UCLA professor Peter Ladefoged, the world’s most influential phonetician, recently passed away:
After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1959, Ladefoged taught in Nigeria and Edinburgh before becoming an assistant professor of phonetics at UCLA in 1962. He established and directed, until 1991, the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory, which became the world’s most prominent linguistic phonetics laboratory. He served as chair of UCLA’s linguistics department from 1977 to 1980, and was widely regarded as the world’s foremost scholar of phonetics. He also served as the linguistic consultant to the movie “My Fair Lady.”