Sounds Interesting: Observations On English And General Phonetics

by J.C. Wells

How do you pronounce omega, tortoise and sloth, and why? Do charted and chartered sound the same? How do people pronounce the names Charon, Punjab and Sexwale? In this engaging book, John Wells, a world-renowned phonetician and phonologist, explores these questions and others. Each chapter consists of carefully selected entries from Wells' acclaimed phonetics blog, on which he regularly posted on a range of current and widely researched topics such as pronunciation, teaching, intonation, spelling, and accents. Based on sound scholarship and full of fascinating facts about the pronunciation of Welsh, Swedish, Czech, Zulu, Icelandic and other languages, this book will appeal to scholars and students in phonetics and phonology, as well as general readers wanting to know more about language. Anyone interested in why a poster in Antigua invited cruise ship visitors to enjoy a game of porker, or what hymns can tell us about pronunciation, should read this book.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction

220 pages, Paperback

First published September 18, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

John Christopher Wells is a British phonetician and Esperanto teacher. Until 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics at the University College London.

Reviews

[Aaron Wong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wells, J. C. (2014). Sounds interesting: Observations on English and general phonetics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Too technical for me, but thoroughly researched.