Lilias Armstrong
Quick Facts
Biography
Lilias Eveline Armstrong (29 September 1882 – 9 December 1937) was an English phonetician who worked at University College London. Her father was James William Armstrong, a Free Methodist minister and her mother was Mary Elizabeth Armstrong, née Hunter. She graduated from the University of Leeds in 1908 and initially taught French at an elementary school in East Ham. She started working at UCL in 1918; she was appointed senior lecturer in 1921 and reader in 1936.
She married Simeon Karlovitch Boyanus (1871 – 1952) in 1926. He was a professor of English philology at the University of Leningrad and later became a lecturer in Russian at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
Following a stroke, she died at Finchley Memorial Hospital, Middlesex at the age of 55.
Daniel Jones (1938:2) wrote in his obituary of her that she was one of the finest phoneticians in the world, and John Catford (1998:7) wrote that he thought her (1932) book was ″the best practical introduction to French phonetics.″
Selected works
Books
Armstrong, L. E. (1923). An English phonetic reader. London: University of London Press.
Armstrong, L. E. (1932). The phonetics of French. London: Bell.
Armstrong, L. E. (1934). The phonetic structure of Somali. Berlin: Mitteilungen des Seminars für orientalische Sprachen. [Reprinted 1964, Farnborough: Gregg].
- Reviewed by J. Lukas. (1938). Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 11(1):121-122. JSTOR 1155231
Armstrong, L. E. (1940). The phonetic and tonal structure of Kikuyu. London: International African Institute
- Reviewed by I. C. Ward. (1941). Journal of the Royal African Society 40(159):179-180. JSTOR 717899
Armstrong, L. E. & Pe Maung Tin (1925). A Burmese phonetic reader. London: University of London Press.
- Reviewed by R. Grant Brown. (1925). Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland No. 4. pp. 737–738. JSTOR 25220835
Armstrong, L. E. & Ward, I. C. (1926). Handbook of English intonation. Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner; Cambridge: Heffer.
- Reviewed by M. B. Ruud. (1928). Modern Language Notes 43(8):567–568. JSTOR 2914433
Coustenoble, H. N. & Armstrong, L. E. (1934). Studies in French intonation. Cambridge: Heffer
Papers
Armstrong, L. E. (1923). "A narrower transcription for English", Le Maître Phonétique (3) 1:17-19.
Armstrong, L. E. (1926). "The B.B.C. Committee on Pronunciation", Le Maître Phonétique (3) 4:34-35.
Reviews
Armstrong, L. E. (1927). [Review of The Phonetics of the Zulu Language by Clement M. Doke (1926)]. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 4(3)670-671. doi:10.1017/S0041977X00103283