Vowels and Consonants

Book excerpt: This popular and accessible introduction to phonetics is now available in a fully updated second edition. Peter Ladefoged describes how languages use a variety of different sounds, many of them quite unlike any that occur in well-known languages. Important topics covered in Vowels and Consonants include: * The main forces operating on the sounds of languages * The acoustic components of speech and speech synthesis * Computers and Text-To-Speech systems and speech recognition systems * Descriptions of the sounds of a wide variety of languages that are reproduced on the accompanying CD. This revised edition includes a new chapter on how we listen to speech and the greatly expanded CD now contains data on 100 languages to reinforce learning and bring the descriptions to life.