The success of my book Sounds Interesting (Cambridge University Press 2014) encourages me to offer a further similar volume. Like its predecessor, Sounds Fascinating is mainly a compilation from the phonetic blog I wrote over the years following my retirement.

I've assumed that the reader is familiar with basic phonetic concepts and with the International Phonetic Alphabet. If you're not quite up to speed on the IPA, please consult the IPA Handbook (Cambridge University Press 1999) and the IPA chart (www.internationalphoneticassociation.org). To brush up on theory, there are various textbooks available. I particularly recommend Practical Phonetics and Phonology by Beverley S. Collins and Inger M. Mees (Routledge 2013, 3rd edition). Wikipedia is a useful and generally reliable guide, particularly since Peter Roach took the phonetics entries in hand. You may wish to refer to my own works: Accents of English (Cambridge University Press 1982, three volumes), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (Pearson Education 2008, 3rd edition – referenced below as LPD) and English Intonation: an Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2006).

In this book I put phonetic symbols in bold, without slashes or brackets unless it is relevant at that point to distinguish phonemes (in slashes //) from allophones or general-phonetic sound-types (in square brackets []). Note that in my IPA transcription of English I use the symbol e for the DRESS vowel, aʊ for the MOUTH vowel, and eə for the SQUARE vowel.

To indicate letters as opposed to sounds, I use italics.

The prosodic conventions I use are a vertical stroke (|) to show an intonation phrase boundary, underlining to show the location of the nuclear (tonic) syllable, and the marks \, /, and \/ to show a fall, a rise, and a fall-rise, respectively. For fuller discussion see Sounds Interesting, 4.1–2.

Words written in capitals, e.g. DRESS, are keywords standing for the entire lexical set of words containing the vowel in question: see my Accents of English, chapter 2.2, or the Wikipedia article on ‘lexical set’.

I hope this further collection inspires readers to explore traditional general phonetics and make their own observations on how both English and other languages are pronounced. There's always something new to be heard.