Started: July 3, 2018
Finished: August 14, 2018
My History With This Book
I actually bought my copy of this book back in 2010. It was one of the required textbooks for a course I was taking in English phonetics & phonology. (The other textbook was A Course in Phonetics by Peter Ladefoged.)
The professor for the course would assign chapters of Ladefoged and Roach each week, but the weekly reading assignments would be based on the course syllabus, and not the internal chronology of the books. Thus we read the books out of order.
Plus, I'm ashamed to admit it, but how well I kept up with the weekly readings varied from week to week. (I had the best of intentions, but I didn't handle the stress of grad school well. Sometimes the overwhelming amount of weekly reading made me so stressed out that I couldn't absorb any of it.)
But, on the weeks that I did keep up with my weekly reading, I was always glad of Peter Roach's clear and simple explanations.
I often felt very lost in that phonetics and phonology course. There were weeks when I felt like I couldn't understand anything the professor was talking about, and I was terrified that I was going to fail the course.
But then, when I sat down to read Roach, I felt like I could understand him. It gave me confidence that maybe I could actually understand this phonetics and phonology stuff.
There were also written practice exercises at the end of each chapter. (You could do the exercises, and check your answers in the back.) And when I did find the time to sit down and do the exercises, I felt they really helped me understand and consolidate the information.
I also used some sections of this book as an authoritative reference for some of the papers I wrote that semester. (HERE and HERE).
But I never actually finished this book cover-to-cover
However, because I felt that this was one of the few books that explained phonetics and phonology in a way that I could understand, I had always intended to one day sit down and read this whole book from front to back. Which is why I kept it with me all these years. Even though I have to purge 90% of my book collection every time I move countries, this was one of the few books I always made sure to keep with me in each of my moves.
And now, I've finally gotten around to reading it.
...actually, it turns out that this book is also part of the recommended reading list for the DELTA. Which I've been trying to work through.
And at my work we've started up a book club for the DELTA recommended reading list. After finishing Speaking by Martin Bygate last month, we sat down to choose the next book. And this is what the other members decided to choose. "Perfect," I thought silently to myself. "I already have a copy at home."
[Sidenote: There are several different editions of this book floating around. The electronic version on our school's computers is the 2nd edition. The hard copy in our school's library is the 3rd edition. The edition I have is the 4th edition. As a result, book club members ended up reading different editions. As far as we could tell, there were no substantial differences. Page numbers were different, but the basic content seemed more or less the same. When it came to the discussion at the end of the month, we all seemed to have absorbed the same information. Although granted we never did a thorough line-by-line analysis. But after reading this cracked.com article, "6 Disturbing Things I Learned Writing Your Textbooks" I've learned that changes in editions are often just excuses to sell new books with no substantial change in content. (See point number 1 in the article linked above). I suspect that's what's happening here. Although I could be wrong.]
Anyways, enough rambling about my history with this book. Let's get on to the actual review.
The Actual Review
Actually after all that build up, I really don't have too much intelligent to say about this book in the way of comments or critique.
What can you really say when reviewing a textbook? (And it's very evident that the primary purpose of this book is to serve as textbook for introductory level university courses on phonetics and phonology.)
Unless you have enough expertise to critique how the author handles subject matter (which I don't), you can't really say much more than "It was readable" and "It was informative".
And, for the record, this book was readable and informative. But that's about all the level of insight I'm able to give on this one.
So I'll just jot down a few stray observations, and then call it a day on this one:
* Some of this book covers the same ground as Sound Foundations by Adrian Underhill. But what's interesting about Peter Roach is rather than tell you what the facts are, he likes to tell you what the controversy is. Are /n/ and /ng/ variations of the same English phoneme, or two different phoneme? Are there clear rules about where syllables are divided? Do native speakers agree on how many syllables a word has?
Each chapter further ends with a "Notes on Problems and Further Reading", which further highlights how much uncertainty there is in this field.
I enjoyed learning about how many unanswered questions there were in this field. It was really interesting.
* There are written exercises and audio exercises at the end of each chapter. I tried to keep up with these for the first few chapters, but in the end I gave up. (It's just not convenient to read this book in coffee shops if you keep having to stop to do all the exercises. Maybe someday I'll give it a re-read.)
* Confession: I finished this book way back on August 14. I did the video review on August 24, but got distracted from writing this book review until now.
I hate to say it, but this book isn't as fresh in my mind as it was two months ago. The video review was done when this book was fresher in my mind (although as always, I got a bit rambling and incoherent on the video review.)
I'm going to have to call this good though. I've got to get ready for the DELTA from tomorrow, so this will have to suffice as a review.
Video Review
Video review HERE and embedded below:
Link of the Day
Chomsky on Lenin and Bakunin
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