutch women. In the transcription, unlike in the texts of the articles, proper names are also transcribed phonetically, preceded by the symbol /*/.
