John Wells is a world-famous phonetician, if only on account of the widespread adoption of his ‘Standard Lexical Sets’. These are around two dozen ‘keywords standing for the entire lexical set of words containing the vowel in question’ (p. xi) and were a prominent feature of his first major work, the three-volume Accents of English (Wells Reference Wells1982). His Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (LPD, Wells Reference Wells2008) records the best known varieties of current British and American English, using IPA symbols to transcribe the original-language values of words which English has borrowed from over fifty languages. Wells was for many years (1971–87) the sole editor of this journal, before becoming Professor of Phonetics at University College London (1988–2006). On his retirement, from 2006 to 2013, he wrote a blog on phonetics, as seen from his professional and personal perspective. The volume Sounds Interesting is his own selection of posts, over 1,800 in all, which he wished to offer to a wider audience. Two indexes – a general index with around 250 entries and an index of words – help readers to find items of interest.

This ‘modest collection of observations’ (ibid.), most of them no longer than a single page, is presented in seven groups: ‘How do you say. . .?’ (the pronunciation of English words such as sloth, omega, veterinary, liege), English phonetics (for example reduction in casual speech), teaching and examining, intonation, spelling, regional and social accents of English, and finally, the phonetics of languages other than English (such as the Welsh ll). What follows is a small sample of the items the book contains.

‘My liege, we are besieged’ is the mock Shakespearian title of his selection in which Wells observes that, although the ‘pronunciation given in dictionaries is liːdʒ’, he keeps ‘hearing . . . actors pronounce it as liːʒ’ (p. 31). Noting that the ‘first dictionary to mention this variant seems to have been Webster's Third International (1961)’, he laments its continuing absence from most others (p. 21). In 1969, at his ceremonial investiture as Prince of Wales, Prince Charles could be clearly heard saying liege with /ʒ/. Wells continues: ‘It's not only liege. I have heard the ʒ variant in siege and besiege too. . . Is this some kind of contamination from prestige -iːʒ or beige beɪʒ?’ (p. 22). Comparing these with rouge, luge, deluge, gamboge, raj and Beijing, he ends: ‘I've not heard anyone pronounce huge as hjuːʒ. . . yet’ (p. 22). That day, however, may soon come, for it seems that, where there is no <d> in the spelling, there is an increasing tendency to say /ʒ/ rather than /dʒ/. BBC Radio 3 presenters, for example, practically always use /ʒ/ in adagio. As for gigolo, although its form indicates an Italian origin, we have the complication of having borrowed it relatively recently via French, as we have with cortege, doge, Eugenie and garage. Of jejune, both ‘jays’ have been heard from the actor Jeremy Irons as /ʒ/. Also to be heard with /ʒ/ are centrifuge, subterfuge and refuge.

‘The symbol for STRUT’ quotes Wells's reply to a student who was unhappy about the use of certain symbols including ᴧ and ɐ. ‘When I first started phonetics . . . I had the same thought as you about ᴧː that it would be better written ɐ. I made a point of [using it, but later] . . . it seemed better to stick with the same transcription other people use’ (p. 60). As Wells points out, many people know that /ᴧ/ means the STRUT vowel of English, but very few ‘know or care anything about the cardinal vowel system’ (ibid.). He poses the further question of whether, in British transcriptions, /æ/ would be better written as /a/. Such a change has been the policy at the division of the Oxford University Press responsible for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and other reference books, though not yet of its English as a Foreign Language division.

‘Stressing schwa’ finds Wells admitting grudgingly that a phonetically stressed schwa occurs occasionally in English ‘through the re-stressing of a weak form’ (p. 46). He instances (be)cause, just and going to. The spoken expression /ˈgənə/ (with the schwa in a stressed syllable), though it may not figure in markedly conservatively styled speech, is a currently normal Parliamentary usage for anything but the most solemn pronouncements and must be one of the most frequently spoken words in the English language. Wells nonetheless asserts that ‘lexically there are no stressed schwas in English’ (ibid.; emphasis added – JWL). This must surely depend on how one defines ‘lexical’. For example, does it include Ms /məz/? There are quite a lot of schwa accentings that pass largely unremarked. The Queen has been heard to say doesn't as /dəz n t/ and doing as /də.ɪŋ/ in unscripted speech. The word threepence is often heard as /ˈθrəpən s/. It may not be /ˈdə rɪˈɡɜ/ to say de rigueur thus but René, Renault, Renoir and première receive schwa in their stressed first syllables from very many General British speakers.

‘Charted and chartered’ arose from Wells’ observation that an issue of The Guardian newspaper contained two apologies: one was for printing ‘unchartered territory’ when ‘uncharted’ was meant and the other was for saying that a minister had ‘tended’ his resignation when ‘tendered’ was required. He complains that all his young native-English students treat affect and effect as homophonous. In my observation similarly, accept (along with its derivatives acceptable and unacceptable) is no longer distinguished among any but the most conservative speakers from the word except, with both words now having the form /ɪk s e p t/. From its first edition of 1990, the LPD registered the existence of this variant form of accept, but none of the other principal authorities (Roach, Setter & Esling Reference Roach, Setter and Esling2011 and OED) has. Wells completes his sorrowful account: ‘An awful lot of [his students] pronounce -ered and -ed as homophones too, both with -əd ’ (p. 56). He suggests, interestingly, that ‘the drift from ɪ to ə’ (p. 56) in England seems to be most general along the east coast. Wells concludes by noting that at least one recent EFL textbook prescribes /-əd/, although ‘in EFL we traditionally teach that the verb ending -ed is pronounced -ɪd’ (p. 56). In fact, variants were acknowledged over fifty years ago in Leslie Hill and J. M. Ure's English Sounds and Spellings (Hill & Ure Reference Hill and Ure1962). Wells may well have had in mind the English Transcription Course (Lecumberri & Maidment Reference Lecumberri and Maidment2000). In its second lesson, the Course deals with vowelled plurals which derive from English nouns ending with sibilant consonants, and comparable past tense forms of verbs ending with the alveolar plosives /t/ or /d/. As the Course says, ‘[t]he vowel is /ɪ/ for some speakers and /ə/ for others’ (Lecumberri & Maidment Reference Lecumberri and Maidment2000: 13). However, of twenty examples given, including buses with /-əz/ and ended with /-əd/, not a single one of them contains /ɪ/. Some students may well be puzzled that this should have been so. Fortunately, the reverse is true of the large quantity of texts the book contains.

‘Volcano’ was occasioned by Wells's puzzlement at the way in which the word was pronounced by a vulcanologist whose native language was said to be Italian: volc[æ]no. He expresses surprise that someone working in an English-speaking environment would not notice that colleagues pronounced volcano as volc[eɪ]no, given that it was so central to their discussions. The effect of this mispronunciation on Wells was to make him ‘discount the value of what he had to say’ (p. 86), since if someone fails to pay attention to how such a crucial word is pronounced, they may not pay attention to the evidence on which they base their scientific findings. One can certainly understand this reaction, but not necessarily come to the same conclusion. Many teachers have been puzzled to observe that even their most careful and conscientious students can sometimes be dismayingly unaware that they are grossly mispronouncing common words. The problem, of course, is our unhelpful orthography and our multiplicity of accepted variants. In my opinion, volc[æ]no was very unlikely indeed to have caused any serious problems of communication.

‘Empty things’ was prompted by a correspondent who, referring to the expression ‘How are things?’, very reasonably asked why some native speakers ‘put the nucleus on the empty word things’ (p. 109). Wells replied that the nucleus ‘has to go \/somewhere’ and if all other words in the intonation phrase are function words, then it will ‘even go on a weak (“empty”) content word’ (p. 109). He added, as an aside, that he usually says ‘How's \things?’, thus violating number concord. In my view, there is a perfectly simple explanation for this violation, namely a stylistic phenomenon that may simply be called ‘Linguistic Slumming’.

‘Fame at last’ begins with Wells exclaiming ‘Gosh, I've been denounced by David Cameron!’ (p. 165). He had been quoted in the course of a condemnation of ‘dumbing down’ in education by the Prime Minister, who said: ‘Listen to this. It's the President of the Spelling Society. He said people should be able to use whichever spelling they prefer . . . I say he's wrong. And by the way, that's spelt with a W’ (p. 165). Wells points out that the remarks were taken out of context, and that what he actually said, as quoted in his press release, was: ‘Let's return to a time when English spelling allowed greater variation. Nowadays we often see light written lite and through as thru. Let's not hold up our hands in horror – people should be able to use whichever spelling they prefer’ (p. 165). Wells insists that he was not advocating that we abandon all standards in spelling, but that he was referring to pairs such as the ones mentioned. He added a few more, such as the textspeak u alongside you. And, he says, ‘I suggested we get rid of the apostrophe’ (p. 165).

‘Welsh ll’. The BBC used to have a web page where one could hear audio files of various Welsh place names. Taking up a suggestion that he should try it out, Wells was immediately struck by the pronunciation of the Welsh ll (e.g. in Llandeilo, Llangwm, Llanddewi Brefi, Benllech, etc.), observing that ‘instead of the standard voiceless alveolar lateral fricative ɬ, he used a voiceless palatal fricative ç’ (p. 187). When Wells raised a query about this with BBC Wales, a representative thanked him for his comments but then replied: ‘I am not a specialist in the Welsh language, but happen to be a native Welsh speaker. To my ear, and to the ears of my Welsh-speaking colleagues here at BBC Wales Education & Learning, we cannot discern a problem with the pronunciation of the letter “ll” on BBC Wales, pronunciation guide’ (p. 187). Martha Figueroa-Clark of the BBC Pronunciation Unit agreed with Wells, saying that she found it ‘very intriguing that these differences do not seem to be discernible to native Welsh speakers’ ears’ (p. 187). So did two other phoneticians. ‘So there we have it’, Wells concludes: ‘The use of a palatal fricative rather than an alveolar lateral fricative, . . . is immediately obvious to . . . phoneticians . . . but is beneath the radar as far as (some) native Welsh speakers are concerned’ (p. 187). He wonders if there is a sound change in progress and if /ɬ/ is indeed giving way to /ç/. If so, he says, and the palatal ‘succeeds in driving out the alveolar lateral’, ‘speakers of Welsh will no longer be able to boast of having a really exotic sound in their consonant system. They'll be no more able to lay claim to exclusivity than the Germans, and the use of the true alveolar lateral fricative will be left to Zulu and Xhosa’ (p. 188).

This brief and arbitrary selection from a book containing so many and varied blog passages cannot hope to give more than a very limited impression of its contents. The complete blog series is archived at http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.co.uk. As is the nature of blogs, the entries are highly personal. The book ends with a couple of pages in which Wells explores the origins of his interest in phonetics. To begin with, he had educated parents who ensured that he had a head start in his education. He began French at eight, Latin at nine, (Ancient) Greek at twelve and so on. From school he went to Cambridge, where one of the optional courses he took was ‘An introduction to phonetics’. This was taught by the late John Trim, previously a member of the staff of Daniel Jones's UCL Department. It proved the first firing-up of a lifelong interest which inspired him to pursue a successful career in the same department.

It would be a great mistake if the brevity and lightness of touch of many of these items led them to be dismissed as mere trivia. They are backed by real depth of learning, seriously and cogently applied.