Phonetic Symbol Guide

by Geoffrey K. Pullum, William A. Ladusaw, Geoffrey K. Pullman

Phonetic Symbol Guide is a comprehensive and authoritative encyclopedia of phonetic alphabet symbols, providing a complete survey of the hundreds of characters used by linguists and speech scientists to record the sounds of the world's languages.

This fully revised second edition incorporates the major revisions to the International Phonetic Alphabet made in 1989 and 1993. Also covered are the American tradition of transcription stemming from the anthropological school of Franz Boas; the Bloch/Smith/Trager style of transcription; the symbols used by dialectologists of the English language; usages of specialists such as Slavicists, Indologists, Sinologists, and Africanists; and the transcription proposals found in all major textbooks of phonetics.

With sixty-one new entries, an expanded glossary of phonetic terms, added symbol charts, and a full index, this book will be an indispensable reference guide for students and professionals in linguistics, phonetics, anthropology, philology, modern language study, and speech science.

Genres: Linguistics, Reference, Language

358 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Geoffrey K. Pullum is a British-American linguist and regular contributor to Language Log. He has taught at the University of Washington; Stanford University; University of California, Santa Cruz; and University of Edinburgh.

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neat little reference that, depending on your background and area of work, could be nice to have, absolutely essential, or entirely inadequate. It's not meant as an introduction to phonology or phonetic transcription, and at least slightly misrepresents the principles guiding the IPA (which may be a consequence of its age and the fact that much happened in the late '80s and early '90s, second edition notwithstanding), but if you only use it as a guide to reading and not as one to writing it more than merits the space it takes up on your bookshelf.

(For myself, I was glad to see confirmed that the use of what Pullum and Ladusaw call a "Right-Tail Hooktop H" by Prokosch in his Comparative Germanic Grammar was entirely idiosyncratic, and that it confused them as much as it did me.)

[Ietrio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful as a reference. Not very interesting outside its field. And quite well replaceable by Wikipedia. Which does not minimize its value - probably the Wikipedia articles could not have been written without a guide like this one. Still, uninteresting outside the specialized context.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a quick reference for anyone wishing to see what a given symbol represents in IPA or American Usage. It is easy to use, for it is an a-z listing of symbols, i.e. all symbols which look similar to a given English letter are grouped together, followed by symbols which cannot be placed in alphabetical order. There is a concise glossary of phonetic terms, and finally charts of several methods of transcription.

The work is generally satisfactory, but it is imperfect. In its discussion of IPA the Guide might be seen as historically superseded, for the IPA subsequently released its own official Handbook, which is less easy to use than the work of Pullum and Ladusaw but perhaps more reliable. With regard to other usage, I was disappointed to find that there was no information on the use of certain symbols in Finno-Ugric/Uralic phonetic alphabets. In fact, outside of IPA and American usage there isn't much information. The book may have well ballooned to twice its size if more usage was added, but it would have made the book a much more useful reference.

If one frequently works with American transcriptions of speech, the Phonetic Symbol Guide might be an excellent reference to get. People concerned with the IPA should probably simply get the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association intead.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very, Very Useful

When I was taking many linguistics classes, this book was very helpful. After looking at it in the library, I decided to buy a copy. I was going through transcriptions of various languages, and it helped me know what the words were supposed to sound like. I wish it had a CD to go along with it.

[Jim]

This is reference book on phonetic symbols, and what they refer to.

For each, it provides discussions of how they're used in the Internal Phonetic Alphabet-- as well as in other phonetic representation systems.

I am not an expert on phonetics or linguistics-- or even a casual amateur-- and I don't feel competent to really 'review' this in terms of its accuracy, completeness, etc. That's a job for the experts. However, I suspect that it could be a handy guide for professionals and students in those fields.