The Missing Meditatio: Leonhard Euler's (1707-1783) Contribution to Articulatory Phonetics

Authors

Olivia Hirschey, Central Washington University
Dominic Klyve, Central Washington UniversityFollow

Department or Administrative Unit

Mathematics

Document Type

Article

Author Copyright

Copyright © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

Publication Date

1-2015

Journal

Historiographia Linguistica

Abstract

In this paper we will present one man, Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), who made two fascinating contributions to the field of articulatory phonetics. First, it was Euler, a mathematician and physicist, who convinced the St. Petersburg Academy to make the nature of the vowels their prize question. Second, Euler himself wrote a short work, his Meditatio de formatione vocum, which, as an article on articula-tory phonetics, strikingly presages 20th-century work in vowel classification.

Comments

This article was originally published in Historiographia Linguistica. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Due to copyright restrictions, this article is not available for free download through ScholarWorks @ CWU.

Recommended Citation

Hirschey, O. & Klyve, D. (2015). The missing meditatio: Leonhard Euler's (1707-1783) contribution to articulatory phonetics. Historiographia Linguistica, 42(1), 54-73. DOI: 10.1075/hl.42.1.04hir