From: benlizro@ihug.co.nz   
      
   One of the Fathers of Phonetics.   
      
   "He changed his name from his father's name, Sharpe, to his mother's   
   maiden name, Ellis, in 1825 as a condition of receiving significant   
   financial support from a relative on his mother's side."   
      
   1848, A Plea for Phonetic Spelling: or, The Necessity of Orthographic Reform   
      
   1869-99 [5 vols.] On early English pronunciation : with especial   
   reference to Shakspere and Chaucer, containing an investigation of the   
   correspondence of writing with speech in England from the Anglosaxon   
   period to the present day....   
      
   Wrote the article on Phonetics for "Encyclopedia Britannica", 1887.   
   (Possibly the first time the subject had been recognized there?)   
      
   "Ellis developed two phonetic alphabets, the English Phonotypic Alphabet   
   (together with Isaac Pitman), which used many new letters, and the   
   Palaeotype alphabet, which replaced many of these with turned letters   
   (such as ⟨ə⟩, ⟨ɔ⟩), small caps (such as ⟨ɪ⟩), and italics. Two   
   of his   
   novel letters survived: ⟨ʃ⟩ and ⟨ʒ⟩ were passed on to Henry Sweet's   
   Romic alphabet and from there to the International Phonetic Alphabet."   
      
   Also made contributions to mathematics and comparative musicology.   
      
   There's a whole chapter devoted to him, in all his multifaceted   
   Victorianness, in Sarah Ogilvie's _The Dictionary People_ (2023).   
      
   Then there's this:   
      
   "He was acknowledged by George Bernard Shaw as the prototype of   
   Professor Henry Higgins of Pygmalion (adapted as the musical My Fair Lady)."   
      
   Now wait a minute....   
   Some of you will recall this question from repeated appearances here and   
   on a.u.e.   
      
   A lot of linguists had assumed (perhaps from no more than the   
   coincidence of names) that Higgins was based on Henry Sweet (1845-1912),   
   another famous phonetician.   
      
   But there is a book (Beverly Collins & Inger M.Mees, The Real Professor   
   Higgins, 1998) which argues that Daniel Jones (1881-1967), yet another   
   famous phonetician, was the one. I haven't read this book, but PTD has,   
   and he was convinced.   
      
   So on what do the Wikipédistes base their claim for Ellis? Why, on a   
   book called "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony", by Ross W.Duffin   
   (2008). And he says (p.110) : "Ellis's passion for contemporary English   
   dialects ... had made him -- as Shaw acknowledged -- a prototype for   
   Professor Henry Higgins in Pygmalion..." He quotes a passage from the   
   Preface (to Pygmalion) in which Shaw remembers seeing Ellis lecture; but   
   I don't see any acknowledgment.   
      
   Looking back at the Preface, I see that Shaw mentions some of the   
   leading figures in phonetics "when I became interested in the subject,   
   towards the end of the eighteen seventies": Alexander Melville Bell (who   
   had emigrated to Canada), Ellis, Tito Pagliardini [who?] and Henry   
   Sweet. Sweet is the one he spends most time on, obviously fascinated by   
   his personality. BUT "Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to   
   whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible;   
   still...there are touches of Sweet in the play."   
      
   "Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little..." This would   
   seem to rule out Daniel Jones.  And Ellis is mentioned only in the three   
   lines quoted by Duffin. Not "acknowledged as a prototype".   
      
   That's OK -- there doesn't have to be a single prototype for Higgins.   
   Just "touches", because after all he did know some of these people.   
      
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_John_Ellis   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)