Neurotip wrote:He seems to be a bit of a maverick
Yeah, reading some of his rants where he lashes out (in response) at other phoneticians or complains about the non-phoneticity of different writing systems of the languages of the world could be quite amusing.
Nevertheless, his phonetic system is very useful and decidedly more accurate than the traditional IPA, and the information available on his website is comprehensive enough to become my go-to source for obtaining phonetic information about almost all the languages I'm interested in studying. Although it does require some perseverance and mental tenacity to get over the "utterly baffled by all the terms and symbols" stage to the "I finally get how all of this works" stage.
If you intend to scour his site, don't forget to look into the
Media Manager. There are many files that aren't available otherwise (i.e. don't have the links on the site's web pages; they were transferred to the new site from the old one which has become discontinued). Some of the good ones are chapters from his old A Handbook of Phonetics (starting with "hph_"), for example, concise phonopses of the various languages of
Europe and
Asia, or A Handbook of Pronunciation (files starting with "hpr_"), which contain, for example, information on
German and
French not available in his excerpts from the dedicated monographs on these languages.