The Golden Age continues?

Speech Prosody 2026 starts tomorrow, and I've been asked to present 5 minutes of welcoming remarks at the opening session. My plan is to start with a quick reading of the abstract from my 2011 Henry Sweet lecture, "Towards the Golden Age of Speech and Language Science": For the sciences of speech and language, the 21st century promises to bring the kind of progress that the 17th century brought to the physical sciences. Our telescopes and microscopes, our alembics and Pneumatical Engines, are today's vast archives of digital text and speech, along with new analysis techniques and inexpensive networked computation. However, the scientific use of these new instruments remains mainly exploratory and potential. There are several critical problems for which we have at best partial solutions; and like our 17th-century predecessors, we need to unlearn some old ideas on the way to learning new ones. Focusing especially on Henry Sweet's own interests in phonetics and in the history of English,…