This book provides a detailed, thoughtful, authoritative analysis of the theory, philosophy and nature of phonetic transcription, particularly the use of symbols to represent segmental sounds in the articulatory, acoustic and auditory domains.

There are seven chapters in the book. Chapter 1 presents the theoretical background to phonetic transcription, for example explaining the difference between pseudo-notation (which has no foundation in phonetic theory), proto-notation (which has a foundation in phonetic theory but only uses existing orthographic characters), and proper notation (which has a solid theoretical foundation and uses a wide range of phonetic symbols and diacritics). Chapter 2 traces the origins of phonetic transcription, in particular considering the rebus principle, syllabographies such as Japanese hiragana and katakana, and early attempts at representing pronunciation by various authors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Chapter 3 describes the further development of phonetic transcription, including a brief overview of Korean Hangŭl, a discussion of the establishment of the IPA, and an overview of the ExtIPA for disordered speech and the use of IPA symbols in Braille. In Chapter 4, types of transcription are analysed, including broad and narrow transcription, phonemic transcription, allophonic transcription, the use of archiphonemes, parametric transcription, and various schemes for representing intonation and rhythm. Chapter 5 is concerned with narrow impressionistic transcription, and it deals with the auditory system and variability between different transcribers. In Chapter 6, there is a discussion of the relationship between transcription and the output of various instruments, particularly spectrograms and palatography, and it is asserted that it is a fallacy to assume that instrumental output such as these somehow represents the true nature of speech. Speech is what we hear, and instruments may or may not capture that usefully. Finally, Chapter 7, the shortest in the book with just 14 pages, discusses the uses of transcription in dictionaries, foreign language learning materials, speech pathology and forensics.

While the book includes impressive coverage of the historical background of transcription, its underlying theoretical foundations, the nature of a wide range of different symbols, and issues in the implementation of transcription, it is a little surprising that there are so few examples of the actual practical use of transcription, and I would have welcomed a more extensive consideration of various practical applications, such as: a detailed comparison of the different systems adopted in a range of dictionaries, why the various choices are made and what the consequences are; issues involved in incorporating phonetic transcription into teaching materials and the selection of symbols to represent various models of pronunciation; reference to some actual case studies in which the transcription of disordered speech by speech pathologists was challenging and how this was dealt with; some instances in which disputed phonetic transcription has been an issue in forensic cases and how the issues were resolved; and the level of inter-transcriber agreement found between trained phoneticians when they compare their transcriptions. While the theoretical background for all these issues is presented in admirable depth, and for example the problems in deriving a figure for inter-transcriber accuracy are discussed in some detail, it would have been interesting to know about the conclusions of various phoneticians who have attempted to compare their output, what levels of accuracy they report, and what sounds are most likely to cause problems.

One other area that receives surprisingly little coverage in this book is the transcription of suprasegmental sounds, particularly intonation. While it is undoubtedly true that the transcription of intonation is ‘more slippery than segmental phenomena’ (p. 166), one might conclude that such slipperiness should result in more space, not less, being assigned to its discussion, and three and a half pages for discussion of the use of pitch tracks, tones, interlinear tonetic transcription, and the ToBI system for representing intonation seems a little parsimonious. I would have appreciated a more detailed discussion of the relative merits of the use of these various transcription systems, and also some analysis of the extent to which they might be applicable to a wide range of different languages. For example, there is little consideration about how lexical tones might be transcribed in various languages or how the different systems of representing tone might be compared across languages, and this would seem to be rather important when dealing with transcription of all the languages of the world.

In some cases, the material is quite densely packed, and some elaboration would have been useful. For instance: it is stated (p. 47) that Korean Hangŭl writing has become increasingly morpho-phonographic over the centuries, and it would have been interesting to see some examples of what this involves; there is reference (p. 53) to the archiphonemic nature of <ψ> in Greek orthography, and some explanation of how <ψ> represents an archiphoneme would have helped; reference is made (p. 103) to the Carolingian minuscule <g>, and some elaboration of Carolingian and miniscule would have been welcome; there is discussion (p. 156) of how notation such as /[pʰiːɫ]/ can be used to denote the realisation of phonemes, and it is not clear how this kind of realisation of phonemes is distinct from allophones or how the notation differs from normal phonetic transcription using simple [] square brackets; and a gestural score for the word palm shown in Figure 4.5 (p. 166) shows a tier for TBCD with no explanation about what TBCD might refer to.

Furthermore, though great care has clearly been taken over the careful and accurate presentation of all the material, there are a few instances in which something is mentioned before it is actually described. For example: Ellis's palaeotype notation is briefly discussed on page 100, and we only learn what this palaeotype is on page 110; mention is made on page 101 of the late twelfth-century Orrmulum manuscript as an example of orthography being readjusted to maintain sound–spelling correspondences, but this manuscript is only introduced on the following page; and on page 181 the McGurk effect is given as an example in which vision influences our auditory perception, but details of the effect are only presented on page 187.

Perhaps the reader is expected to know about such things as a palaeotype, the Orrmulum manuscript and the McGurk effect beforehand, so the fact that they are only described in detail later on is not considered important. However, this occasional disjunction between referring to something and then describing it somewhat later does not add to the ease of reading the material. In fact, substantial background knowledge about phonetics is assumed throughout the book, and little explanation is offered about the meaning of concepts such as archiphoneme, formant transition and de-alveolisation. Although there is a brief glossary at the end of the book, it only has entries for 31 items, including abjad, alphabet, glyph, logogram, pronunciation, syllabogram and spelling, and readers without a solid knowledge of phonetics might appreciate definitions of a few more terms.

However, these issues are quite minor when considering the impressive attention to detail with which all the material in this book has been collated. In fact, there seem to be almost no errors in the presentation of the symbols or alignment of diacritics, which is an admirable achievement when there is so much detailed material; and the only error I found in the whole book is that ‘dz’ is given as an example of continuous symbol in Figure 3.11 (p. 99) when presumably this should be ‘ʣ’.

In conclusion, this book presents a profound discussion of the theoretical foundations for segmental transcription and practical problems encountered in implementing it, and while a few more actual case studies would have enriched the material, a little more attention might have been given to suprasegmental issues, and there might have been some additional elaboration or clarification about some of the issues, this does not prevent the book from being exceptionally valuable. Many phoneticians will certainly find the book both fascinating and immensely useful, though perhaps some students of linguistics will find parts of it a little tough.