Peter Ladefoged

I never met him, nor read any writing of his beyond A Course In Phonetics when I was an undergraduate, which has thus far constituted pretty much my entire professional exposure to phonetics. But when I got an email announcing his death this morning from a listserv, I felt startled at how shaken I was by the news. I felt sad at the thought of how sad many of my colleagues in the extended fraternity of linguists must be feeling. I subsequently went and read several of the various documents people had linked to in the annoucements, and felt a bit more entitled to feel sad on my own behalf, for having never met him.

You can hear Peter's (rather devastating) voice for yourself at this URL:

Vowels And Consonants, Chapter 2

The random lines of English he's reading form a bit of a poem themselves, really.