Daniel Jones (1881 - 1967) was a British phonetician. He was a disciple of Paul-Edouard Passy. He wrote The Pronunciation of English in 1909 and An outline of English Phonetics in 1918. This is considered to be the first comprehensive description of Received Pronunciation. He uses the term phoneme in the current sense. 1881 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ... 1967 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... 1909 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... 1918 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... Received Pronunciation (RP) is a form of pronunciation of the English language, sometimes defined as the educated spoken English of southeastern England. It is the accent of English English most often taught to non-native speakers, and represented in the pronunciation schemes of most British dictionaries. ... In oral language, a phoneme is the theoretical basic unit of sound that can be used to distinguish words or morphemes; in sign language, it is a similarly basic unit of hand shape, motion, position, or facial expression. ...

The problem of the phonetic description of vowels was a long-standing one. Earlier phoneticians such as Bell and Ellis had suggested a system of reference vowels; and Henry Sweet did much work on the systematic description of vowels. Jones however was the one who is credited with having solved the problem by introducing the concept of 'cardinal vowels', a system of reference vowels which are taught with much care in the British tradition. (Most British-trained phoneticians can trace their teachers through to Jones.) Jones uses in his theory a two-parameter diagram to visualize how vowels are produced. Jones also systematised the phonetic analysis of vowels—still known as the cardinal vowels. Tongue height is represented on the vertical axis and frontness and backness on the horizontal axis. Lip-rounding is implicit in the system, so that front vowels (such as [i e] and [a]) have spread or neutral lip postures, but the back vowels (such as [o] and [u]) have increased lip-rounding as vowel height increases. The International Phonetic Association still uses Jones's model. In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract, in contrast to consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. ... Cardinal vowels are a set of reference vowels used by phoneticians in describing the sounds of languages. ...

Jones studied the phonetics of various languages. In particular, for example, he did an analysis of the tone in Tswana. He developed new alphabets for African and Indian languages. TSWANA (singular moTswana or Motswana, plural baTswana or Batswana) is the name of a Southern African people, and of its Bantu language. ... An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. ...

Source: R. E. Asher, The encyclopedia of language and linguistics, Pergamon Press, 1994

Daniel Jones (1912 - 1993) was a Welsh composer; see Daniel Jones (composer). Daniel Jones (December 7, 1912 - April 23, 1993) was a Welsh composer of classical music. ...