Wiktor Jassem (June 11, 1922 – January 7, 2016) was a

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken *Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...

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. ...

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as ...

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingui ...

, technical sciences

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professor ...

, and honourable member of Polish Phonetic Association. He specialized in

acoustic phonetics Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics, which deals with acoustic aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates time domain features such as the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental frequency, o ...

and conducted research on the production of sounds and the processes of understanding of the speech. Dafydd Gibbon, Daniel Hirst & Nick Campbell (Eds.), ''Rhythm, melody and harmony in speech: Studies in honour of Wiktor Jassem'' peech and Language Technology, 14/15(pp. 117-127). Poznań: Polskie Towarzystwo Fonetyczne, 2012.

Biography

Wiktor Jassem was born on June 11, 1922, in

Kraków Kraków (), or Cracow, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 159 ...

. During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

he took part in underground education – as a

student A student is a person enrolled in a school or other educational institution. In the United Kingdom and most commonwealth countries, a "student" attends a secondary school or higher (e.g., college or university); those in primary or elementa ...

since he studied English and German languages, yet also as a professor of English language. He started his academic career at

University of Wrocław , ''Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau'' (before 1945) , free_label = Specialty programs , free = , colors = Blue , website uni.wroc.pl The University of Wrocław ( pl, Uniwersytet Wrocławski, U ...

in the lat 1940s, where he was a lecturer of

English phonetics Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system. Am ...

. In 1952, he moved out and began teaching at

Adam Mickiewicz University Adam; el, Ἀδάμ, Adám; la, Adam is the name given in Book of Genesis, Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, ''adam'' is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a coll ...

Poznań Poznań () is a city on the River Warta in west-central Poland, within the Greater Poland region. The city is an important cultural and business centre, and one of Poland's most populous regions with many regional customs such as Saint Joh ...

. In the years 1955-1992 he was the Head of Laboratory of Acoustic Phonetics at the Institute of Fundamental Technical Research, Polish Academy of Sciences. Until 1968, he also worked in the Faculty of Languages and Literatures ( pol. ''Wydział Filologii'') where, in 1966-68, he was the director of the Phonetics Department. In 1968, during the Polish political crisis, he was suspended by the

PZPR The Polish United Workers' Party ( pl, Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza; ), commonly abbreviated to PZPR, was the communist party which ruled the Polish People's Republic as a one-party state from 1948 to 1989. The PZPR had led two other lega ...

works council A works council is a shop-floor organization representing workers that functions as a local/firm-level complement to trade unions but is independent of these at least in some countries. Works councils exist with different names in a variety of r ...

and then dismissed from the University for refusing to read the "

anti-Zionist Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palest ...

" letter in front of his students. He then continued his work at

Polish Academy of Sciences The Polish Academy of Sciences ( pl, Polska Akademia Nauk, PAN) is a Polish state-sponsored institution of higher learning. Headquartered in Warsaw, it is responsible for spearheading the development of science across the country by a society of ...

in Poznań, where in 1974, as part of the Institute of Fundamental Problems of Technology of the Faculty of Technical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, he created the Independent Laboratory of Acoustic Fonetics. In 1976, he rejoined the PZPR. In 1978, he received the title of professor of technical sciences. In his life, he wrote over 200 academic publications, primarily in the area of acoustic phonetics and its applications, many of his works focused on

and

. For over 50 years, he was a member of the board of Permanent Council of

International Phonetic Association The International Phonetic Association (IPA; French: ', ''API'') is an organization that promotes the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. The IPA's major contribution to phonetics is the Interna ...

Editorial boards

1951–1970 lə mɛ:trə fɔnetik.
1979–1984 The Phonetician, Honorary Vice President from 1984.
1985–2003 Phonetica.
1976 International Journal of Man Machine Studies.
1972–1977 Acoustics and Ultrasounds Library.

Participation in research programmes

1995–1998 Project Copernicus. 58: Onomastica: Multilanguage and pronunciation dictionary of names in central and Eastern Europe.
1997–2000 Cooperative Research in Information Technology 2 (CRIT2), ESPRIT No. 20288: Computer analysis and synthesis of suprasegmental structures in communication systems.

Polish programmes centrally financed

1979–1985 Interdisciplinary programme: Nervous system together with biocybernetics elements and systems. 1985–1990 Central programme of fundamental issues: System with artificial intelligence for robots and vehicles. 1997–2001 2 Science Committee Grants. He died on January 7, 2016, at the age of 93. He is buried in the Junikowo Cemetery in Poznań.

Personal life

He was a father of Krzysztof Jassem and Dorota Glowacka (née Jassem).

Selected publications

* Jassem, W. ''Intonation of Colloquial English'', Travaux de la Société des Sciences et des Lettres de Wroclaw, 1951 * Jassem, W. ''Fonetyka języka angielskiego'', Warszawa : Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1954 * Jassem, W. ''Podręcznik wymowy angielskiej'', Warszawa : Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1962 * Jassem, W. ''Podstawy fonetyki akustycznej (Bases of acoustic phonetics)'', Warszawa: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1973. * Jassem, W. and F. J. Nolan ''Sounds and Languages'', In ''G. Bristow, ed. Electronic Speech Synthesis''. London: Granada, 19–47, 1984. * ''The Phonology of Modern English'', Warszawa : Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1983, 1987 * Jassem, W. 1992. ''The phoneme and the acoustical speech signal''. In W. Ainsworth (Ed.) ''Advances in Speech, Hearing and Language Processing'', vol. 2. London: JAI Press Ltd. 1–16 * ''Exercises in English Pronunciation'', Warszawa : Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1995 * Jassem, W., M. Krzyśko and W. Wołyński. ''Normalization of Polish vowel spectra''. In ''The Phonetician'' 81, 23–31, 2000. * Jassem, W., M. Krzyśko and W. Wołyński. ''Reduction of speaker-related variability in Polish vowel spectra''. In ''Journal of the International Phonetic Association'' 31/2, 187–202, 2001. * Jassem, W. ''Classification and organization of data in intonation research''. In A. Braun and R. Masthoff eds. ''Phonetics and its applications. Festschrift for Jens-Peter Köster on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday''. Wiesbaden, Stuttgart: Franz Steinet Verlag. 289–297, 2002. * Jassem, W. ''Illustrations of the IPA: Polish. Journal of the International Phonetic Association'', Journal of the International Phonetic Association (JIPA), 33(1), 103-107, 2003. * Jassem, W. and W. Grygiel ''Off-line classification of Polish vowel spectra using artificial neural networks''. In ''Journal of the International Phonetic Association'' 34/1, 37–52, 2004.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jassem, Wiktor Polish United Workers' Party members Polish philologists 1922 births 2016 deaths Phoneticians Scientists from Kraków Academic staff of the Polish Academy of Sciences