The ‘hylomorphic’ distinction between MATTER and FORM was the basis, for many seventeenth century writers, of the analysis of the sound of speech. MATTER was breath, to which FORM was given by articulations of the organs of speech.

In experimental phonetic research, we often come across cases of multiple perceptual cues to a phonemic distinction, even though this distinction may be seen traditionally as dependent on some single phonetic feature. The question arises as to the relative power of these cues. How equally do they share the burden of communicative relevance? For example, among the several cues that emanate from the timing of the valvular action of the larynx (Lisker and Abramson (1965); Abramson (1977)), fundamental-frequency perturbations (House and Fairbanks (1953)) have been shown by some studies, apparently starting with Haggard, Ambler and Callow (1970) and Fujimura (1971), to help in the perceptual differentiation of voiced and voiceless stop consonants; however, recent work (Abramson and Lisker (1985)) suggests that this cue has very limited efficacy compared with other acoustic consequences of voice timing.

Un verset de l'Évangile selon saint Jean (III, 16), on le sait, a été le texte sur lequel Paul Passy (1859–1940) a essayé pour la première fois, il y a cent ans, d'appliquer de manière systématique l'alphabet de l'association Phonétique à un grand nombre de langues.

The present set of symbols recommended by the International Phonetic Association had its origins nearly 100 years ago, shortly after the Association was founded in 1886. It was revised many times in its early years, but in the last 40 years there have been few changes. As a result, it is now time for the Association to turn to this matter again. But before we do so, we would like to make it clear that in our view the Association should be concerned with far more than the management of a set of symbols. Just as no university course in phonetics should limit itself to teaching students how to make phonetic transcriptions, so equally the Association is concerned with the whole science of phonetics. Phoneticians are not just people who can hear and produce a great variety of speech sounds. They are scholars who have studied the entire process of speech production and perception. They know how speech sounds form the medium of spoken language, and they continually relate their work to other fields such as general linguistics. They also know something about the practical applications of their work, ranging from pronunciation teaching to automatic speech recognition. Phonetics is an academic discipline, and the International Phonetic Association is the organization of the group of scholars who are enaged in that discipline.

In the space available it is impossible to do full and proper justice to all of the IPA's activities over the past 100 years. I shall, therefore, restrict myself to considering only a number of aspects, namely the origins and growth of the Association, the importance of the journal in underpinning its work, and the character of the Association as it expressed itself under the secretaryship of Paul Passy. Something of the Association's earlier history can be found on the covers of The Principles of the International Phonetic Association, in Daniel Jones' survey of the Association's history, published in 1935, and in Robert Albright's monograph on the development of the IPA's alphabet and related matters.

An international or, better, a universal phonetic alphabet is a set of conventions where each letter is equated with a physically well-identified speech sound. In scientific practice, the use of such an alphabet is imperative when an auditory or mechanical recording of vocal utterances is to be given a visual rendering. It must be kept in mind that the latter, a succession of discrete symbols, cannot be considered the exact equivalent of the former, a continuous flux.

In 1972 (Uldall (1972)) I measured the durations of all the two-syllable rhythmic feet in Professor David Abercrombie's reading of ‘The North Wind and the Sun’, to see how they fitted his three types of two-syllable feet (Abercrombie (1964)), A short-long, B equal-equal, and C long-short (with a word-boundary between the syllables). I measured all the segments in the words, on broad band spectrograms. The text had been marked for stress by Professor Abercrombie while listening to the tape.

The following text was read at the VIIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, held at the University of Leeds in August 1972. Its contents gave rise to quite a lively discussion, but it was never published. I think the problem still calls for a close scrutiny, particularly at a time when the Association is reconsidering its aims and procedures. Speaking from my experience, I based my argument on the problems of teaching pronunciation of second languages between the two World Wars. This was one of the more important tasks of phoneticians, especially in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in the USA; the results were excellent, often outstanding. Under the leadership of Daniel Jones, graduates from UCL acquired a thorough knowledge of spoken French, achieving a near perfection in articulation and intonation. Now, this was the avowed aim of the Department of Phonetics at UCL and other universities, which reflected on the curriculum and teaching procedures of grammar schools and high schools. An important dose of phonetic and phonemic theory was included in the course, to supply a basis for memorizing morphophonemic rules and the interface between sounds and spelling; some contrastive work was also included, contrasting English and French phonetic structures. It seems to me that this approach has now lost some of its appeal, and although phonemic transcription has gained a wider recognition since 1925, the overall aim of teachers is an acceptable approximation rather than a strict imitation. I submit this text therefore in the hope that it will be examined by the Council and the membership, to see whether it still has merit, and if so, to examine what the modern science of applied linguistics can do about it. It will be obvious to all that such teaching is closely associated with problems of transcription involving the choice and use of IPA symbols very much in the way envisaged by Peter Ladefoged in his recent circular letter.