ABSTRACT
Alexander Ellis (1814–90) was, as his obituary notice in The Athenaeum records, a scholar of ‘singular industry and fidelity’, equipped with ‘an intellect of unusual power and subtlety’. 1 ‘Of the range of his acquirements it would be difficult to speak with exaggeration’, it continues, adding still further: ‘No German of our time could at all rival him in this respect. Indeed, few men here or abroad have possessed his width of knowledge or his powers of application.’ A mathematician as well as a philologist and phonetician, Ellis was a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1864, a member of the Philological Society from 1866, and served twice as president of the latter, first from 1872 to 1874 and again from 1880 to 1882. A close associate of James Murray, he was a scholar of both past and present in the English language, committed to investigating the biographies of sounds just as the OED of Murray and Furnivall sought to furnish the biographies of words. Ellis’s major work, On Early English Pronunciation (EEP), published in five volumes from 1869 to 1889, 2 was, again like the OED, a vast scholarly enterprise, aiming to encompass a diachronic span from early Middle English to language in the nineteenth century itself. Collating evidence for the history and developments of English speech from Havelok and Horn, from Orm, Laℨamon, Chaucer, and Gower, from Scandinavian sources and English orthoepists, from pronouncing dictionaries and the emergent phoneticians of the nineteenth century such as A.M. Bell (to name but a few of the sources used in Ellis’s research), EEP clearly represents a formidable achievement in English philology; it was, as The Athenaeum averred, an ‘epoch-making work’, 3 and the detail and range it provides still remain, in a number of ways, largely unsurpassed.
