Julian Talbot Pring was born in London on the 28th of October 1913. He graduated in European languages at Oxford in 1936 and then obtained a teaching diploma. Apparently he first envisaged a career as a schoolmaster, but he very soon got involved with Daniel Jones’s Department of Phonetics at University College London. With the outbreak of the Second World War he took part in the EFL work organised by the British Council in successively the Balkans, Greece and Egypt in so doing joining a succession of UCL-trained phoneticians including David Abercrombie, Peter MacCarthy and RogerKingdon. He was hurried back from Cairo from his Royal Air Force post by Daniel Jones for whom he began teaching at UCL before the end of the 44/45 session. He was eventually appointed Reader in Phonetics in 1964.
His interest in EFL remained throughout his career resulting in two modest but admirable little books. The first was Colloquial English Pronunciation (Longmans 1959) a concise 83 pages which interestingly showed approval of one or two rather old-fashioned usages such as often rhyming with orphan and lord distinguished from laud by having a diphthong — features of his own pronunciation. The other, a joint work with Rudolf Germer, A New English Phonetic Reader (Lensing, Dortmund 1962, 64pp) notably revealed his considerable interest in intonation with its simple but effective indications of pitch features.
His rather rare contributions to the IPA journal were also mainly EFL orientated except for a Specimen of the Dialect of Naples in 1950 and a 1955 review of Boyanus on Russian pronunciation. The last of them (1976 pp 92-5) was a slightly waspish attack on the position that EFL learners’ use of “intrusive” /r/ was not to be discouraged. He had strong views on what should be considered “standard” English usages, on matters like English spelling which he insisted it was “wrong to deplore” and he declared that “unless the description of a language can be used to facilitate the learning of it, it is not, in my opinion worth having”.
Although his interests ran to a broad range of languages, his major writings were on the modern Greek language and its pronunciation, beginning in 1950 with his Grammar of Modern Greek on a Phonetic Basis and culminating with the admirable Oxford Dictionary of Modern Greek (1982) a standard work which has steadily remained in print.
He stayed in the UCL department throughout his whole career except for the academic session 1967-8 which he spent in the USA as a visiting professor at the West Washington State College. Otherwise he would only undertake the occasional lecturing engagement for example for the British Council. One of these was to Norway in the sixties.
He was a fastidious and reserved person always conservatively dressed but was well liked by his colleagues and students. Those from abroad often found that he struck them as their idea of the perfect English gentleman. While working at UCL he lived with his charming Greek wife Eleni in some style in an elegant Knightsbridge flat which enabled him to be more hospitable than most of his colleagues who lived less centrally. In retirement they made their home in Athens where she also died only a few days after him.