A Course In Phonetics (Sixth edition)

Phonetics is concerned with describing speech. There are many different reasons for wanting to do this, which means that there are many kinds of phoneticians. Some are interested in the different sounds that occur in languages. Some are more concerned with pathological speech. Others are trying to help people speak a particular form of English. Still others are looking for ways to make computers talk more intelligibly or to get omputers to recognize speech. For all these purposes, phoneticians need to find out what people are doing when they are talking and how the sounds of  speech can be described.