英語の音声に関する雑記帳

It was a sad and sudden news, which arrived shortly after I had happened to talk at LSA annual meeting about Peter’s whereabouts with Frances Ingemann, who taught me much of my phonetics with his book A Course in Phonetics, 2nd edition when I spent a year at the University of Kansas.

My first personal contact with Peter was when I began translating his A Course, 3rd edition into Japanese for publication in early 1997. On March 10, I sent him a question about Figure 1.8 of the book. Peter quickly replied with “Hi Makinosan,” and that was the beginning of our numerous exchanges online of an effort to make the translation as good and precise as possible. When I apologized for my fussiness, he replied, “Please be as ‘fussy’ as you can. This is very educational for me. Thank you very much.” I felt very much obliged indeed. I could not possibly “educate” the leading phonetician of the world!

I am rather slow in doing things, so it took a whole two years just to finish the manuscript. At the end of the translation work, I thought of visiting him at his office at UCLA to settle everthing left. To my surprise, he offered to have me stay in his own house, which I had no reason not to accept. I will not forget his quickness to run to his front door to meet me and warmness of his handshaking when I arrived after hopelessly lost on my way from LAX. I stayed two nights (from January 4 to 6, 1999) with him and Jenny. That was some of my happiest nights ever. While I was there, he even asked me to translate his Vowels and Consonants, which was just about to be published. I could not have been able to do it, but hope to do in future. I liked the whole idea of introducing the acoustics first in that book so much that I imitated it when I wrote a serial introduction to phonetics in a Japanese magazine Gekkan Gengo [Language Monthly] in 2004.

The Japanese edition of A Course in Phonetics was published in November 1999 (again it was me who was slow). In the preface to the 4th edition, which was published in the summer of 2000, Peter acknowledged me by writing “Takehiko Makino made numerous astute observations while translating the third edition into Japanese.” I was grateful, except that it appeared so quick that the Japanese version was not the latest edition only half a year or so after its publication! I am now thinking of persuading my publisher to translate the 5th edition, which he rightly claims to be “the first complete revision of this book since its original publication in 1975.” He was always in motion. I have been too slow to follow him.

His trust in me was sometimes all too great for me. He appointed me as the IPA representative proofreader of the Japanese edition of the Handbook of the IPA, which was published in 2003. I was just astounded. I did my best, but I am not sure if my effort and the result live up to his trust.

My last encounter with Peter was in a rather unexpected place. In Alan S. Kaye’s article “Gemination in English.” in English Today vol.21 no.2 (April 2005): 43-55, I just happened to find a passage “gray tomb and great tomb (examples from Takekiko [sic] Makino furnished by Ladefoged)”(p.45). That was a pair I just casually had posted to phonet (Teaching of phonetics mailing list) a little more than a year before.

Last summer I published a coursebook in English phonetics, written in Japanese. I am now trying to make an English version of the book, partly because I wanted to show Peter what I was doing apart from translation. Again I was too slow.

(This is the same passage I sent to UCLA Phonetics Lab as part of Remembering Peter Ladefoged, from which the photograph given in the previous article in this blog and its accompanying sentence have been removed.)