My former colleague Jack Windsor Lewis, who has died aged 94, was an expert in English pronunciation who wrote books on the subject and lectured for many years at the University of Leeds.
Born and bred in Cardiff, Jack went to Howard Gardens high school in the city and then studied for a degree in medieval English at the University of Wales, before holding a succession of overseas posts teaching English.
He became especially interested in the study of pronunciation, and in 1954 enrolled on a phonetics course at University College London, where he was awarded the Certificate of the International Phonetic Association after being taught by the two most influential English phoneticians of the period, AC Gimson and JD O’Connor.
Further teaching jobs overseas followed, including three years in Tehran and seven years at the University of Oslo. There he wrote his Guide to English Pronunciation (1969).
In 1970 Jack was appointed a lecturer in phonetics in the department of phonetics (now part of the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies) at the University of Leeds, and while he was there his best-known work, A Concise Pronouncing Dictionary of British and American English, was published in 1972. It was the first pronunciation dictionary to cover both the British and American varieties of English, and was innovative and even daring in its readiness to abandon the outdated and embrace the new. That was a line that Jack found he had to tone down when he became pronunciation editor for the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, an English-language dictionary aimed at a non-native audience, in 1974.
In the 1960s and 70s there was a controversy over how best to represent the English vowels in phonetic transcription. Jack was a keen advocate of a “qualitative” notation, which made no use of length marks to show long vowels, as opposed to Daniel Jones’s “quantitative” notation, which had hitherto prevailed but was increasingly felt to be unsatisfactory. Unfortunately for Jack, he eventually lost this argument to a compromise proposed by Gimson, whose “qualitative/quantitative” transcription has emerged victorious.
Jack’s last book was a collection of intonationally transcribed texts, People Speaking (1977). He also contributed lively and informative articles and reviews to academic journals, and as editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association I could always rely on him for interesting copy.
He remained a lecturer at the University of Leeds until his retirement in 1989.
In 1969 he married Jane Peer, and she survives him.
