The death at Zagreb, Croatia has been reported of Ernestina Landau. The widow of Rudolf Buljan a distinguisht Croatian mechanical engineer who predeceased her by some decades, she was born and spent her early life in Sarajevo. By the age of twenty-five she had become a technical editor to a scientific journal. When she studied for a BA in English Language and Literature, she became especially interested in English phonetics. This led her to enrol in a short course in London where she was so inspired by the encouragement she received from her contacts with A. C. Gimson, G. F. Arnold and others that she returned to the University College Department of Phonetics for further studies in the years 1963 to 1965. After that she accepted the suggestion of her compatriot Professor Petar Guberina that she should take up residence in Zagreb where he was a member of the Faculty of Philosophy highly influential in the field of language teaching. She did so and soon joined the staff of a language institute. In the course of her use of Guberina's teaching materials she produced in 1987 a 'reference book' entitled Phonetic Transcription of the English Audio-Visual Text with Vocabulary.
She came again to England in August 1975, this time to Leeds to
participate in the Eighth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.
She presented a paper on a great hobbyhorse of hers entitled 'On the Usefulness of Applying the Linking Mark in the English Phonetic Transcription'.
She had obviously keenly appreciated its value in the only book
throughout which Daniel Jones had employed it, his 1930 amazingly
popular (in Germany at least) Phonetic Readings in English. In 1978 she had an article on this same topic in German in the Zeitschrift für Phonetik etc.
Her enthusiasm for the link sign was undimmed when in August 1989 at
Kiel in Germany she attended a special Convention of the International
Phonetic Association and presented to it a paper entitled 'The Linking
Mark — An Addition to Diacritics'. Later that year, no doubt in no
small part owing to her ardent advocacy, for the first time ever the
world-famous official single-page summary of the International Phonetic
Alphabet appeared with the addition at the foot of the section headed
Suprasegmentals the entry:
" ᴗ Linking (absence of break)".
In 1984 and again 1988 she returned to UCL for the Summer Courses in English Phonetics. Another matter which must have given her great satisfaction was the acceptance for publication in 1995 in JIPA Vol.25, no.2 (repeated in the 1999 IPA Handbook) of four pages of illustrations of the Croatian language which she co-authored with two other Zagreb scholars from the Institute of Croatian Language and the University Department of Phonetics. Among her publications were a book in which she presented numbers of a practice drills she had taken from O'Connor-&-Arnold's Intonation of Colloqial English to which she added phonemic transcriptions and, something not previously seen except in an early work of Daniel Jones's (his 1909 Intonation Curves), music staves representing much more precise pitches than were customary in books dealing with intonations. She was also accustomed to contribute reviews to journals from time to time. Her final publication, in 2008, was BrE vs. AmE HOMOPHONES. This characteristically eccentric production, subtitled An Extract from LPD, began with an 82-page introduction on 'PHONEMIC NOTATION OF ENGLISH SOUNDS'. The book, produced by the Graphis company of Zagreb, was mainly an assemblage, in 183 pages, of 12,000 homophones extracted from the Wells Longman Pronunciation Dictionary edition of 2000 to which she offered her compilation as a companion. It was a broad hardback 21 by 15 cm also unusual in that its phonemic symbols were all printed in red except that 'optional' sounds appeared in a pale green which was also employed for most glosses. It made for a pleasant book to browse through. She will be remembered by many for her tireless enthusiasm for the subject of English phonetics.