Catford has died

John Wells blogged today that the Scottish phonetician Ian Catford has died. There’s a detailed obituary here.

I never met the man, but I love his Practical Introduction to Phonetics, which is a great introduction to articulatory phonetics, teaching you how to produce all sorts of speech sounds.

All high schools should teach all their students phonetics like this – I’m sure it would improve the pronunciation of foreign languages immensely!