Benjamin Smith Lyman as a phonetician
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Timothy J. Vance
Abstract
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.
© 2017 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Journal of Japanese Linguistics Vol. 28 (2012). Contents
- Introduction
- Diversity and uniformity of grammar: When ungrammatical expressions become grammatical
- Benjamin Smith Lyman as a phonetician
- Deictic and anaphoric uses of the Japanese demonstratives ko-so-a
- Three uses of kata ‘person’ in Japanese
- An investigation into the interaction between intentionality and the use of transitive/ intransitive expression: A contrastive study of Japanese and Marathi
- Zibun and locality in L2 Japanese
- Pronominal interpretations in L2 Japanese
Articles in the same Issue
- Journal of Japanese Linguistics Vol. 28 (2012). Contents
- Introduction
- Diversity and uniformity of grammar: When ungrammatical expressions become grammatical
- Benjamin Smith Lyman as a phonetician
- Deictic and anaphoric uses of the Japanese demonstratives ko-so-a
- Three uses of kata ‘person’ in Japanese
- An investigation into the interaction between intentionality and the use of transitive/ intransitive expression: A contrastive study of Japanese and Marathi
- Zibun and locality in L2 Japanese
- Pronominal interpretations in L2 Japanese
