JAMES MURRAY AND THE PHONETIC NOTATION IN THE NEW ENGLISH DICTIONARY

T o a linguist nurtured on predominantly twentieth-century phone-tic theories and practices, the appearance of the phonetic notation Murray devised for the New English Dictionury (N E D) in the early 1880s might seem unusual, both in terms of the choice of symbols and also in the occasional narrowness of the transcription: for example, @@ties) for THOUGHTLESS and (yanai-t) for UNITE.' Indeed, a closer examination of not only the entire inventory of symbols and diacritics but also of the technical phonetic nomencta-ture reveals considerable divergences from twentieth-century as well as certain other nineteenth-century practices. In many cases, however, there are no difficulties in interpreting the notation: for example, (p k IJ E). A number of items will not seem unfamiliar to anyone conversant with the notational conventions of philology or generative phonology: for example, (a) and (6). And, particularly in an American context, the use of (y) for [J] would pass more or less unnoticed. Having said this, however, there still remains a residue of items which are liable to be misinterpreted-or not interpreted at all. Firstly, Murray italicizes certain vowel symbols, but nowhere in the Dictionary does he provide any explanation for the use of italics. (They are certainly not to be equated with optional articulatory segments, as in Jones' English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD).) Secondly, he sets up three categories of vowel, without indicating adequately what they refer to: 'ordinary' (also