Saturday 8 August 2015

Compression and W. R. Evans

I wrote in a postscript to my blog of the sixth of July (see here) that I could not find anything about W. R. Evans, who had used the term 'compression' to describe the reduction of diphthongs to simple vowel sounds. Jack Windsor Lewis in his blog no. 502 of the 7th of August kindly referred me to the journal 'Phonetische Studien', in which Evans had published two articles which dealt with the Bell vowel system.

In volume 2 (1889) on p. 112 of said periodical I found an obituary for William Robert Evans:


Evans was an autodidact in matters phonetic. He "conducted" (as it pleased Evans to call it) the journal The spelling experimenter and phonetic investigator, which appeared in two volumes from 1880 to 1883. Evans ran a small print shop in London. He died from pulmonary consumption in London on the 21st of June 1888.

1 comment: