Elements of acoustic phonetics. 2nd edn. by Peter Ladefoged (review)

BOOK NOTICES 661 Jingrong's A Chinese-English dictionary, of which a revised edition has recently come out (Wei Dongya (ed.) 1995. Beijing: Foreign Language and Research Press). Yet, in the interest of producing a conveniently -sized volume, D's lexicon omits quite a bit of information and detail included in Wu' s work. For example, under chao yuè, D gives only 'exceed'; in Wu you find: 'surmount; overstep; transcend; surpass '; and three example sentences. This leads one to conclude that D may be fine for beginning and intermediate learners of Chinese, but a serious scholar or translator might as well save time and go straight to Wu when help is needed. Since D uses simplified characters, looking up characters in traditional form is a bit more trouble than it might be (you must use a special index, though the traditional form is given upon the first appearance of each character/morpheme). The book features a number of useful appendices, including a compact Romanization table, though not as many as Wu's work. Some of D's conventions, e.g. asterisking high frequency morphemes for each syllable sequence, seem to be more for the sake of computer file management than reader need. Missing from both D and Wu are expressions particular to the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, Singapore, and other non-PRC Chinese-speaking areas. The D work has the advantage of extremely clear print on high-quality paper, something many Chinese editions lack. One cannot but feel the highest admiration for someone willing to take on the momentous task of producing in a conscientious way any kind of Chinese dictionary, and this work is truly admirable for this and many other reasons. D had limited resources to work with and did a positively remarkable job. But I hope that many dictionary users take him up on the invitation in his 'Editor's call to action' to improve and amplify future editions, for the sake of everybody involved in Chinese studies. [Karen Steffen Chung, National Taiwan University.] Elements of acoustic phonetics. 2nd edn. By Peter Ladefoged. Stanford, Chicago , & London: University of Chicago Press. 1995. Pp. viii, 216. Cloth $39.95, paper $14.95. Elements is a revision and expansion of Ladefoged 's classic introduction to acoustic phonetics, first published (according to the preface) around 1957, though the earliest copyright date given is 1962. The new edition has eleven chapters, compared to seven in the original. In this edition, L adds material on 'modern insights into the nature of speech . . . resonances of the vocal tract and how formants are related to different cavities' (vii) and, most notably, various aspects of computer speech processing. This book takes the reader from the most basic descriptions of what sound is, how it is produced, and how it is perceived by the human ear, to the concepts of complex waves, Fourier analysis, and the decibel scale. A picture of the complexity of the many resonators in the human vocal cavity is slowly built up through simplified graphic analogies. The reader is finally told that the real situation is in fact much more complicated than all the mental exercises they have been through to understand parts of it would suggest, thus giving them a healthy respect and feel for how the real thing functions. L holds the reader's hand through anything at all mathematical—which would seem to reflect his understanding of the panic many linguist types feel when confronted with formulae and calculations. Everything is carefully explained so as to be as accessible as possible, even for the numerically challenged . It is clear from this book that L' s position in the field is well-deserved, not only as a phonetician but as a skilled and patient educator. It is perhaps this point that makes Elements stand out most in the crowd of acoustic phonetics texts available. The reader is likely to often have a feeling of 'Yes, of course, I knew that' as they read and think through the material; when in fact it might be the first time they really get it as regards some particular phenomenon , such as why 70.7% is such a special number, what the 'radiation factor' is...