Phonetic Symbol Guide

Book excerpt: An indispensable comprehensive reference guide to the phonetic alphabet symbols, revised and expanded. 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. Praise for the First Edition of Phonetic Symbol Guide “A useful and convenient reference work in dictionary form.” —Marc Picard, Canadian Journal of Linguistics “Pullum and Ladusaw have compiled a unique . . . and very enjoyable book. . . . I expect that this guide will prove to be very useful to very many people.” —Keren D. Rice, Phonology “The attention to detail is exemplary, as is the clarity of exposition. . . . The authors have produced a book in which there is much to be admired.” —Richard Coates, Journal of Linguistics