Peter Ladefoged

Since he's been referred to several times on Cybalist, I'm posting
this from today's Washington Post.
Last year the Danes on this list answered my question as to his
surname: = "bailiff" <-- Scand. 'lada' "barn" and the LGer. equivalent
of HGer. 'Vogt' <-- L. 'advocatus".
Dan Milton


Peter Ladefoged, Linguist and Movie Consultant

From News Services
Monday, January 30, 2006; Page B06

Peter Ladefoged, 80, a pioneering linguist who consulted on the 1964
film "My Fair Lady," in which actor Rex Harrison plays a phonetician,
died Jan. 24 at a hospital in London after a stroke.

Dr. Ladefoged, who made it his life's work to record and study the
various parts of speech, became ill while traveling home from a
research trip to India.


Dr. Ladefoged pioneered the use of state-of-the-art equipment in the
field. His first portable phonetics lab, which included a tape
recorder and various scientific instruments, weighed 100 pounds and
required a porter but enabled him to do more than listen: He could
take quantitative measurements, such as gauging how much air escaped
from the nose or throat when a sound was made.

In an earlier trip to India, he recorded the Toda language, which is
spoken by fewer than 1,000 people, as he documented its six trills
produced by the tip of the tongue. In the Kalahari Desert, he studied
the click sound native to Africa. In the United States, a Native
American tribe whose members knew their language was vanishing refused
to cooperate because they didn't want to reveal their culture to
outsiders.

Soon after moving to Los Angeles from Scotland to become an assistant
professor at UCLA in 1962, Dr. Ladefoged had a brief career in
Hollywood as the chief linguistic consultant on "My Fair Lady."

Director George Cukor wanted him to teach Harrison -- who would win an
Academy Award for the starring role of Professor Henry Higgins -- to
behave like a phonetician.

"My immediate answer was, 'I don't have a singing butler and three
maids who sing, but I will tell you what I can as an assistant
professor,' " Dr. Ladefoged told the Los Angeles Times in 2004.

Dr. Ladefoged helped set up the film set's phonetics laboratory,
taught Harrison to read phonetic symbols -- and ate cookies that the
film's co-star, Audrey Hepburn, baked for crew members.

"I'd never heard of Cukor. It just struck me as the chance to earn a
fortune each week," Dr. Ladefoged said. "It was just so much more than
a professor's salary. It paid me enough to buy my first car in America."

The professor's voice is preserved on the soundtrack. When Henry
Higgins stomps down the stairs, he knocks a record player that starts
playing a recording of Dr. Ladefoged making vowel sounds.

Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was born in Sutton, England. After serving in
the British army during World War II, he enrolled at the University of
Edinburgh in Scotland. He planned to study English literature but soon
became fascinated by the sounds of speech. He earned a doctorate in
phonetics at the university.

"I wanted to find out why Shelley could write better-sounding poetry
than I," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1970.

Survivors include his wife, Jenny; three children; and five grandchildren.