The London School

Henry Sweet

Was the greatest of the few historical linguistics whom Britain produced in the nineteenth century. He was actively concerned with systematizing phonetic  transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform.

Daniel Jones

Stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech-sound; he invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels.

J.R. Firth

He turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain

Bronislaw Malinowski

Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics from 1927 onward. He did fieldwork in the very primitive culture of the Trobriand Islands off eastern New Guinea. The most important aspect of Malinowski’s theorizing, as distinct from his purely ethnographic work, concerned the functioning of language.

London School