Phonetic Symbol Guide

A very comprehensive guide to phonetic symbols used in IPA, including those for which approval has been withdrawn, & US usage. It might have been useful to include Unicode references & details of composite characters used for Aboriginal & other languages. On the whole the work is extremely clear & easy to use, though for my geriatric eyes a larger size font would have helped. Irreplaceable for any student of this branch of linguistics.

I have found this book to be a very helpful, well organized reference guide to phonetic symbols. My initial phonetic training was in the Americanist system, and though I now more commonly use IPA when I have to produce a phonetic transcription, the presence of Americanist symbols in this guide helps me make sure that I am choosing the right IPA symbol. While this book is certainly not a course in phonetics, students of linguistics will find it a handy reference once they have completed their initial training in phonetics. I wouldn't want to be without it.

Very helpful, and the author was cheerful when I contacted him via internet to let him know I heard about him from my linguistics prof.

This is a precious and useful reference book. It covers most of history of IPA and of the American usage(s) in transcription, with some minor gaps (e.g., the symbol for dental voiced affricate used by Gleason and Hall, the special use of reversed small capital U in Hockett, etc.). It is a trustworthy guide for the traditions of transcription it covers: I learned a lot about them. Some moot points of the new IPA are duly commented upon and clarified, too. The Continental European tradition, on the contrary, is only cursorily hinted at (e.g., Meillet-Cohen, Slavic linguistics, but not Dialectology and Linguistic Geography, both Romance and Germanic) and so is the tradition of Africanists (Beach and Doke are taken into account, but not, e.g., Guthrie). Being grateful to the authors for the service they paid to the community of linguists and anthropologists, might I hope for a little bit larger coverage in a next edition?

A completely thorough guide to phonetics, including all symbols considered and ever used in the IPA, American system, and various specialized systems (such as those of eskimologists, etc.). An absolute must and a great improvement from the first edition.