Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests/Lilias Armstrong

Lilias Armstrong

 * This is the archived discussion of the TFAR nomination for the article below. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/requests). Please do not modify this page. 

The result was: scheduled for Today's featured article/January 4, 2018 by Jimfbleak - talk to me?  14:05, 10 December 2017 (UTC)



Lilias Eveline Armstrong (29 September 1882 – 9 December 1937) was an English phonetician. She worked at University College London, where she attained the rank of reader. Armstrong is most known for her work on English intonation as well as the phonetics and tone of Somali and Kikuyu. Her book on English intonation, written with Ida C. Ward, was in print for fifty years. Armstrong also provided some of the first detailed descriptions of tone in Somali and Kikuyu. Armstrong grew up in Northern England and graduated from the University of Leeds. She taught French in an elementary school for a while, but then joined the University College Phonetics Department, headed by Daniel Jones. Her most notable works were the 1926 book A Handbook of English Intonation, co-written with Ward, the 1934 paper "The Phonetic Structure of Somali", and the book The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Kikuyu, published posthumously in 1940. She was the subeditor of the International Phonetic Association's journal Le Maître Phonétique for more than a decade, and was praised in her day for her teaching. Jones wrote in his obituary of her that she was "one of the finest phoneticians in the world".
 * Most recent similar article(s): The last Linguistics WikiProject article on the main page was Black American Sign Language (November 18, 2016). The most recent of these about a person was Harold Innis (June 2, 2008), though he was more a "communications scholar" than a linguist. For just biographies of academics I guess the paleontologist Mortimer Wheeler (December 23, 2017)? Not sure when the last biography of a woman academic was.
 * Main editors:
 * Promoted: 23 November 2017
 * Reasons for nomination: No real reason, this is my first FA, and I'm happy to have added to the very small number of FA about linguistics.
 * Support as nominator. Comment: It's unfortunate that the portrait can't be used. I guess the image of her transcription of The Mill on the Floss or the Somali text could be used, though, but I figured it was safer to just nominate without an image. Umimmak (talk) 00:56, 24 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Support for the reason given by the nominator. We don't see much at TFA in this field, and it deserves a day in the sunlight. Brianboulton (talk) 10:28, 8 December 2017 (UTC)