Paul Passy, A Radical Linguist

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the life and work of the French linguist Paul Passy (1859-1940), with a focus on his significant contributions to the fields of linguistics and phonetics. Renowned as a pioneering educator, Passy was the driving force behind the creation of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is widely used today in the teaching of modern languages and in phonetic descriptions of the languages of the world. Jacques Durand and Chantal Lyche explore how Passy's advocacy for spelling reform and his promotion of the Direct Method in foreign language teaching were deeply rooted in his social and spiritual commitments as a Christian socialist. The chapters also shed light on the influence that contemporary British linguists such as Alexander Melville Bell, Alexander John Ellis, Isaac Pitman, and Henry Sweet had on his thought, as well as on his later productive collaboration with Daniel Jones in the creation of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Durand and Lyche's close examination of Passy's scholarly and pedagogical output reveals a visionary figure whose legacy continues to resonate in modern descriptive and applied linguistics.

Jacques Durand is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès and was previously Director of the CNRS research centre 'Cognition, Langues, Language, Ergonomie' in Toulouse. He is an honorary senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France and has held academic posts in Aberdeen, Essex, Paris, and Aix-en-Provence. His many publications, primarily in the areas of phonology and machine translation, include the OUP edited volumes The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology (with Gert Kristoffersen and Ulrike Gut, 2014) and Varieties of Spoken French (with Sylvain Detey, Bernard Laks, and Chantal Lyche, 2016; paperback 2018). He is the co-founder, with Chantal Lyche and Bernard Laks, of the research programme 'Phonologie du français contemporain'. Chantal Schwoerer Lyche is Professor Emerita at the University of Oslo, and was an affiliated member of the CASTL Centre of Excellence at the University of Tromsø. Her publications focus on French phonology, varieties of French in the Francophone world (particularly Louisiana and Africa), and the teaching of French as a foreign language. She is the co-editor, with Sylvain Detey, Jacques Durand, and Bernard Laks, of Varieties of Spoken French (OUP, 2016; paperback 2018), and co-founder, with Jacques Durand and Bernard Laks, of the research programme 'Phonologie du français contemporain'. Within the framework of the European Language Council, she also contributed to the pilot development of the European Language Portfolio in the Higher Education Sector.