Non-phonemic respeller
Heather Mills
or at least consistent, phonetic spelling using only the letters a-z?
For example, "Diarrhea" would become something like "DYE-uh-REE-a".
Peter Moylan
Take a look at http://www.onelook.com. Most of the dictionaries there
indicate the pronunciation. (Probably all of them, but I didn't have the
patience to look at all 27.)
Admittedly, most of them don't satisfy your criterion of using only eye
dialect. There's a reason for that. Pronunciations vary from region to
region, so a representation that looks reasonable to one person can be
grossly misleading for another. I used to have a dictionary that did
that (things like "uh means u as in cup"), but in the end I had to admit
that it was misleading me about pronunciation.
Merriam-Webster does something similar to what you want, using macrons
above the vowels to disambiguate between different sounds for the same
vowel.
Encarta has the weirdest scheme I've ever seen. Who would have thought
of using K-circumflex to represent the first vowel of "diarrhoea"?
--
Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org
For an e-mail address, see my web page.
John Lawler
wrote:
> Heather Mills wrote:
> > Is there a web app that will convert an English word into a standard,
> > or at least consistent, phonetic spelling using only the letters a-z?
>
> > For example, "Diarrhea" would become something like "DYE-uh-REE-a".
>
> indicate the pronunciation. (Probably all of them, but I didn't have the
> patience to look at all 27.)
>
> Admittedly, most of them don't satisfy your criterion of using only eye
> dialect. There's a reason for that. Pronunciations vary from region to
> region, so a representation that looks reasonable to one person can be
> grossly misleading for another. I used to have a dictionary that did
> that (things like "uh means u as in cup"), but in the end I had to admit
> that it was misleading me about pronunciation.
>
> Merriam-Webster does something similar to what you want, using macrons
> above the vowels to disambiguate between different sounds for the same
> vowel.
>
> Encarta has the weirdest scheme I've ever seen. Who would have thought
> of using K-circumflex to represent the first vowel of "diarrhoea"?
>
> --
> Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org
> For an e-mail address, see my web page.
There are 26 letters in the Latin alphabet and 36
phonemes in English,,not counting diphthongs.
How should the 36 be coded by the 26? Since
there is no standard for eye dialect, any two
automated systems will produce inconsistent
output.
Really, learning the English Phonemic Alphabet is easy
enough for a first-grader who already speaks English.
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf
It should be within the reach of most adult native speakers.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler
"He who wants to persuade should put his trust
not in the right argument, but in the right word.
The power of sound has always been greater
than the power of sense." -- Joseph Conrad
Roland Hutchinson
> Encarta has the weirdest scheme I've ever seen. Who would have thought
> of using K-circumflex to represent the first vowel of "diarrhoea"?
That's got to be Microsoft character-set or font damage of some kind. I
think it's supposed to be i with a macron, judging from their
pronunciation key, but it doesn't display correctly on the "diarrhea"
page (note American spelling required -- at least from here!) in my
browser, either (Firefox 3.6.12 on Linux).
--
Roland Hutchinson
He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )
Stan Brown
> On Sun, 21 Nov 2010 12:47:36 +1100, Peter Moylan wrote:
>
> > Encarta has the weirdest scheme I've ever seen. Who would have thought
> > of using K-circumflex to represent the first vowel of "diarrhoea"?
>
> That's got to be Microsoft character-set or font damage of some kind. I
> think it's supposed to be i with a macron, judging from their
> pronunciation key, but it doesn't display correctly on the "diarrhea"
> page (note American spelling required -- at least from here!) in my
> browser, either (Firefox 3.6.12 on Linux).
It's fine on my Firefox 3.6.12 in Windows 7: the character is an i
with a macron instead of the dot, and then a grave accent above that.
Firefox is usually good at finding a font that contains a desired
character when your default font doesn't have one. Do you have a
decent Unicode font installed?
--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
Shikata ga nai...
Christian Weisgerber
> > > Encarta has the weirdest scheme I've ever seen. Who would have thought
> > > of using K-circumflex to represent the first vowel of "diarrhoea"?
> >
> > That's got to be Microsoft character-set or font damage of some kind. I
> > think it's supposed to be i with a macron,
>
> It's fine on my Firefox 3.6.12 in Windows 7: the character is an i
> with a macron instead of the dot, and then a grave accent above that.
>
> Firefox is usually good at finding a font that contains a desired
> character when your default font doesn't have one. Do you have a
> decent Unicode font installed?
Firefox doesn't find a character here and shows the replacement box
with the Unicode value: U+F806. That's within the private use area
E000-F8FF where the standard does not assign characters.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> On Nov 20, 5:47 pm, Peter Moylan <inva...@peter.pmoylan.org.invalid>
> wrote:
[ ...]
>> Encarta has the weirdest scheme I've ever seen. Who would have thought
>> of using K-circumflex to represent the first vowel of "diarrhoea"?
>
> There are 26 letters in the Latin alphabet and 36
> phonemes in English,,not counting diphthongs.
> How should the 36 be coded by the 26? Since
> there is no standard for eye dialect, any two
> automated systems will produce inconsistent
> output.
>
> Really, learning the English Phonemic Alphabet is easy
> enough for a first-grader who already speaks English.
> http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf
> It should be within the reach of most adult native speakers.
OK, but is there an answer to Peter's question: Who would have thought
of using K-circumflex to represent the first vowel of "diarrhoea"?
--
athel
Peter Moylan
version of iso-8859-1 is different from ISO's version. It has been
suggested in the past that that problem will be eliminated once everyone
switches to Unicode.
But no, Microsoft is one step ahead of us. It has already found a way to
be incompatible with everyone else's version of Unicode. At least this
time the area is "reserved for private use" rather than "reserved for
control codes".
John Dunlop
> OK, but is there an answer to Peter's question: Who would have thought
> of using K-circumflex to represent the first vowel of "diarrhoea"?
I think it's a mistake. Encarta uses the character reference "",
which, as Christian pointed out, refers to a private-use character, so
Unicode doesn't specify how it should be interpreted.
Looking at their pronunciation key, I think the character they're after
is <ī> (U+012B). They could have used the character reference "ī"
or just inserted the character as raw data, as they did for the schwa.
--
John
Stan Brown
You're right. I didn't look at the character code earlier because
(a) my Firefox produced something reasnoable and (b) I didn't think
even Microsoft would use a private-use area to create accented
characters for Web publishing.
Pablo
> Really, learning the English Phonemic Alphabet is easy
> enough for a first-grader who already speaks English.
> http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf
> It should be within the reach of most adult native speakers.
Put me right off when it says that the e in modest should be a schwa.
--
Pablo
James Silverton
That's how I pronounce it. The only "Modest" I know is Mussorgsky.
--
James Silverton
Potomac, Maryland
Email, with obvious alterations: not.jim.silverton.at.verizon.not
Jerry Friedman
As John Lawler has more or less pointed out, the first question is
whether there's a phonetic spelling using only those letters.
I notice you're willing to use hyphens. If you're willing to use a
few other characters, you have the choices of ASCII IPA (the standard
around here, and known as "Kirshenbaum" to some) and SAMPA.
I don't know SAMPA. For American English, which is what I assume you
want because of your spelling of "diarrhea", ASCII IPA uses the usual
Roman alphabet and the colon, comma, apostrophe, ampersand, and at
sign. You could probably dispense with the comma. "Diarrhea" would
be transcribed /,daI@'ri@/ or /,daI @ 'ri @/. (For British English,
you also need the period and the quotation mark, though you can get by
without the quotation mark.)
This is all for phonemic transcription. You'd probably need more
symbols for a phonetic transcription. Despite your subject line, I'm
afraid I think a phonemic system is what you want.
Unfortunately, ASCII IPA takes some learning. Some people have been
respected regulars here for over a decade but have never learned it.
If you want a system that will make the pronunciation obvious to any
literate American, I think it would be very difficult or impossible.
(For ASCII IPA users: If you really wanted to minimize non-alphabetic
characters, you could probably do GenAm phonemically using only the
apostrophe and ampersand, with no secondary accents, V for the schwa
as in M-W, and transcribing "Mary" as /meri/, in which case you don't
need colons. Heck, you could use /a/ instead of /&/ and transcribe /
aI/ as /AI/ as /aU/ as /AU/.)
--
Jerry Friedman
Jerry Friedman
> On Nov 20, 6:21 pm, Heather Mills <hsmi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Is there a web app that will convert an English word into a standard,
> > or at least consistent, phonetic spelling using only the letters a-z?
>
> > For example, "Diarrhea" would become something like "DYE-uh-REE-a".
> I notice you're willing to use hyphens. If you're willing to use a
> few other characters, you have the choices of ASCII IPA (the standard
> around here, and known as "Kirshenbaum" to some) and SAMPA.
...
I meant to give this URL for ASCII IPA:
http://alt-usage-english.org/ipa/ascii_ipa_combined.shtml
--
Jerry Friedman
Roland Hutchinson
Microsoft character-set/font damage, as I had supposed. I further
conjecture that the character in question simply escaped the conversion
process when they moved their dictionary from CD (where private
characters might make sense) to the Web. They managed to get it right in
their pronunciation key, so there's no good reason for it to be wrong
here.
ObUsage: no Oxford/Harvard comma is needed in "The right way, the wrong
way and the Microsoft way".
Peter Moylan
surprise. Even more surprising was the omission of 't' from "picture".
Nick
> Pablo wrote:
>> John Lawler escribió:
>>
>>> Really, learning the English Phonemic Alphabet is easy
>>> enough for a first-grader who already speaks English.
>>> http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf
>>> It should be within the reach of most adult native speakers.
>>
>> Put me right off when it says that the e in modest should be a schwa.
It's pretty schwaish to me.
> That didn't bother me, but the schwa in "jumping" was a bit of a
> surprise. Even more surprising was the omission of 't' from "picture".
Which vowel in jumping? I can't see either (but then I have a strong
regional -ing sound) and picture needs a t to start the second syllable
with.
--
Online waterways route planner | http://canalplan.eu
Plan trips, see photos, check facilities | http://canalplan.org.uk
Pablo
> Peter Moylan <inv...@peter.pmoylan.org.invalid> writes:
>
>> Pablo wrote:
>>> John Lawler escribió:
>>>
>>>> Really, learning the English Phonemic Alphabet is easy
>>>> enough for a first-grader who already speaks English.
>>>> http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/modestproposal.pdf
>>>> It should be within the reach of most adult native speakers.
>>>
>>> Put me right off when it says that the e in modest should be a schwa.
>
> It's pretty schwaish to me.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone pronounce "modest" with a schwa
"modust" - yuk.
>> That didn't bother me, but the schwa in "jumping" was a bit of a
>> surprise. Even more surprising was the omission of 't' from "picture".
>
> Which vowel in jumping? I can't see either (but then I have a strong
> regional -ing sound) and picture needs a t to start the second syllable
> with.
The u in jumping can't be anything other than a schwa in my world.
There we have it ladies and gents - we all speak differently.
--
Pablo
Heather Mills
<johnm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Nov 20, 5:47 pm, Peter Moylan <inva...@peter.pmoylan.org.invalid>
>wrote:
>> Heather Mills wrote:
>> > Is there a web app that will convert an English word into a standard,
>> > or at least consistent, phonetic spelling using only the letters a-z?
>>
>> > For example, "Diarrhea" would become something like "DYE-uh-REE-a".
>>
>> Take a look athttp://www.onelook.com. Most of the dictionaries there
>> indicate the pronunciation. (Probably all of them, but I didn't have the
>> patience to look at all 27.)
>>
>> Admittedly, most of them don't satisfy your criterion of using only eye
>> dialect.
I wasn't familiar with the term "eye dialect". It seems to have a
mostly pejorative connotation. Or at least it is often used to
indicate (in literature) a non-standard dialect or pronunciation
("dat" instead of "that").
Is there another, non-pejorative, term for a way of phonetic spelling
as in "DYE-uh-REE-uh"?
Heather Mills
<jerry_f...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>On Nov 20, 6:21 pm, Heather Mills <hsmi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Is there a web app that will convert an English word into a standard,
>> or at least consistent, phonetic spelling using only the letters a-z?
>>
>> For example, "Diarrhea" would become something like "DYE-uh-REE-a".
>
>As John Lawler has more or less pointed out, the first question is
>whether there's a phonetic spelling using only those letters.
>
>I notice you're willing to use hyphens. If you're willing to use a
>few other characters, you have the choices of ASCII IPA (the standard
>around here, and known as "Kirshenbaum" to some) and SAMPA.
>
>I don't know SAMPA. For American English, which is what I assume you
>want because of your spelling of "diarrhea", ASCII IPA uses the usual
>Roman alphabet and the colon, comma, apostrophe, ampersand, and at
>sign. You could probably dispense with the comma. "Diarrhea" would
>be transcribed /,daI@'ri@/ or /,daI @ 'ri @/. (For British English,
>you also need the period and the quotation mark, though you can get by
>without the quotation mark.)
>
>This is all for phonemic transcription. You'd probably need more
>symbols for a phonetic transcription. Despite your subject line, I'm
>afraid I think a phonemic system is what you want.
What's the difference between phonetic and phonemic? Is it that
phonemic is more precise in that each symbol represents a single
phoneme whereas phonetic is more loosely spelling as it sounds?
Peter Duncanson (BrE)
wrote:
Wikipedia has what I think is a reasonable explanation of "phoneme":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme
a phoneme is a group of slightly different sounds which are all
perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or
dialect in question. An example of a phoneme is the /k/ sound in the
words kit and skill. (In transcription, phonemes are placed between
slashes, as here.) Even though most native speakers don't notice
this, in most dialects, the k sounds in each of these words are
actually pronounced differently: they are different speech sounds,
or phones (which, in transcription, are placed in square brackets).
In our example, the /k/ in kit is aspirated, [k^(h)], while the /k/
in skill is not, [k]. The reason why these different sounds are
nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme in English is
that if an English-speaker used one instead of the other, the
meaning of the word would not change: using [k^(h)] in skill might
sound odd, but the word would still be recognized.
--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)
CDB
> John Lawler <johnm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Peter Moylan <inva...@peter.pmoylan.org.invalid> wrote:
>>> Heather Mills wrote:
>>
>>>> Is there a web app that will convert an English word into a
>>>> standard, or at least consistent, phonetic spelling using only
>>>> the letters a-z?
>>>
>>>> For example, "Diarrhea" would become something like
>>>> "DYE-uh-REE-a".
>>>
>>> Take a look athttp://www.onelook.com. Most of the dictionaries
>>> there indicate the pronunciation. (Probably all of them, but I
>>> didn't have the patience to look at all 27.)
>>>
>>> Admittedly, most of them don't satisfy your criterion of using
>>> only eye dialect.
>
> I wasn't familiar with the term "eye dialect". It seems to have a
> mostly pejorative connotation. Or at least it is often used to
> indicate (in literature) a non-standard dialect or pronunciation
> ("dat" instead of "that").
>>
pronunciations intended to show the speaker as beyond the pale in some
way: "sez" for "says" is eye-dialect, at least in North America, but
"dat" indicates a non-standard pronunciation, and thus a dialect form
not perceived by the eye alone.
>>
> Is there another, non-pejorative, term for a way of phonetic
> spelling as in "DYE-uh-REE-uh"?
>>
Heather Mills
tony cooper
wrote:
>>Around here, it's mostly used for non-standard spellings of standard
>>pronunciations intended to show the speaker as beyond the pale in some
>>way: "sez" for "says" is eye-dialect, at least in North America, but
>>"dat" indicates a non-standard pronunciation, and thus a dialect form
>>not perceived by the eye alone.
>
>So, "ear dialect"?
No. Eye. When you are talking about spelling you are talking about
what is written. When it is written so the eye sees it as the ear
hears it, it is eye dialect.
--
Tony Cooper - Orlando, Florida
CDB
I think it would be unnecessary. I believe that the phrase "eye
dialect" was coined as a specialised term on the understanding that
"dialect" was what you call the kind of non-standard spelling that
reflects a non-standard pronunciation. As you said above,
"eye-dialect" is somewhat pejorative; the linguists who read this
group would say that non-standard utterances ("ear-dialect") should
not be disparaged, and would not use "dialect" in such a context.
Unless they disagree with that, of course.
>>
[...]