Peter Ladefoged (1925–2006)

A stunning triumph! Ladefoged's approach is both perfectly intuitive and intriguingly nontraditional, starting with simplified versions of all the concepts in an English context for English speakers in the first half of the book, and then expanding them each in the second half in a comparative way that builds on what we've learned. Super easy to read, with demonstrations, an amazing wealth of material on the CD, and pages and pages of exercise that fly the flag for the old-school idea that a show more phonetician should actually be able to produce and hear as many sounds as possible rather than just understand them in the abstract, this book is probably THE phonetics text I'd recommend to novices or anyone bad at producing a voiced pharyngeal fricative (not that I'm some big authority in these matters), and the only criticism I can level against it is that it didn't manage to make the parts of phonetics I already find dreary (e.g. pitch, with the overtechnical silliness of the "ToBI" method) palatable. Now I'm off to practice my formants. Farewell! Agluck agluck! show less

I had somehow expected this to be a more forbiddingly academic and encyclopaedic work than what it turned out to be. It's actually quite readable, and while the authors exemplify various unusual distinctions with data from many languages, they don't waste time on the obvious. Any reader of a book like this, after all, is certain to know of a language distinguishing /t/ and /k/, say.

This is such a good idea, this kind of "forget the theory, here's what you'll actually do. Here's what I know about reading a spectrogram. Here's what I know about fixing the equipment. Take bug spray"-style hot tips approach to a discipline. And Ladefoged is certainly the man to pull it off if anyone can--although I'm not sure if he totally does. The thing with the equipment is it changes so fast, and while the people who are actually parachuting into the Amazon to front-line record show more new-discovered language isolates can no doubt learn something from this, the students who are going to be reading this book need to work up to it some. That sounds like I'm saying it was too advanced, and I'm not--I'm saying more to the point would have been "here are some easy experiments that you can do with your friends to get practice reading a spectrograph. Here are some you can do with an airflow meter." Because these people, phonetics profs, from what I've seen they love telling us some stuff about sounds and some stuff about their research and then leaving us to figure out all the practicalities ourselves. I could have used some more practice reading spectral slices and nomograms and many other things, and it's a bit of an abdication of responsibility to just go over it in class once and then say "now study on your own time." But there is a wealth of good random tidbits in here, and Ladefoged is an engaging narrator. show less

Probably the first time I've had to read about wave physics in any detail since 1982, and I survived. The first part is both overly painstaking and, in places, ambiguous; in the middle it picks up and starts to make sense with the discussion of damping. Could have used more labels of "this is counterintuitive" and "in real life this corresponds to ...," and more examples of formants affecting sound quality (not using an RP speaker) but overall I feel on much firmer ground now.

I need to get show more hold of his more technical work, the works cited in the back (or their updated equivalents), and Helmholtz for the hell of it. show less