bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Linking, intrusive, and rhotic /r/ in pronunciation models
Authors: Brown Adam
Published: February 2009

This article examines two related phenomena concerning the English phoneme /r/:linking/intrusive/r/ andrhotic/r/. The former is usually discussed in RP-oriented pronunciation drill books and phonetics textbooks. However, unless one adopts the narrow view that RP is the only feasible pronunciation model in a given situation, it is not legitimate to discuss linking/intrusive /r/ without mention of the second phenomenon – rhoticity. Indeed, as is shown below, these may be thought of not as two separate phenomena, but as two branches of the same phenomenon. Further, it is argued that linking/intrusive /r/ is not of great importance in English pronunciation teaching world-wide, and that the potential advantages of rhoticity are often underestimated.
Problems in the transcription of dysfluent speech
Authors: Duckworth Martin , Ball Martin J.
Published: February 2009

Clinical phoneticians and speech pathologists often face difficulties in transcription of a different nature from those which the general phonetician encounters. A wide range of speech disorders present at the clinic (see Crystal 1980, 1981, 1984), and in many cases a detailed phonetic description of speech is an important part of the analysis and diagnosis of a person's problem (see Carney 1979, on the dangers of inadequate description).
Spanish intonation: Design and implementation of a machine-readable corpus
Authors: Uribe Miriam Cid , Roach Peter
Published: February 2009

The intonation of Spanish does not appear to have received the same degree of attention as the Spanish segmental system. Furthermore, much of the information available and the analyses proposed until fairly recently seem to have been largely arrived at on the basis of subjective, impressionistic considerations. It is only in the last few years that there seems to have been a shift of emphasis in the study of Spanish prosody and more research of an experimental and instrumental nature is being carried out.
The transcription of tone in the IPA
Authors: Maddieson Ian
Published: February 2009

Prior to the 1989 convention in Kiel the principal symbols for tones recommended by the IPA were a set of “horizontal and oblique accents” which were intended ‘by their shapes and positions” to “give some indication of their musical values” (quotations are from Principles of the IPA 1949, p. 18.). Thus, level tones were to be indicated by horizontal bars, rising tones by marks that slope up from left to right, falling tones by marks that slope down from left to right, and so on. The height of a tone could be indicated by vertical position of these marks relative to the symbols for the segmental material concerned. The marks could be placed either “over or under the vowels, … or at the beginnings of syllables”. A possible set of transcriptions is illustrated in table 1.
Commentary on ‘Reading waveforms’
Authors: Maddieson Ian
Published: February 2009

The previous issue of the Journal contained a discussion by Peter Ladefoged about interpreting the information in a speech waveform (JIPA, 21, 32–34), noting that examination of waveforms displays is becoming commonplace with the easy availability of personal computer tools for digitizing and editing. As Ladefoged noted:

“Several aspects of sounds are clearly distinguishable from the waveforms of a phrase. Stop closures are very evident, as are differences between voiced sounds which have repetitive waveforms and voiceless sounds which do not. Differences in amplitude can be used to distinguish high frequency, high intensity sibilants from lower intensity non-sibilant fricatives; and nasals and laterals usually have smaller amplitudes than the louder adjacent vowels. An expanded view of the waveform allows us to see intervals between peaks in the damped wave of a voiced sound, and thus to calculate the frequency of the first formant. Nasals can often be distinguished from vowels in these expanded waveforms, not only by their smaller amplitudes but also by the less clear formant structure.”
Further to Articulatory Force and the IPA Revisions
Authors: Ball Martin J.
Published: February 2009

I read with interest the note by Leigh Lisker in JIPA 22 (pp 57–61) concerning the problem of marking force of articulation in phonetic transcription, and his regret that the 1989 revisions did not include diacritics for the fortis-lenis distinction. It is true that there exists no universally agreed definition of articulatory force, however, as Professor Lisker points out, phoneticians involved in transcription frequently encounter the need to differentiate sounds of different strength which appear to be the same in other phonetic dimensions.
Letter to the Editor
Authors: Okada Hideo
Published: February 2009

I am grateful that the wish I expressed at Kiel for a means to indicate neutral lip position has been fulfilled in the form of a set of rules for extended application of over-rounding and under-rounding diacritics, stated officially in the Journal 20:2, p.23, item 8. Only, could I point out that there is a serious mistake in the final portion of this passage?
MARSEC: A Machine-Readable Spoken English Corpus
Authors: Roach Peter , Knowles Gerry , Varadi Tamas , Arnfield Simon
Published: February 2009

The purpose of this paper is to describe a new version of the Spoken English Corpus which will be of interest to phoneticians and other speech scientists. The Spoken English Corpus is a well-known collection of spoken-language texts that was collected and transcribed in the 1980's in a joint project involving IBM UK and the University of Lancaster (Alderson and Knowles forthcoming, Knowles and Taylor 1988). One valuable aspect of it is that the recorded material on which it was based is fairly freely available and the recording quality is generally good. At the time when the recordings were made, the idea of storing all the recorded material in digital form suitable for computer processing was of limited practicality. Although storage on digital tape was certainly feasible, this did not provide rapid computer access. The arrival of optical disk technology, with the possibility of storing very large amounts of digital data on a compact disk at relatively low cost, has brought about a revolution in ideas on database construction and use. It seemed to us that the recordings of the Spoken English Corpus (hereafter SEC) should now be converted into a form which would enable the user to gain access to the acoustic signal without the laborious business of winding through large amounts of tape. Once this was done, we should be able not only to listen to the recordings in a very convenient way, but also to carry out many automatic analyses of the material by computer.
French
Authors: Fougeron Cécile , Smith Caroline L.
Published: February 2009

The following description of French is based on the speech of a young Parisian female speaker. Varieties of French have almost identical inventories; the main differences are to be found in the maintenance or loss of certain contrasts.
Hausa
Authors: Schuh Russell G. , Yalwa Lawan D.
Published: February 2009

The following description of Hausa is based on the variety of the language spoken in Kano, Nigeria. The sample text is transcribed from a recording of a male native of Kano in his late 30's. This variety of Hausa is considered “standard”. Though Kano is a large urban center with some internal variation in speech, the sound inventory is relatively homogeneous within the city and surrounding area. Kano Hausa is the variety most commonly heard on national and regional radio and television broadcasts in Nigeria as well as most international broadcasting, such as the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio Moscow, and Voice of America. Kano Hausa is therefore familiar throughout the Hausa speaking areas of Nigeria as well as Hausa speaking communities in Niger, Ghana, and other areas outside northern Nigeria. Hausa has a standard orthography, in use since the 1930's and also based on the Kano variety. It is familiar to all Hausa speakers literate in the Romanized orthography. (Many Hausas are also literate in Arabic orthography, a variety of which has been used to write Hausa, probably for several centuries. The Arabic orthography for Hausa is less standardized than the Roman orthography and has little formally published literature.)
Effects of Place of Articulation and Vowel Context on VOT Production and Perception for French and English Stops
Authors: Nearey Terrance M. , Rochet Bernard L.
Published: February 2009

The focus of this study is the nature of the secondary effects of place of articulation and vowel quality on VOT (and other acoustic properties) in the production of stops in French and English and the consequences of these factors on the perception of VOT continua by speakers of those languages. Although the largest source of differences in VOT is that associated with the voicing contrast, a number of previous studies indicate that both French and English stops show an effect of place of articulation, with velars showing longer VOT than labials or coronals in accord with the general tendencies noted by Lisker and Abramson (1967; see also Volaitis and Miller 1992). However, some modulation of VOT by vowel context has also been reported. Thus, Fischer-Jørgensen (1972) finds that, in French voiceless stops, VOT is longer before a high vowel than before a low vowel. She further reports an interaction between the place of articulation of the consonant and the identity of the vowel. Specifically, for /p/, the longest voicing lags occur before high rounded vowels (/u/ and /y/); but for /t/ and /k/, they are longest before /i/. Yeni-Komshian, Caramazza and Preston (1977: 43) also report longer voicing lags before /i/ than before /a/ or /o/ for unilingual French speakers.
The extIPA Chart
Authors:   ICPLA Executive Committee
Published: February 2009

At the 1989 Kiel Convention of the IPA a sub-group was established to draw up recommendations for the transcription of disordered speech. The report produced at the Convention appeared in print in Duckworth, Hardcastle, Allen and Ball (1990), being mainly a list of symbols, termed ‘extensions to the IPA’, or ‘extIPA’ for short. Examples of the use of the extIPA symbols are given in Ball (1991), Howard (1993) and Ball, Code, Rahilly and Hazlett (1994) among others, and Ball (1993) includes them at textbook level. Various changes and additions to the original set of symbols are reported in Bernhardt and Ball (1993). These changes mean, however, there is a need for a listing of the current set of symbols, preferably in as concise a form as possible. There was also felt to be a need for the symbol set to receive overt recognition from a relevant society, therefore this publication marks the official adoption of the extIPA symbols by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA).
The VoQS System for the Transcription of Voice Quality
Authors: Ball Martin J. , Esling John , Dickson Craig
Published: February 2009

While the history of interest in voice quality dates back at least as far as Henry Sweet (e.g. 1890), there was for many years little agreement on how to classify voice quality or how to transcribe it as part of a phonetic transcription. Indeed, there is not even agreement on precisely what the term covers in that it is often restricted to aspects of voice quality derived from vocal fold activity, rather than the fuller meaning which encompasses features derived from supralaryngeal settings of the articulators. Authors such as Nolan (1983) have used the phrase long-term quality as an alternative; however, in this article we will retain the traditional term but with a wide application to account for voice quality derived from airflow features, vocal fold activity, and supralaryngeal activity.
Temporal-based acoustic-phonetic patterns in read speech: some evidence for speaker sex differences
Authors: Whiteside Sandra P.
Published: February 2009

The perception of speaker sex depends on the listener's integration of a complex range of factors. These may relate, for example, to the style of delivery, the use of particular language, pronunciation (Trudgill, 1983; Smith, 1979), the use of particular intonation patterns (McConnell-Ginet, 1983) and the perceived pitch of the speaker (Aronovitch, 1976, Elyan, 1978; Lass et al., 1976). Some acoustic-phonetic investigations have explored through instrumental analysis how speaker sex differences are perceived. These have shown that acoustic phonetic differences exist between the read speech of men and women speakers. It has been demonstrated that fundamental frequency differences exist between men and women, with men having on average, lower fundamental frequencies (Aronovitch, 1976; Coleman, 1973a). This can be explained in part by their larger larynges. However it is also acknowledged that it is not a low overall average fundamental frequency alone that contributes to the perception of an adult male voice. Some evidence shows for example that use of a wider pitch range will contribute to the perception of femininity, even where the overall pitch is low (Terrango, 1966). In addition women have been found to have on average higher formant frequencies (Coleman, 1976; Henton, 1986; Peterson & Barney, 1952; Childers & Wu, 1991; Wu & Childers, 1991) as a result of the smaller vocal tract. Women have different glottal source characteristics (Karlsson, 1989) which are reflected in the filter characteristics of the speech signal (Klatt & Klatt, 1990). There is also some evidence to suggest that other speaker sex differences exist in the temporal domain. Byrd (1992) found differences between men and women speakers in speaking rate in read speech in American English in the TIMIT database. Byrd states that under the recording conditions used for the TIMIT database, women spoke appreciably more slowly than the men and that men tended to reduce vowels to schwa ([ə]) more often than the women. Byrd also found that female speakers in the TIMIT database released stops in sentence-final position more frequently and produced more glottal stops than male speakers. All these findings were statistically significant.
The role of NZ English in a binary feature analysis of English short vowels
Authors: Hawkins Peter
Published: February 2009

The Jakobsonian system of binary distinctive features is based on the premise that, as far as vowels are concerned, their articulation, and the resulting acoustic effects, are not distributed randomly over the available articulatory or acoustic space, but are organized into systems of binary contrasts, so that for example (in articulatory terms) a set of front vowels will be matched by a corresponding set of back vowels, a set of high vowels by a set of mid or low vowels, and so on. There will thus be a certain symmetry in the distribution of such vowels, either in their positions on a vowel quadrilateral, or in a similar schematic shape such as the five-vowel triangle.
In defence of the colon
Authors: Obendorfer R.
Published: February 2009

In ‘The undesirability of length marks in EFL phonemic transcription’ (1975) J. Windsor Lewis advanced a number of arguments to demonstrate why the colon was undesirable as a notational device for use in EFL phonemic transcriptions. I will try to review the case systematically and draw attention to certain facts before an ANTI-COLON attitude becomes more widespread and irremediably fixed. To introduce some method into the treatment and to separate the issues clearly from one another, I will consider the question from five different aspects and in this order: (1) phonological, (2) phonetic, (3) typographical, (4) pedagogic, and (5) practical.
The opposition /tʃ/ vs./tʃh/ in Neo-Aramaic
Authors: Odisho Edward Y.
Published: February 2009

In 1913 Le Maître Phonétique published the first ever phonetic text of Neo-Aramaic (Neo-Syriac) in IPA. It was contributed by Osipov (Osipoff) who, according to Jones (1950), was a remarkable linguist and phonetician. The text had, however, been the cause of a dispute between Jones and Passy. The latter had reacted so strongly to Osipov' phonetic representation of the feature of aspiration that he described the language (i.e. Syriac) as ‘Langue excentrique’ (Passy, 1913). According to Polotsky (1961) ‘this epithet refers to the bewildering abundance of aspiration marks in Osipov's text and to their occurrence in unexpected surroundings’.
A Tribute to Peter Ladefoged
Authors: Laver John
Published: February 2009

At the XIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences held in Aix-en-Provence (19–24 August 1991), Professor Peter Ladefoged was presented with a Gold Medal, jointly offered by the International Organizing Committee of the Congress, the International Phonetic Association, and the International Society of Phonetic Sciences, in recognition of his contribution to the subject of phonetics over the forty years of his career to date. Professor Mario Rossi, as the President of the International Organizing Committee of the Congress, asked me to say a few words at the banquet in Peter Ladefoged's honor. This article is intended to give an expanded version of those comments a more permanent form, and to bring an appreciation of his outstanding contribution to a wider audience.
Voiceless Nasal Phonemes in Icelandic
Authors: Jessen Michael , Pétursson Magnús
Published: February 2009

Icelandic has a number of ‘surface minimal pairs’ between voiced and voiceless nasals. Facts and arguments are presented that speak for the phonemic status of these sounds, in contrast to the widespread view that voiceless nasals in Icelandic are derived. It is shown, among else, that stops after voiced and voiceless nasals are phonetically identical. Due to this fact it is not possible on synchronic grounds to ascribe the distinction between voiced and voiceless nasals to a distinction among the following stops, unless phonological abstractness is used as an analytical tool. The rarely mentioned case of single word-initial voiced versus voiceless nasals (where no subsequent stop occurs) would require an even greater commitment to phonological abstractness if the derived status of voiceless nasals were maintained. Implications for linguistic phonetics and the IPA are discussed.
Transcription of Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features of Emotional Speech
Authors: Roach Peter , Stibbard Richard , Osborne Jane , Arnfield Simon , Setter Jane
Published: February 2009

A study of emotional speech has resulted in a collection of some five hours of recorded material. The analysis of this material has required computer-based annotation incorporating prosodic and paralinguistic transcription as well as the coding of various psychological variables. A version of the prosodic and paralinguistic transcription devised by Crystal & Quirk was developed for use within thexwavesTMenvironment. This paper describes this transcription system and its application.
Mixing properties of (α,β)-expansions
Authors: DAJANI KARMA , HARTONO YUSUF , KRAAIKAMP COR
Published: February 2009

Let 0<α<1 andβ>1. We show that everyx∈[0,1] has an expansion of the formwherehi=hi(x)∈{0,α/β}, andpi=pi(x)∈{0,1}. We study the dynamical system underlying this expansion and give the density of the invariant measure that is equivalent to the Lebesgue measure. We prove that the system is weakly Bernoulli, and we give a version of the natural extension. For special values ofα, we give the relationship of this expansion with the greedyβ-expansion.
Minimal homeomorphisms on low-dimensional tori
Authors: DOS SANTOS N. M. , URZÚA-LUZ R.
Published: February 2009

We study minimal homeomorphisms (all orbits are dense) of the tori Tn, n≤4. The linear part of a homeomorphism φ of Tn is the linear mapping L induced by φ on the first homology group of Tn. It follows from the Lefschetz fixed point theorem that 1 is an eigenvalue of L if φ minimal. We show that if φ is minimal and n≤4, then L is quasi-unipontent, that is, all of the eigenvalues of L are roots of unity and conversely if L∈GL(n,ℤ) is quasi-unipotent and 1 is an eigenvalue of L, then there exists a C∞ minimal skew-product diffeomorphism φ of Tn whose linear part is precisely L. We do not know whether these results are true for n≥5. We give a sufficient condition for a smooth skew-product diffeomorphism of a torus of arbitrary dimension to be smoothly conjugate to an affine transformation.
Never Trust the Census Taker, even when he's Dead
Authors: Binford Henry C.
Published: February 2009

In the statistical jungle of the twentieth century, the collection of vast amounts of demographic data is an activity as relentless as breathing. We seldom question our impulse to count ourselves, and to ensure that our births, marriages, deaths, and innumerable other events are duly and permanently recorded. For reasons of both practicality and curiosity, historians and demographers have long attempted to possess the same sorts of data for as much of the past as possible, and have devised ever more ingenious ways of obtaining them. Most recently, such efforts have involved systematic analysis of very large numbers of quantitative records, and have borne fruit in studies of family characteristics, population trends, migration, mobility, and the like. As a result, it is now reasonable to discuss age-specific fertility in seventeenth-century Colyton as well as in twentieth-century London. With understandable pride, the practitioners of the new historical demography have described their accomplishment as one of pushing back the boundary which divides our modern, numerical age from a “pre-statistical past”.
Urban History in Scandinavia: A survey of recent trends
Authors: Hammarström Ingrid
Published: February 2009

Urban history in Scandinavian countries has long been practised mainly in the form of individual town histories, a large number of which have been written by local amateurs. Among professional historians, however, local history (including the history of towns, parishes and regions) has been of interest since the late-nineteenth century, and has been especially popular in Norway and Finland. This may have to do with the fact that these two countries did not become independent until 1905 and 1917 respectively. The Swedish-Norwegian union of 1814–1905 had been preceded by Norway's incorporation into the Danish kingdom from 1536 on, and Finland's inclusion in the Russian empire as a semi-autonomous grand duchy between 1809 and 1917 had been preceded by her incorporation into the Swedish kingdom since the Middle Ages. These facts must be kept in mind in order to realize why historical research in Scandinavia has so many topics and features in common. They also explain some of the differences, such as why historians in Norway and Finland to a greater extent than in Sweden and Denmark should have turned to local history both before and after having achieved independence, in order to strengthen the conciousness of national identity in the two countries. Although there was much interest in rural local history, town history also got its share. There are very few towns – if any – in Norway and Finland that have not had their histories written; in Denmark and Sweden urban and local history also became increasingly popular in the 1920s and 1930s.
Dr Dyer's Urban Undulations
Authors: Phythian-Adams C. V.
Published: February 2009

In seeking to purge what he seems to regard as the dangerously insidious views of an academic ‘gang of four’,Dr Alan Dyer has certainly eschewed gentle persuasion as the appropriate way of re-converting erring heretics. Being apparently the worst offender - and bedaubed in penitential ashes, as I clearly ought to be - it is then hardly for me to answer for the views of my fellow conspirators: Peter Clark, Paul Slack and Penelope Corfield. They are well able to stand up for themselves. All I have space to do here is to reflect on Dr Dyer's re-assertion of the neutralist text-book orthodoxy regarding the state of England's towns in the earlier Tudor period, and so to ponder whether a recantation of my own seemingly obsessional sins might be appropriate. I certainly do not intend simply to reiterate what the disinterested follower of this discussion might wish to read for himself, the actual arguments of my 1975 paper, with its qualifying remarks and its ‘handful’ of 75 urban examples.
Rateable Assessment as a Data Source for Status Area Analysis: the Example of Edinburgh 1855–1962
Authors: Gordon George
Published: February 2009

Research has revealed spatial segregation of status groups to be characteristic feature of many urban settlements. Sjoberg has identified such areas in pre-industrial cities although many have argued that marked spatial segregation primarily occurred in post-Industrial Revolution cities. Much interest has surrounded detailed analysis of settlements, or parts thereof, within particular historical eras, e.g. Victorian studies, but the study of the status areas of a settlement over a longer time period has received less attention. This article resulted from a study of status areas in Edinburgh at three points in time: 1855, 1914 and 1962.
Residential segregation in the American metropolis: concentration, dispersion and dominance
Authors: Zunz Olivier
Published: February 2009

Measuring residential segregation is a challenging and crucial task. Many important questions in urban history can be understood fully only after correctly assessing the importance and significance of the clustering patterns of different groups of urbanites. However, the extent to which and the ways in which various social classes, races, and ethnic groups congregated in the expanding industrial metropolis of nineteenth-century America form the subject of heated debates among historians. With large black ghettos now existing in all major cities, experts and lay citizens alike agree that Americans live in a ‘separated society’. In the first half of the twentieth century, metropolitan areas took the form of ghettoized central cities with white suburbs. With the transfer of many urban functions to suburban units, and the shift of America from a nation of urbanites to a nation of suburbanites, a complex pattern of suburban segregation also developed. The universal concern about the magnitude of today's segregation makes the historical debate intriguing. Was it once different? Was there a time when cities were integrated? At some time in the past, many believe, American cities were better places in which to live—hence we should strive to recover our lost community.
Death and survival in the city: approaches to the history of disease
Authors: Luckin Bill
Published: February 2009

Now that the debate about the standard of living during the first half of the nineteenth century appears to have entered a relatively quiescent phase, historians have begun to turn their attention towards the more elusive concept of the quality of life. The incidence of fatal and non-fatal disease is clearly central to research of this type and so, too, is a delineation of the physical context in which infections have flourished and in which those who have been afflicted by them have lived. Although there has been a tendency to underestimate the ferocity of epidemics in rural areas in the period after about 1750, historians working on disease in the modern period are inevitably most usually concerned with processes which are specifically urban in character. And urban historians, especially those interested in such topics as the development of utilities, the growth of administrative bureau-cracies or the spatial segregation and different life experiences of the classes, can undoubtedly benefit from a knowledge of patterns of infection in the past.
Urban history research in Germany: its development and present condition
Authors: Reulecke Jürgen , Huck Gerhard , Sutcliffe Anthony
Published: February 2009

Anyone glancing into a bookshop window in the Federal Republic of Germany today might get the impression that urban history is currently one of the most important and widely published historical disciplines. Such an impression would mislead, however. Most of these richly illustrated and expensively produced volumes have almost no academic significance. They are the product of a wave of nostalgia which certain astute publishers have managed to catch thanks to their unerring appreciation of market demand. For instance, a whole generation over the age of fifty wants to be reminded of the undamaged towns of its pre-war childhood. Post-war redevelopment, too, has had its effect, and the insecure citizens of our often featureless towns require a means of self-representation and identification. Demand for such publications has also been generated by the growing consciousness of the environment, which has made the expression ‘Heimat’ (heritage) respectable again, and strengthened the call for the conservation of a world rooted in the past. However, modern urban history is only just beginning to function as an independent specialism in the Federal Republic (and the same applies to its eastern neighbour). It has made gradual progress in the last few years, but even so, in comparison with the sustained and varied urban history research pursued in countries such as Britain and the United States of America, Germany is an underdeveloped country. In fact, theDeutsches Institut für Urbanistik(DIFU) acknowledged as much when, as recently as April 1980, it organized a review of the field. The Federal Republic's handful of specialists were invited to Berlin for a colloquium on ‘Problems in the writing of urban history’. The aim of the conference was just as much to examine the current difficulties of urban history as to stimulate further research.
English pre-industrial urban economies
Authors: Goose Nigel
Published: February 2009

In an attempt to define how pre-industrial towns are differentiated from their counterparts in industrial societies, some (though not all) historians have emphasized the unspecialized nature of their economies. Of Elizabethan Leicester, Hoskins wrote ‘The special interest of Leicester to the economic and social historian is that it had no industry worth speaking of. Here was a community of some three thousand people, the largest and wealthiest town between the Trent and the Thames, which had no obvious means of livelihood…Towns which had no marked industrial character (such as Leicester) greatly outnumbered those which had (such as Coventry).’ Recently this argument has been developed by Patten, who writes ‘far from having “no obvious means of livelihood” at the time, Leicester had an urban superstructure as typical of Stuart and Restoration towns as it was of Elizabethan towns. The activities of building, brewing, provisioning, tailoring, weaving and the like in pre-industrial Leicester supported the basic economy of every pre-industrial town. Specialities in the manufactures of the day—usually textiles, iron and leather goods—were invariable additions rather than the basis of their economies… To look at the pre-industrial town is thus to look at an unspecialised economy… In dealing with the non-specialised urban economy we are dealing with the majority of English pre-industrial towns.’ The case is forcefully put, but does it stand up to scrutiny?
A new study of London before the Great Fire
Authors: Keene Derek
Published: February 2009

London is one of the best recorded of medieval cities. Yet the very bulk of the sources has in the past inhibited systematic enquiry, so that for many periods and aspects of its history the capital remains the unknown element in English urban affairs. The greatest quantity of records concerns property-holding, and one way of making sense of this forbidding mass of information is to reconstitute it in the form of histories of the properties to which it refers. Since the early eighteenth century this way of using urban records has been adopted from time to time in antiquarian studies which have thrown valuable light on conditions in English medieval towns. In particular H. E. Salter's work on medieval Oxford inspired the present author to apply similar methods in a study of Winchester, which is now complete. Winchester pointed the way to London and to a means of remedying our great ignorance of that city.
‘Giving directions to the town’: the early town directories
Authors: Corfield P. J. , Kelly Serena
Published: February 2009

Swift's poetic jibe was aimed at the ever-friendless literary critic; but there were many others who shared in the polymorphic business of ‘giving directions’ to the unwieldy town. Some very literally so: the makers of the early directories provided names, addresses, and occupations of leading urban residents, plus staple information about transport services, posts, banks and miscellaneous local offices. Itemizing and classifying a complex urbanity took a certain confidence. ‘I have taken upon me the arduous Task of compiling aComplete Guide, for the easy finding out of every inhabitant of the least Consequence…’, asserted Elizabeth Raffald, publishing theManchester Directoryin 1772, while confessing the difficulties of the task. Not everyone may have been convinced by her computation that the significant citizens numbered only 1,500 men and women, in a growing conurbation of over 30,000 residents. But that was not the point. A directory offered immediacy rather than complete accuracy or comprehension. Indeed, most compilers were careful not to claim too much. ‘Errors and Deficien- cies must unavoidably appear in every Work of this Kind, from the extreme Difficulty of procuring Information in some Things, and the fluctuating Variety of others’, asA Directory of Sheffieldexplained firmly in 1787. Many compilations made a caveat of this sort, and indicated a willingness to accept corrections and additions for future editions.
Urban elites in Victorian Britain
Authors: Trainor Richard
Published: February 2009

After years of concentration on the working class, social historians of nineteenth-century urban Britain have recently rediscovered the upper and middle classes. Various writers have recognized these groups, and elites within them, as significant subjects in themselves and as major influences in urban society generally.
Easter Books and Parish Rate Books: a new source for the urban historian
Authors: Wright S. J.
Published: February 2009

Whilst the historian of the nineteenth-century town is able to turn to the censuses for information about the demographic and occupational character of a particular community, nothing comparable survives for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lists of the entire population are extremely rare and records enumerating sections of the community only, such as tax lists, are difficult to use without firm evidence of the proportions exempted and the levels of evasion. An impression of the social and occupational structure of the early modern town can be obtained only by deriving material from a range of local as well as national sources.
Division and cohesion in the nineteenth-century middle class: the case of Ipswich, 1830–1870
Authors: Hills Philip
Published: February 2009

For a long time historians saw the increased wealth, numbers and power of British manufacturers, merchants and professionals as simply an inevitable part of the process of industrialization. As a result the formation of the class seemed to require no further exploration. More recently interest in the middle class has increased and much closer attention has been given to specific dimensions. It seems evident from this work that any analysis of the middle class faces a number of problems. Firstly, that of definition. There was a wide range of status and income groups within the middle class. What criteria of wealth and occupation should be used, how important is it to fix upper and lower boundaries for the class, how are questions of lifestyle and attitudes to be gauged? Secondly, there were certain divisions within groups who can reasonably be considered middle class by any criteria. Above all, we must note that there was no distinctive middle-class political party and differences were as deeply felt in politics as were antagonisms between Anglicans and Nonconformists in religion. In view of such diversities is it possible to speak of the middle class and, if so, what does class formation and unity consist of? What levels of unity allow or inhibit class power? This is the subject of my overall research, of which only a glimpse can be given here.
Politics and the urban process: the case of Philadelphia, 1800–54
Authors: Greenstein D.I.
Published: February 2009

History is a discipline in a state of perpetual crisis. Thus, in 1970, Arthur Marwick explained much of the controversy over historians' use of social science methods and theories in the latest incarnation of a social history which emerged after the Second World War. History's flirtations with the social sciences are recurrent. So are its crises. In the 1980s, Marwick's view of cyclical crises in history has been borne out. The use in history of ‘illuminating’ social science methods and concepts is now widely accepted. A spirit of tolerance, respect and professional courtesy has replaced the outward hostility which until recently characterized exchanges between the so-called ‘traditional’ and new social historians respectively.
Economic decline and the urban elite in eighteenth-century Dutch towns: a review essay
Authors: Diederiks Herman
Published: February 2009

Dutch urban history has finally accorded the eighteenth century the attention it deserves in a number of recent publications. That century was characterized by the economic and political decline of the Dutch Republic generally, and certain towns in particular. The ‘Zuiderzee’ towns witnessed a dramatic fall in population, reflecting their economic decline, and in the southern part of the province of Holland urban life also stagnated. In contrast to the ports, inland towns derived status in the urban hierarchy from their industrial interests, but due to foreign competition in the eighteenth century, they too declined; most notably, the cloth industry of Leiden, the clay pipe industry of Gouda, and the breweries and potteries of Delft each lost the leading position established in the seventeenth century. Leiden was the largest of the towns with more than 70,000 inhabitants in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and after Amsterdam, was the most populous town of the Republic. Leiden however could not maintain that position, and lost almost 50 per cent of its inhabitants during the first half of the eighteenth century, declining further to under 30,000 residents by 1800. Gouda numbered about 20,000 in 1732, but declined to 12,000 in 1795; Hoorn with 12,000 inhabitants diminished to only 9,500 in 1795 and the population of Delft, too, fell from around 24,000 in 1680 to 14,000 in 1795.
The paradoxes of urbanization: Belgian socialism and society in the belle epoque
Authors: Strikwerda Carl
Published: February 2009

Although small and consequently often overlooked, Belgium none the less provides historians with an interesting case study for comparing social and economic trends among Western European countries. Belgian society in the nineteenth century was transformed by the same forces as its close neighbours – Britain, France and Germany. Indeed, Belgium was the second country in the world to industrialize and it has long been one of the most heavily urbanized societies as well. Yet urbanization and industrialization affected Belgium in some significantly different ways than they did other Western European countries.
Schooling in the city: educational history and the urban variable
Authors: Reeder David A.
Published: February 2009

Educational history has been regularly noticed in the Urban History Yearbook in reviews, and in the bibliography under the heading of urban culture, but it has been a minority interest among urban historians and in Britain the treatment of schools and schooling in town histories has tended until recently to be perfunctory or conventional. However, the impact of social and cultural history on both urban and educational history is resulting in more of an overlap of interests. Hence the publication later this year, in the series of themes in International Urban History, of a set of comparative essays on urban educational history: The City and Education in Four Nations. This article anticipates the historiographical reviews, case studies and theoretical discussions of that volume. It attempts to show, from a British perspective, how recent historiographical bends raise questions and issues of interest to urban historians of the modern period.
Debt and credit in Bath's court of requests, 1829–39
Authors: Finn Margot
Published: February 2009

Historians have long recognized the central role of debt and credit for producers, retailers and consumers in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Against a background characterized by persistent shortages of specie, limited banking facilities and erratic transport mechanisms, the speculative impulse that fed the expanding economy drew sustenance from a proliferation of instruments of private credit — notably bills of exchange, promissory notes, and accommodation bills — which, together with an increase of trade credit to retailers and their customers, served to promote and intertwine the industrial, commercial and consumer revolutions. ‘At any one time any business owed and was owed many goods caught up in the process of exchange’, Julian Hoppit observes of the later decades of the eighteenth century. ‘All businessmen were creditors and all businessmen were debtors.’ As trade and manufacture increased in English towns and cities, extended chains of indebtedness multiplied the economic links both between individual producers, retailers or consumers and among these sectors of the economy. Thus in Lancashire innkeepers were the debtors of maltsters, brewers and wine merchants, but were the creditors of shopkeepers, who in turn extended webs of consumer credit to sawyers and carpenters, artisans typically indebted (in their capacity as producers) to the master builders for whom they laboured in Liverpool's shipyards. Based on personal faith rather than tangible securities, these varied forms of private credit were notoriously unstable. Broad-based financial crises fuelled by the failure of private credit became commonplace in the last three decades of the century, and persistently disrupted economic life into the Victorian period.
Landlords and tenants: housing and the rented property market in early fourteenth-century Norwich
Authors: Rutledge Elizabeth
Published: February 2009

Most evidence for leasing in medieval towns is episodic and unquantifiable. An exceptional Norwich source has been used to estimate the scale of demand for rented accommodation and to assess the resulting multiple occupation of freehold properties. The way in which a growing population was housed at Norwich and the physical and social consequences is examined. Much of the demand for rented property was met by landlords who were both secular and private, suggesting that in this respect fourteenth-century Norwich resembled Bristol rather than Oxford. Finally, the response of institutional landlords to an apparently growing demand and the behaviour of rents is considered. Falling rent receipts from the late 1330s may be an indicator of economic rather than population decline.
European directories: a universal source for urban historians
Authors: Shaw Gareth , Coles Tim
Published: February 2009

This article stresses the need to develop a more systematic approach to data sources in a context of greater European comparative study. The work and initial findings of the European Directories Project to provide a resource guide of one universal European data source, the town directory, are outlined here. Pathways and mechanisms of directory evolution are considered with special reference to Germany. This is succeeded by a discussion of the problems associated with the compilation of a pan-European directory database and the potential difficulties associated with directory use in urban historical research.
Myth, image and social process in the English medieval town
Authors: Rosser Gervase
Published: February 2009

This essay examines the nature and role of mythical histories in English medieval towns. Myths concerning the origins and special destinies of particular cities were widespread and long-lasting. For contemporaries they acquired meaning through their interaction with changing historical circumstances. Evidence for their circulation in both elite and popular domains is reviewed. Their significance was not unambiguous; they were, rather, contested territory, a means through which townspeople articulated their particular views about the nature and purpose of urban society. Their effect, therefore, could be to assist both in the formation and in the transformation of that society. Issue is taken with the argument that the early modern period saw a weakening of the potential force of such myths.
Mapping the early modern city
Authors: Hills Helen
Published: February 2009

This paper analyses in their political context the festival decorations created by Paolo Amato, architect to the Senate of Palermo, in 1686 for the festival of the patron saint of that city. One of these decorations, that of the main altar in the cathedral, is of particular interest in that it represents a map of the city itself. An analysis of this map in relation to other seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century maps of Palermo reveals its political and social aim and biases, but also shows that it was unusually up to date and accurate as a representation of the city at that date. Such a representation not only marks a striking cul-de-sac in the history of the development of cartography, but sheds light on the relationship between forging politically acceptable identities for a city and their representation in the early modern period. The map in particular, but all the decorations, or apparati, in general are interpreted in the context of the weakened Spanish empire (to which Sicily belonged) and of the internal politics of the island and of Palermo.
Town wastes, agricultural sustainability and Victorian sewage
Authors: Sheail John
Published: February 2009

In analysing the practicability of Victorian proposals to dispose of urban wastes, valuable insights may be gained from the commentaries of agriculturalists and their scientific advisers. The paper reconstructs the debate as to how the sewage of towns and cities might be transferred to farmland, the developing concepts of sewage farming and the ‘sewage farm’, the increasing disillusionment of farmers with sewage irrigation and, finally, the acknowledgement by the turn of the century that the recycling of such wastes was irrelevant to the needs of town and country alike.
Coping in their own way: Asian cities and the problem of fires
Authors: Frost Lionel
Published: February 2009

The debate about the ability of Third World cities today and in the future to cope with rapid population growth has taken place with virtually no reference to urban history. This article seeks to remedy that, examining how three of Asia's largest cities during the pre-modern period coped with the problem of major fires. It examines the nature of the problem, its causes and its economic significance. The article concludes by considering the implications of this history for the current debate.
Reformation, civic culture and collective memory in English provincial towns
Authors: Tittler Robert
Published: February 2009

This essay explores the concept of collective memory as a component of political culture in pre- and especially post-Reformation provincial towns. Pre-Reformation political culture depended heavily on a collective memory shaped by traditional religious experience and institutions. When so many of these were destroyed by the Reformation, it became necessary for the ruling elites of provincial towns to create alternative cultural forms, and thus to refashion a usefully legitimizing political culture. Three forms of this refashioned and legitimizing collective memory – civic regalia, civic portraiture and historical writing – are examined as they applied to the provincial urban milieu in the years c. 1540–1640.