Benjamin Smith Lyman as a phonetician

• 作者: Timothy J. Vance
• 来源期刊: Journal of Japanese Linguistics
• 关键词: Areas of interest: phonetics phonology Japanese as a foreign language
• 年，卷（期）: 2012,（1）
• 页码范围: 32-43
• 页数: 12页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.1515/jjl-2012-0104

摘要

Benjamin Smith Lyman was a geologist who worked for the Meiji government as a foreign expert in the 1870s. His 1894 article on rendaku later made him famous among linguists, but in 1878 he published a detailed account of Japanese pronunciation, which he claimed was motivated in part by a desire to help learners of Japanese as a foreign language. Lyman’s descriptions were quite sophisticated for the time, but it is clear in hindsight that he was hampered by the lack of a universal phonetic transcription system and by the unavailability of the phonemic principle. Lyman’s descriptions went far beyond those of his missionary contemporaries, but for ordinary learners, the kind of detail he provided would have been overkill and not much practical help.