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Historiographia Linguistica
Vol. 42:1 (2015) ► pp.63–83

The Missing Meditatio

Leonhard Euler’s (1707–1783) contribution to articulatory phonetics

| Central Washington University
| Central Washington University

This work describes the contributions of Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), the 18th-century physicist and mathematician, to the fields of articulatory and experimental phonetics. First the authors provide evidence for Euler’s role in establishing the St. Petersburg Academy prize of 1780. Next, they consider a short and posthumously published work of Euler, the Meditatio de formatione vocum. It is shown that the Meditatio represents an early attempt to compare vowels in several languages, and includes a two-dimensional classification of vowels which anticipates in many ways the International Phonetic Alphabet vowel chart.

Published online: 26 May 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.42.1.04hir
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