WELSH PHONETICS

". . . a significant and most welcome work on the phonetics of Welsh by two experienced and accomplished scholars. The work brings together in one volume the results of existing studies on the speech sounds of Welsh and also presents original work by the authors for the first time. Existing works are not simply reported but are also critically assessed, especially in the light of contemporary instrumental phonetics. . . .The work is comprehensive: it looks at segmental and suprasegmental, and does so using different methodologies traditional impressionistic judgements, instrumental phonetics, and experimental analyses. The work is well-organized and carefully presented. . . . this text will be an indispensable and extremely useful starting-point for future researchers." Bob Morris Jones

"This book serves a very useful purpose, in providing a survey of the work carried out so far in the field of Welsh phonetics, drawing on an extremely wide array of sources. These include dialect studies of the Welsh of different districts, some of them dating back to the second half of the Nineteenth Century, while others adopt more recent structuralist and generative approaches. . . . Nor is the survey limited to the standard focus on segmental phonetics. It also explores less charted areas such as stress and intonation, and presents the first work to be carried out in new fields such as speech synthesis and clinical phonetics. The authors do not merely present this material without comment. They draw attention to problematic areas, where existing studies disagree among themselves, and indicate where longstanding problems of analysis may be resolvable in terms of instrumental, experimental approaches. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the book is the highlighting of such gaps and unresolved issues, so that one can see where new work would make an immediate contribution to our understanding of how the language works. . . . This book is therefore a survey of Welsh phonetics for the professional linguist rather than an introduction to phonetics for those interested in the language, wishing to explore new ways of analysing it." Gwenllian Awbery

Table of Contents:
Foreword; Preface
Part I: Transcriptional Phonetics: Types of Transcript; Consonants; Vowels Monophthongs, Diphthongs; Speech Rate Variation; Regional and Style Variation; Transcribing Disordered Speech; Welsh Orthography
Part II: Instrumental Phonetics: Consonant Studies; Monophthong Studies; Diphthong Studies
Part III: Suprasegmental Phonetics: World-Level Stress: Intonation; Transcribing Suprasegmentals
Appendices: International Phonetic Alphabet; Extensions to the IPA; VoQS Symbols
References; Index