A. J. Ellis's encyclopaedic work On Early English Pronunciation (henceforth EEP) now receives remarkably little serious attention from linguists. This has not always been the case. As long ago as 1877 Sweet hailed EEP as a ‘great work’ which ‘inaugurated the scientific historical study of English pronunciation.’ (viii) Other commentators admittedly have not been so complimentary. Wright, discussing the transcription of dialects in Part V of EEP, was prompted to write that ‘If his rendering … of other dialect speakers is as inaccurate as that of the Windhill dialect, the value of these tests for phonetic and philological purposes is not very great.’ (1892: 174) Orton (1949) found the work ‘defective and unreliable’. Dieth (1946) was equally critical.

This article originated as a paper given to the Colloquium of British Academic Phoneticians in September 1978. That was based on an auditory-cum-proprioceptive investigation of some 200 ‘interesting voices’, taped from radio, TV and from some early jazz-records made available by Mr. P. Gras of Dutch radio.

‘Investigation has shown’, writes Doke (1931: 31–2) ‘that at least two diphthongs and occur in certain Shona dialects.’ He does not report the nature of the investigation conducted. The present study suggests that there are no restrictions on vowel combinability, but that there are no grounds for postulating diphthongal unit phonemes in the language.

In a previous article (Kenning, 1979) I presented a description of French intonation within a similar framework to that used by Halliday (1967, 1970) and El-Menoufy (1969) in their studies of English intonation. In the present paper I want to compare English and French with regard to the third set of choices recognized by the studies: TONAL choices. After a few general remarks I shall discuss first the shapes and meanings of the formal categories called tones, then the way in which these categories are expounded phonetically.