Fromkin and Rodman Phonetics Wheel

F&R Phonetics Wheel [1988]

Things have been thrown off their normal (already irregular) schedule here at Chancery Hill Books by a death in the family: my mother-in-law, a wonderful person who was herself a retired English professor.

The reverse of the Phonetics Wheel.

Many was the time Joyce and I chatted about having taught the Introduction to the English Language course at our respective institutions, and we both often used the venerable Fromkin and Rodman textbook for the course (An Introduction to Language; more recent editions have included additional co-authors, but I am afraid the book remains 'Fromkin and Rodman' in my heart).

We recently found, tucked in among Joyce's books and papers, the Fromkin and Rodman Phonetics Wheel that I've pictured here. It is, obviously, a volvelle, of the common everyday sort I've written about here before. 

Such little volvelles were, of course, unbelievably common in the twentieth century: verb wheels will, no doubt, be familiar to many who studied a foreign language in the middle of the twentieth century, but many simple calculations or collections of tabulated material were formatted into volvelles for promotional or advertising purposes during that time. I'd guess that some are probably still being produced, somewhere out there.

This Fromkin and Rodman Phonetics Wheel, of course, was also a promotional item: a giveaway, surely, intended to help persuade teachers to adopt the Fourth Edition of Fromkin and Rodman as a textbook for their classes to buy. 

Such items are ephemeral, and it is surprising when they survive at all. In the case of this example, a Google search on the phrase "Phonetics Wheel" turns up hardly anything at all, though one link may refer to a wheel like this one. 

This one, of course, can stay, for now, in my own little collection.