Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet

by International Phonetic Association

This book is a comprehensive guide to the International Phonetic Alphabet, widely used for over a century to transcribe the sounds of languages. The Handbook is in three parts: Part I contains an introduction to phonetic description and exemplification of the use of phonetic symbols; Part II consists of twenty-nine "Illustrations" of the application of the International Phonetic Alphabet to a range of languages; and Part III covers speech pathology, computer codings, and the history of the IPA. This is an essential reference work for phoneticians and linguists more generally.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Reference, Nonfiction, Textbooks, Academic

213 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1999

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well worth reading for anyone who ever comes into contact with IPA, which is probably most people. A lot of aspects of the alphabet are obviously intuitive, but a number of conventions and assumptions are not, and can be easy to miss if you weren't introduced to it in an academic context.
Most of the book is given over to illustrations of IPA's use in the form of phonological inventories of and transcribed texts in twenty-nine different languages, and a lot of them are deliberately obtuse in an instructive way (e.g. for Japanese, the only sibilants mentioned on the chart are /s/ and /z/, with the acknowledgement that they become [ɕ] and [ʑ] (sic) before /i/ buried in the middle of the Conventions section—it's good to be aware that this is something people can do, even if you'd obviously usually punch them if they did); the Dutch one is, as is common, nonsense almost from start to finish.

[Cynbel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very good book for anyone interested in Phonetics or Linguistics. I got this book when I took an Intro to Anthropology class and we had a group project to create our own culture, my group had too many people and not enough topics, so I decided to do my own topic of creating a language. I wanted to go about doing this properly so I did research found out that I should start with the sounds and build up. This book allowed me to understand how different sounds are made and how other languages are constructed, though because not all sounds are in English there were sounds I didn't really know, luckily I found a program that would play the proper sound for any of the IPA.

This knowledge has also helped me with animation, though I know animating with phonemes isn't good, it does give me a better understanding of how to go about it properly.

[Nawesa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muy útil para las dudas sobre la descripción fonética de los sonidos del habla.

[Mark A.]

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