Daniel Jones

He took the subjects up as a hobby, suggested to the authorities of University College, London, that they ought to consider teaching the phonetics of French, was taken on as a lecture there in 1907 and build up what become the first University department of phonetics in Britain. Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinction of speech-sound; he invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels. Thanks to the traditions established by Sweet and Jones, the ‘ear training’ aspect of phonetics plays a large part in University courses in linguistics in Britain, and British linguistic research tends to be informed by meticulous attention to phonetic detail. 

American linguistics, like many other aspects of American scholarship, was more influenced by German than by British practice. As a result, even the Descriptivists in America were startlingly cavalier by comparison with their British  counterparts about the phonetic facts of the languages they described (while, for the Chomskyans,  it is a point of principle of ignore 'mere phonetic detail').

The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R. Firth(1890-1960).