About Lilias Armstrong
Lilias Eveline Armstrong (29 September 1882 – 9 December 1937) was an English phonetician. She worked at University College London, where she attained the rank of reader. Armstrong is most known for her work on English intonation as well as the phonetics and tone of Somali and Kikuyu. Her book on English intonation, written with Ida C. Ward, was in print for 50 years. Armstrong also provided some of the first detailed descriptions of tone in Somali and Kikuyu. Armstrong grew up in Northern England. She graduated from the University of Leeds, where she studied French and Latin. She taught French in an elementary school in the London suburbs for a while, but then joined the University College Phonetics Department, headed by Daniel Jones. Her most notable works were the 1926 book A Handbook of English Intonation, co-written with Ward, the 1934 paper "The Phonetic Structure of Somali", and the book The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Kikuyu, published posthumously in 1940 after she died of a stroke in 1937 at age 55. She was the subeditor of the International Phonetic Association's journal Le Maître Phonétique for more than a decade, and was praised in her day for her teaching, both during the academic term and in the department's summer vacation courses. Jones wrote in his obituary of her that she was "one of the finest phoneticians in the world". Armstrong first taught phonetics in 1917 in Daniel Jones's summer course for missionaries; even before then, Jones had planned to give Armstrong a full-time position at the University College Phonetics Department.
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