Arthur Lloyd James

alt=A man wearing a jacket, white shirt, and dotted bow-tie. Arthur Lloyd James (21 June 1884 – 24 March 1943) was a Welsh phonetician and convicted murderer who was a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the linguistic adviser to the British Broadcasting Corporation. His research was mainly on the phonetics of English and French, but he also worked on the phonetics of Hausa and Yoruba. He killed himself while a patient at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he was committed after killing his wife, the violinist Elsie Winifred Owen, in 1941.

Early life Arthur Lloyd James was born on 21 June 1884, in Pentre, Glamorgan, Wales. His parents were William James, manager of a coal mine and a mining engineer, and Rachel James, née Clark. He went to school in Llanelli and then Pontypridd. Lloyd James graduated from University College, Cardiff in 1905, obtaining third-class honours in French. He taught for a few years and then went to Trinity College, Cambridge; his research centred on Old French and Provençal, and he graduated in 1910 with a degree in medieval and modern languages. He taught French and phonetics at Training College, and during World War I served with the Royal Engineers. Hausa (with George Percival Bargery), Marathi (with S. G. Kanhere), and Pashto (with Georg Morgenstierne). In his later career Lloyd James worked primarily in applied phonetics, in the 1920s developing standards for the English pronunciation style to be used by announcers on broadcast radio, and in the early 1940s in military telephony. His theoretical phonetic perspective was that language is a system of signals, and in this context he introduced a distinction between "articulation", for consonants, and "modulation", for vowels. In his primer for RAF officers on the importance of clarity of enunciation under service conditions, he pointed out: In some languages the acoustic difference between Accented Syllables and others is not very considerable. In others it is very considerable indeed; there is a pronounced "punch." He takes French and Telugu as examples of the former, and English, Arabic and Persian for the latter, using the wartime metaphors of machine gun and Morse code rhythm, respectively, for the benefit of his officer students. An informal formulation shows his didactic approach: "Good rhythm means punching out the accented syllables, keeping them at equal intervals of time apart, and not smothering up the unstressed syllables. It is exactly like good rhythm in a dance band."

Work with the BBC From 1926 to 1940, Lloyd James was the honorary secretary of the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English and was instrumental in establishing a standard broadcasting pronunciation for British English, familiarly referred to as "BBC English". In 1938, he was given the title of "Linguistic Adviser to the BBC".

He was tried at the Central Criminal Court, with Mr. Justice Wrottesley presiding. The prosecutor was Mr. G. B. McClure, and Mr. Richard O'Sullivan, K.C. was the defence. Brixton Prison senior medical officer Dr. H. A. Grierson argued that Lloyd James had manic depressive insanity with a predominant depressive stage. Lloyd James pleaded not guilty; the jury found him guilty but insane.