Peter Ladefoged, a leading linguist phonetician who traveled the world to document the distinct sounds of endangered languages and pioneered ways to collect and study data, has died. He was 80.
Ladefoged, a UCLA professor emeritus, died Tuesday at a London hospital after becoming ill following a research trip to India, the university announced.
When Ladefoged entered the field in the late 1950s, he married linguistic fieldwork and phonetics in a new way, said Pat Keating, a UCLA linguistics professor.
"He did extensive linguistic fieldwork on a scale it had not been done before; and when he brought it back from the field, he found ways to use sophisticated laboratory equipment to analyze his recordings," she said.
Ladefoged also pioneered the use of state-of-the-art equipment in the field. His first portable phonetics lab that included a tape recorder and various scientific instruments weighed 100 pounds and required a porter but enabled him to do more than listen: He could take quantitative measurements, such as gauging how much air escaped from the nose or throat when a sound was made.
In an earlier trip to India, he recorded the Toda language, which is spoken by fewer than 1,000 people, as he documented its six trills produced by the tip of the tongue. In the Kalahari Desert, he studied the click sound native to Africa. In America, an Indian tribe whose members knew their language was vanishing refused to cooperate because they didn't want to reveal their culture to outsiders.
Soon after moving to Los Angeles from Scotland to become an assistant professor at UCLA in 1962, Ladefoged had a brief career in Hollywood as the chief linguistic consultant on the 1964 film "My Fair Lady."
Director George Cukor wanted him to teach the film's star, Rex Harrison -- who would win an Oscar for the role of Professor Henry Higgins -- to behave like a phonetician.
"My immediate answer was, 'I don't have a singing butler and three maids who sing, but I will tell you what I can as an assistant professor,' " Ladefoged told The Times in 2004.
Ladefoged helped set up the film set's phonetics laboratory, taught Harrison to read phonetic symbols -- and ate the cookies that the film's co-star, Audrey Hepburn, baked for crew members.
"I'd never heard of Cukor. It just struck me as the chance to earn a fortune each week," Ladefoged said. "It was just so much more than a professor's salary. It paid me enough to buy my first car in America."
