Peter Ladefoged (1925–2006)

This is such a good idea, this kind of "forget the theory, here's what you'll actually do. Here's what I know about reading a spectrogram. Here's what I know about fixing the equipment. Take bug spray"-style hot tips approach to a discipline. And Ladefoged is certainly the man to pull it off if anyone can--although I'm not sure if he totally does. The thing with the equipment is it changes so fast, and while the people who are actually parachuting into the Amazon to front-line record new-discovered language isolates can no doubt learn something from this, the students who are going to be reading this book need to work up to it some. That sounds like I'm saying it was too advanced, and I'm not--I'm saying more to the point would have been "here are some easy experiments that you can do with your friends to get practice reading a spectrograph. Here are some you can do with an airflow meter." Because these people, phonetics profs, from what I've seen they love telling us some stuff about sounds and some stuff about their research and then leaving us to figure out all the practicalities ourselves. I could have used some more practice reading spectral slices and nomograms and many other things, and it's a bit of an abdication of responsibility to just go over it in class once and then say "now study on your own time." But there is a wealth of good random tidbits in here, and Ladefoged is an engaging narrator.… (más)