Otto Jespersen was another admirer, calling Hart’s principles ‘excellent’ and the man himself ‘an honest scholar’ and ‘the first phonetician of the modern period.’

It’s entirely subjective, of course, but linguistic phonetician Doug Honorof says languages with a lot of vowels have an advantage.

This fact, familiar to phoneticians but disbelieved by others, is one of the first peculiarities noted by foreigners beginning to learn English.