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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: J.R.Firth born (17-6-1890)
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2024 11:59:01 +1200
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"a leading figure in British linguistics during the 1950s"
Studied history at U. of Leeds.
Joined the Indian Education Service during 1914-18 war,
then Professor of English at University of the Punjab until 1928.
Returned to teach in UK, first phonetics at UCL, then Professor of 
General Linguistics at School of Oriental and African Studies 
(University of London), 1944-56. Died 1960.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rupert_Firth

Firth is always mentioned in histories of linguistics, but I've never 
had much success in grasping what was distinctive about his theories.
Crystal focuses on "context of situation", the non-linguistic context in 
which speaking takes place, which can have an important influence on 
what is said and how it is understood. I think most people take this for 
granted now, but Firth may have been the first 20th century linguist to 
emphasize it. (Crystal quotes from his 1937 book _The Tongues of Men_.)

Wikipedia describes an interesting WWII project he was involved in:

"In July 1941, before the outbreak of war with Japan, Firth attended a 
conference on the training of Japanese interpreters and translators and 
began to think of how crash courses might be devised. By the summer of 
1942 he had devised a method of training people rapidly in how to 
eavesdrop on Japanese conversations (for example, between pilots and 
ground control) and to interpret what they heard. The first course began 
on 12 October 1942 and was for RAF personnel. He had used captured 
Japanese code books and other such material to draw up a list of 
essential military vocabulary and had arranged for two Japanese teachers 
at SOAS (one had been interned on the Isle of Man but had volunteered to 
teach, while the other was a Canadian-Japanese) to record sentences in 
which these words might be used. Trainees listened through headphones to 
recordings containing expressions such as 'Bakugeki junbi taikei 
tsukure' (Take up formation for bombing). At the end of each course he 
sent a report to Bletchley Park commenting on the abilities of each 
trainee. The trainees were mostly posted to India and played a vital 
role during the long Burma Campaign giving warning of bombing raids, and 
a few of them were undertaking similar duties on ships of the Royal Navy 
during the last year of the war."