Firth, a Yorkshireman, read history as an undergraduate, before soldiering in various parts of the Empire during the First World War. He was Professor of English at the University of the Punjab from 1919 to 1928, and returned in the latter year to a post in the phonetics department of University College, London. In 1938 Firth moved to the linguistics department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, where in 1944 he became the first Professor of General Linguistics in Great Britain (his department, itself the fist of its kind in the country, had been established only in 1932). Until quite recently, the majority of university teachers of linguistics in Britain were people who had trained under Firth’s aegis and whose work reflected his ideas, so that, although linguistics eventually began to flourish in a number of the other locations, the name ‘London School’ is quite appropriate for the distinctively British approach to the subject.
Firth's own theorizing concerned mainly phonology and semantics, which we shall consider in that order.
One of the principal features of Firth's treatment of phonological is that it is polysystemic, to the Firth's term.
Firth argues, that phonetmicists are led into error by the neture of European writing systems. A phonemic transcription, afterl all, represents a fully consistent application of the particular principles of orthography on which European alphabetic scripts happen to be more or less accurately based. It is natural that scholars working with Oriental cultures, many of which had scripts based on other principles and whose traditions of philological discourse were independent of European thought, should be sceptical about elevating their own tribal speech-notation system into an axiom of science.
