Phonetic Symbol Guide

Rating:
Summary: Anyone involved in phonetics needs this book!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Generally usable, but it could have been so much more.
Review: The PHONETIC SYMBOL GUIDE of Geoffrey K. Pullum and William A. Ladusaw 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 In its discussion of IPA the Guide might be seen as historically superseded, for the IPA subsequently released its own official Handbook, which is less easy to use than the work of Pullum and Ladusaw but perhaps more reliable.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.

Rating:
Summary: This 2nd edition is even better, but...
Review: 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?