European experts in speech science held a conference at ELTE
At the end of September, the Faculty of Humanities at ELTE hosted the Sixth International Workshop on the History of Speech Communication Research. The event, organized by Professor Emerita Mária Gósy, welcomed guests from universities and research institutions of Germany, France, England, Switzerland, and Portugal. Domestic representatives included researchers from ELTE, BME, the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Network, PPKE, and PTE.
The event was opened by Dávid Bartus, the dean, following a flute solo by Péter Hős, a student at the ELTE Institute of Arts Communication and Music. He shared exciting linguistic artifacts from antiquity. Then, Judit Bóna, a university professor and director of the Hungarian Linguistics and Finno-Ugric Institute, presented a volume compiled from the workshop's presentations, the digital version of which will be uploaded to the ISCA archive, the largest online database of conference papers on speech sciences.
At the conference, Jürgen Trouvain (University of Saarbrücken) gave a brief overview of the history of international phonetic world congresses and spoke about the contributions of three influential female phoneticians: Louise Kaiser, Ilse Lehiste, and Anne Cutler. Ákos Gocsál (University of Pécs) examined the characteristics of speech productions in Hungarian newsreels from the first half of the 1900s, as well as the technical challenges of linguistic analysis of the newsreels.
The section presentations focused on the development of experimental phonetics tools, the historical linguistic analysis of centuries-old works, and the historical emergence and etymology of speech phenomena. Participants also had the opportunity to learn about additional scholars from the history of phonetics, view a phonetics-themed board game, and explore a Hungarian hearing test device from nearly 40 years ago. Both days of the professional program concluded with informal discussions about potential future research projects and collaborative publications.
The workshop was made possible with the support of the ELTE Faculty of Humanities Scientific Grant and the collaboration of the Hungarian Linguistic Society. The smooth organization of the conference was also assisted by students from the doctoral programs in Applied Linguistics and Intercultural Linguistics.
A detailed report and photos from the event are available on the ELTE Faculty of Humanities website.