Robert Robinson was an English

phonetician Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

living in

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in the early

17th century The 17th century lasted from January 1, 1601 ( MDCI), to December 31, 1700 ( MDCC). It falls into the early modern period of Europe and in that continent (whose impact on the world was increasing) was characterized by the Baroque cultural movem ...

who created his own phonetic alphabet and wrote ''The Art of Pronuntiation''.

Biography

Almost nothing is known about Robinson's life. He was relatively young, according to his own account, in 1617, and therefore may have been born not long before 1600. He may also have survived past 1660, earning a living as a

schoolmaster The word schoolmaster, or simply master, refers to a male school teacher. This usage survives in British independent schools, both secondary and preparatory, and a few Indian boarding schools (such as The Doon School) that were modelled aft ...

.(Dobson 1957 p. ix)

Works

His only known published work is ''The Art of Pronuntiation'', a handbook of English phonetics, published in 1617, and apparently a poor seller, as only one copy survives, in

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. ''The Art of Pronuntiation'' contains two parts. The first ''Vox Audienda'', attempts in a very elementary and far from satisfactory way to give an account of the sounds of English in articulatory terms. The second, ''Vox Videnda'' is more interesting, as it sets forth an ingenious, if occasionally defective, alphabet to represent these sounds. Unlike other attempts at a phonetic English character (such as that of Alexander Gil), Robinson's

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a s ...

breaks entirely free from the basis of the

Roman alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

, using characters that bear only an accidental resemblance to Roman letters, while having a systematic relation to each other. Robinson's alphabet is not only phonetic but to some extent

featural In a featural writing system, the shapes of the symbols (such as letters) are not arbitrary but encode phonological features of the phonemes that they represent. The term featural was introduced by Geoffrey Sampson to describe the Korean alph ...

, as voicing is not represented on the letters themselves, but by means of

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

s, in a mode that takes some account of assimilative voicing and devoicing of

consonant clusters In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...

; English stress accent is also indicated by diacritics. Nasal stops are marked by a modification of the letters representing oral stops. Included in ''The Art of Pronuntiation'' is Robinson's transcription of a

Latin poem Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

(presumably of his own composition), which exemplifies the

idiosyncratic An idiosyncrasy is an unusual feature of a person (though there are also other uses, see below). It can also mean an odd habit. The term is often used to express eccentricity or peculiarity. A synonym may be " quirk". Etymology The term "idiosyncr ...

pronunciation used in English Latin schools of his time — and also, with sound-changes concurrent with those taking place in English, down to the 19th century, and thus provides valuable evidence as to the traditional adaptation of Latin to English

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

Unpublished works

Even more significant than Robinson's published work, however, is his transcription (unpublished in his lifetime) of several poems by

Richard Barnfield Richard Barnfield (baptized 29 June 1574 – 1620) was an English poet. His obscure though close relationship with William Shakespeare has long made him interesting to scholars. It has been suggested that he was the "rival poet" mentioned in ...

into this alphabet. These transcriptions provide very valuable evidence as to the pronunciation of English in Robinson's time; a pronunciation which, perhaps due to Robinson's youth or place of origin, contains many features that are more modern than Gil's, and which exemplify (even within a single text) several contemporary changes occurring in the pronunciation of English.

Robinson's phonetics

Robinson distinguishes ten

vowels A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...

in English, which he clearly considers to be distinct in

quality Quality may refer to: Concepts *Quality (business), the ''non-inferiority'' or ''superiority'' of something *Quality (philosophy), an attribute or a property * Quality (physics), in response theory *Energy quality, used in various science discipl ...

as well as

length Length is a measure of distance. In the International System of Quantities, length is a quantity with dimension distance. In most systems of measurement a base unit for length is chosen, from which all other units are derived. In the Inte ...

. The long vowels are implied to be midway in quality between the neighbouring short vowels. In his alphabet, however, he treats them as pairs, with the long vowels being in shape inverted forms of the short vowels. Although interpretation of his symbolism is necessary, very approximately his vowels can be assigned as follows: *First pair: Short Long *Second pair: Short Long *Third pair: Short Long *Fourth pair: Short Long *Fifth pair: Short Long or (according to Robinson, "almost extended to the inward place of the consonants") Representative words are: # "love" (ModE ), "rose" (ModE ) # "hot" (ModE ), "cause" (ModE ) # "sad" (ModE ), "name" (ModE ) # "best" (ModE ), "please" (ModE ) # "rich" (ModE ), "queen" (ModE ) The vowel assignments must be taken as extremely approximate, better reflecting the relationships between the vowels than their precise sound. Robinson's

diphthongs A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...

are: * or perhaps in ) "plain" (ModE ). This sound was in process of merging with (e.g. "day" both and , "against" both and ), hence the inference that it may have been . * in "thoughts" (ModE ) * in "fine" (ModE ) * in "few" (ModE ) * in "view" (ModE ) * in "coin" (ModE ) * in "ground" (ModE ) but also in "soul" (ModE ) and likewise "cold", "gold", etc. * in "moon" (ModE )

References

Sources

Dobson, E.J., 1957. ''The Phonetic Writings of Robert Robinson''. Early English Text Society Vol. No. 238. Oxford University Press.