Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary Free Download Full Version
Carmel Kittell
Apart from the transcriptions, the CD-ROM version offers a few additional features. Some of them,e.g. sound recordings, are typical of a software dictionary.Others are quite novel, e.g. the Sound Search and pronunciation exercises. All the featuresare described below.
Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary Free Download Full Version
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The 16th edition of the EPD CD-ROM was a bit disappointing because it only had British recordings. This edition has both British and American recordings.However, you can listen only to the first (most common) British and American pronunciation.For example, even if the dictionary lists more than one British transcription (e.g. for pure:/pjʊəʳ/ and /pjɔ:ʳ/),you can only listen to the first pronunciation.
As I wrote in my review of the book version, the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary is usefulin those situations where you have reasons to doubt your regular dictionary (or dictionaries). If the EPD lists a pronunciation first,it is probably the most common one. If the EPD does not list a pronunciation, it is probably quite rare.
According to the help file, CEPD on CD-ROM "is the complete electronic version of this classic English pronunciation guide." Though the CD-ROM's User's Guide (p. 4) asserts that it "contains all the entries in the printed book and much more," it should be noted that the eighty-seven "information" panels and the twenty-six "Pronouncing the letter ..." panels that start each letter section in the printed version do not appear here. The former provide a wealth of information on a variety of phonetic issues, from "Abbreviations" to "Weak forms"; the latter contain the much needed summary advice on common grapho-phonemic correspondences of English. For some reason the user of the electronic version of the dictionary is deprived of access to these sections of the traditional hard-copy edition. The twenty-page introduction to the printed CEPD, with such sections as "Whose pronunciation is represented?," "Principles of transcription," and "The International Phonetic Alphabet," is also absent. [-1-]
The CD-ROM Help file is entirely devoted to the mechanics of installing and using the electronic dictionary (see Figure 2); it doesn't supply instructions regarding phonemic searches and non-English language operating systems.
Unlike in the case of the dictionary's macrostructure, the microstructure of the entries in the electronic CEPD practically mimics that of the printed page, with the added benefit of colour: (a) black for British phonetic transcription and "compounds or phrases which are part of another entry" (CD-ROM User's Guide, p. 8), (b) red for inflectional endings and British transcription (if different from American), (c) dark blue for headwords and stems of inflected words, and (d) light blue for American transcription. Inflected forms are nicely aligned with left indentation, which makes for better visual scanning than in the run-on three-columns-per-page hard copy of the dictionary. The IPA transcription is rendered with the standard SIL font, widely used in phonetic word-processing all over the world.
The global screen layout conforms to another lexicographic standard: the word search box with the dynamically expanding word/result list on the left, the much larger main dictionary window on the right, and the pull-down menus across the top toolbar (see Figure 1). All fonts are clearly legible at the standard resolution of 1024x768 pixels and in all three font sizes selectable from the CEPD options menu (small, medium, and large).
Sound Search is an excellent pedagogical tool for a number of applications. It can easily produce word lists for materials and test construction, it will highlight the notorious English grapho-phonemic incompatibilities (cause of many learners' headaches), it assists the dictionary user in finding words of whose spelling they may not be certain and can raise the overall learner's awareness of English orthographic and phonetic patterns and preferences, thus creating an intuitive 'feel' which is helpful for advanced foreign language communication.
The CEPD is obviously an excellent didactic resource in the field of EFL/ESL. However, there are some problems with the design and functionality of the CD-ROM, which are in part unavoidable teething pains for this new baby of Cambridge University Press and TEXTware A/S, yet some of which reflect more systematic flaws of current electronic lexicography. After all, CEPD is not the first electronic dictionary to feature phonetic transcription, audio recordings or listen-record-compare exercises. In my review of Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (Sobkowiak, 2003), for example, I analysed some common weaknesses such as: audio-transcription mismatches, IPA screen rendition problems, limited and/or confusing representation of phonostylistic variation (due to different accents and tempos of speech), Sound Search and Pronunciation Practice functionality problems, and unused potentials. While not the first electronic dictionary, CEPD is the first electronic pronunciation dictionary on CD-ROM, so naturally any phonetic weaknesses in its design and implementation are immediately thrown into especially sharp focus. These will be reviewed in the next section.
Italicization and other abbreviatory conventions, which are generally adequate for a printed dictionary (Wells, 2004), may be confusing for active querying in this electronic version. For example, the CEPD has three kinds of lax schwa, standard, italic and superscript: only two of which are directly enterable from the Sound Search keyboard (first and third). Aniston with italic schwa matches the /*tn/ Sound Search query as the only hit. Nasals can also be italicised, as in genre /'ʒã:n.rə/ but notice that Sound Searching for /'ʒã:rə/ or /'ʒã:nr/ yields zero. Clearly, the combinatorics of abbreviatory conventions are too complex for the present edition of the CEPD.
The problem above is exacerbated by not having a syllable boundary symbol on the phonetic keyboard (see Figure 5). As a consequence, syllable onset and offset strings cannot be searched for directly, a rather disappointing lack in a pronouncing electronic dictionary. While stress marks are assumed in Sound Search queries, (i.e. strings entered 'stress-lessly' will match stress-full ones), the opposite is not true. Thus, /'si:k/ or /'aʊtˌsaɪd/ will return a "Sorry, no results match your search" message.
Designing the user interface for an electronic dictionary is no small task. All of linguistic, lexicographic, psychological and computational issues come into play to form a knot of conflicting demands and preferences. The challenge of making an electronic pronouncing dictionary is of course even greater; not only because of the multimedia (which is by now taken for granted by dictionary users), but because in the absence of all the semantic information, so prominent in an ordinary dictionary, the phonetic issues come to the foreground, with all the complexities outlined here. In this context, CEPD on CD-ROM is to be seen as a remarkable achievement of phono-lexicography. Most of the flaws detailed in this review can be easily remedied before the next edition appears, and those which might not will certainly continue to provide food for thought and research to metalexicographers and phoneticians. In the meantime learners and teachers of English pronunciation will be using this resource to great benefit.
The CEPD functionalities which will doubtless turn out to be most useful in the context of EFL/ESL teaching and learning are: (a) fast orthographic access to impeccably pronounced model renditions of a large number of English words, (b) Pronunciation Practice for both in-class ad-hoc remedial treatment and self-access long-term drilling (for highly motivated learners), (c) Sound Search through the contents of the dictionary via the Phonetic Keyboard. The pedagogically most disappointing feature of CEPD is the exercise suite: a rather unimaginative bunch of multiple choice tasks which are bound to become thoroughly boring after a few attempts.
The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary is the ultimate guide to pronunciation in English. Thousands of pronunciations not shown in general dictionaries are included, from people and places, to words from science, technology and literature. Based on the classic work by Daniel Jones, the 17th edition is edited by three of the most distinguished phonetics scholars working today. * NEW! Up-to-date entries including general vocabulary and people and places in the news * NEW! Lively study pages help with common areas of difficulty * Clear, accessible layout with 80,000 entries and 220,000 British and North American pronunciations using the International Phonetic Alphabet * 200 information panels that explain phonetics terminology The CD-ROM features the whole paper dictionary
Jones had collaborated on a dictionary project prior to the EPD but, rather than listing headwords orthographically in alphabetical order, that version had listed the headwords in phonemic script first, with the spelling form following. It was not a best-seller.
Adam Kilgarriff is a research scientist working at the intersection of computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and dictionary-making. Following a PhD on "Polysemy" from Sussex University, he has worked at Longman Dictionaries, Oxford University Press, and the University of Brighton, and is now Director of two companies, Lexicography MasterClass Ltd and Lexical Computing Ltd, which provide software, training and consultancy in the research areas. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at Sussex University. He started the SENSEVAL initiative on automatic word sense disambiguation and is now active in moves to make the web available as a linguists' corpus. He is a Board member of European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX) and former president of the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on the Lexicon (ACL-SIGLEX).
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