Polish is a consonant language. On one phonemic analysis (Biedrzycki, 1974: 35) it has thirty-one consonants and six vowels. The main factor contributing to the richness of the Polish consonant system is the range of grooved frictionals; each fricative has a corresponding affricate and vice versa, each voiced frictional has a corresponding voiceless frictional and vice versa.

In their book on British English accents and dialects, Hughes & Trudgill (1979: 51–3) include a brief study of the South Wales variety of English, based on the speech of informants from Neath and Pontypridd. Although in the main their description rings true, it does leave some gaps and contain some inaccuracies, sufficient to prompt me to offer the following, somewhat fuller notes on the South Welsh pronunciation of English, with particular reference to the speech of my native West Glamorgan (WG). My comments relate primarily to the Port Talbot variety of WG, but since this variety is similar in most respects to those found in nearby Neath and Swansea and their surrounding areas, my remarks may, for the most part, be taken as applying to WG speech in general. The accents found in the adjoining south-western part of the county of Mid Glamorgan, in towns such as Maesteg or Porthcawl, are also similar to the Port Talbot variety, and thus share most of the characteristics attributed here to WG speech.

One of the challenges of current research into speech communication is that of effectively using the power of the digital computer to both organize data and to extract relevant relationships by computational methods. Whilst considerable progress has been made in the analysis and synthesis of the acoustics of speech and in understanding the perceptual mechanisms at work in human perception of speech, there has been a paucity of relations between such knowledge and the description of speech by the traditional discipline of phonetics. One significant factor in this situation is the lack of an effective way for the speech scientist to code the descriptions of the phonetician in a way that preserves the richness of description and accuracy of judgement attained by a highly trained ear and expressed in specialized phonetic scripts. It is the intent of this paper to propose a tool that could provide improved communication between the two disciplines.

C. E. Capell's article ‘Transcription, Vowel and Consonant Systems of Upper Bavarian Dialect’, in JIPA, vol. 9, no. 1 (June 1979), was interesting as being one of the very few contributions in English to the study of this phonologically fascinating German dialect, but was unfortunately so full of straightforward errors of data and interpretation that it gravely misrepresents the dialect. The following article is an attempt to set the record straight in all but a few very minor points.