The "bonn connection" and its consequences: Paul Menzerath and Werner Meyer-Eppler's reunification of phonetics and phonology and the emergence of a new phonetic speech science based on Shannon's mathematical theory of communication

1950, only two years after it was founded, the MIT’s Electronic Research Laboratory (ERL) organised the first „Speech Communication Conference“. Surprisingly, among the fourteen very prominent participants there were merely two representatives from the field of phonetic speech research: Paul Menzerath and Werner Meyer-Eppler from Germany; and it was on this very trip to the USA that they first met Claude Shannon of Bell Labs. Upon their return to the University of Bonn they founded the Institut für Phonetik und Kommunikationsforschung which completely changed the direction of phonetics into speech communication research by forming a unique collaboration originally based on Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication. We begin with a discussion of how it took another eighty years following the great early successes in speech physiology and subsequent school of early instrumental phonetics from 1850 onwards for the classic phonetic theory of vowels and consonants to finally come crashing down. We then outline how this crisis was overcome by the paradigm shift at the institute in Bonn and describe the consequences for the subsequent development of phonetic theory and its applications. Finally, we demonstrate that – looking back – the eventual collapse of early instrumental phonetics was virtually pre-programmed and could be expected because of the initially successful but in hindsight far to optimistic “simplifying assumptions” made by speech physiologists such as Brücke (1849/1856) and Bell (1865). N.B.: An extended version of this paper will be prepaired for the Conference and made available on the internet for downloading. 1. Early modern phonetics since 1850 from the initially great successes to the final disaster of instrumental work eighty years later A full description of “Early Modern Phonetics, especially Experimental and Instrumental Work” has been given by the first author 1994 in EmP 1 It should be noted that to L1-speakers of German the term Kommunikation at that time was a strange foreign word and totally incomprehensible; it took a few years before e.g. the verb kommunizieren (‘to communicate’) became a familiar German loan-word. . With respect to the paradigm shift described in section 2, it should be pointed out that, quite different from the situation in the US (and the UK), in the years after 1920 the academic development of speech sound research in central Europe had spiralled further and further into a deep crisis which finally led to 2 ENCOCLOPEDIA OF LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS (p. 3082 – 3095), reprinted in Koerner et. al (1995)