The Association will offer two kinds of travel awards to student members presenting their work at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in August 2015. Gösta Bruce Scholarships are funded by the Gösta Bruce Memorial Fund, established by the family of the late Gösta Bruce, previous President of the IPA. IPA Student Awards are funded by the Association. The deadline for applications for both kinds of awards will be in late May. Information about the numbers and amounts of the awards, and about the application procedures, is available on the IPA website under ‘Grants’.

The minutes of the IPA General Meeting of 18 August 2011 in Hong Kong as published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association vol. 41(3) were agreed on as being a correct record.

The Association has enjoyed a period of financial stability in which strong royalty income from JIPA has been coupled with efficiency savings driven by the Secretary and Treasurer. As a result we have had a surplus in each year, and our total assets have grown by more than 80% over four years. This is despite the continued decline in the value of the euro against sterling, which has reduced the real value of members’ subscriptions by around 15% over the same period.

Sandro Vasilyevich Kodzasov, Professor at M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, died on 25 October 2014 in Karlsruhe, Germany, after a serious illness, at the age of 76.

Max Mangold, who died on 3 February 2015 aged 92, devoted his whole life to learning and describing languages and their pronunciation. It is no exaggeration to say that he was the IPA phonetician par excellence of the German-speaking world, adopting the system at an early age in preference to the established German transcription systems of the time, because it enabled him to acquire more efficiently the correct pronunciation of the many languages he studied. And many there were! Apart from those he could speak fluently – estimates vary between 10 and 20 in different reports – he studied the grammars of many more. His answer to a personal enquiry in 1992 as to how many languages he could speak was 15 – and a few weeks to polish up the other 15! He then circulated among the multi-national staff and students at the departmental summer barbecue, speaking to the Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Czech, Bulgarian, Greek, Spanish and Swedish guests in their respective native tongues. That was about three years after retiring from his position as professor of phonetics at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, where he had taught since 1957. He continued to offer transcription classes and a colloquium each semester until he was over 90.