Alexander John Ellis

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Alexander John Ellis (or Alexander Sharpe) (14 June 1814 - 28 October 1890) was an English mathematician and philologist.

Initially trained in mathematics and the classics, he became a well-known phonetician of his time. Through his work in phonetics he also became interested in vocal pitch and by extension in musical pitch as well as speech and song.

Ellis is also noted for translating and extensively annotating Hermann Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone. The second edition of this translaton, published in 1885, contains an appendix which summarizes Ellis own work on related matters.

In his writings on musical pitch and scales, Ellis elaborates his notion and notaiton of cents for musical intervals which became especially influential in Comparative Musicology, a predesessor of ethnomusicology. Analyzing the sclaes (tone systems) of various extra-European musical traditions, Ellis also showed that the diversity of tone systems cannot be explained by a single physical law, as had been argued by earlier scholars.

In part V of his work On Early English Pronunciation, he applied the Dialect Test across Britain, and distinguished forty-two different dialects in England and the Scottish Lowlands.

There are claims that Ellis himself was pitch-deaf, i.e. could not distinguish different pitches with his own ears. Today, this claim is often not supported anymore ^[1].

He was acknowledged by Shaw as the prototype of Professor Henry Higgins of Pygmalion. (My Fair Lady).^[2]

[edit] References

• M. K. C. MacMahon, Ellis , Alexander John (1814–1890), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 14 June 2006