Arthur Lloyd James

Arthur Lloyd James (21 June 1884 – 24 March 1943) was a Welsh phonetician who was a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the linguistic adviser to the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Lloyd James graduated from University College, Cardiff in 1905, obtaining third-class honours in French.

He taught for a few years and then went to Trinity College, Cambridge; his research centred on Old French and Provençal, and he graduated in 1910 with a degree in medieval and modern languages.

In his later career Lloyd James worked primarily in applied phonetics, in the 1920s developing standards for the English pronunciation style to be used by announcers on broadcast radio, and in the early 1940s in military telephony.

His theoretical phonetic perspective was that language is a system of signals, and in this context he introduced a distinction between "articulation", for consonants, and "modulation", for vowels.

In his primer for RAF officers on the importance of clarity of enunciation under service conditions, he pointed out:[6] In some languages the acoustic difference between Accented Syllables and others is not very considerable.

He takes French and Telugu as examples of the former, and English, Arabic and Persian for the latter, using the wartime metaphors of machine gun and Morse code rhythm, respectively, for the benefit of his officer students.

[9] Arthur Lloyd James killed himself on 24 March 1943, at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Crowthorne, Berkshire.