Hi Philip,
Yes, Shavian is phonemic, but the Traditional Orthography isn't, and
that's what we're starting with. If the program is to work on a
phonemic level rather than a word level, then before it even gets
around to transliterating anything it has to determine what the
phonemes in each TO word are, and that would require a LOT more
sophistication than the current program has -- and even then there
would be a lot of room for error due to orthographic idiosyncrasies.
It would be great to take that approach, but I don't think it's viable
given the complexity of the English language, my programming ability
and the amount of time I'm willing to expend on the project.
If you're suggesting that the program should contain a table of
underlying phonemic values for each TO word, and then that it should
contain a table of how those underlying phonemic values map onto
phonemes for each target accent, I think that would be very hard to
do. Given the different phonemic patterns that different accents have,
we'd be dealing with meta-phonemics rather than pure, simple
phonemics. I could see a lot going wrong (and who would provide the
data?). (But I haven't thought about that for long enough yet. Please
let me know if you think I've got the wrong end of the stick.)
If someone doing a transliteration were asked to define the
characteristics of their accent (Do "put" and "putt" rhyme? Do "crass"
and "grass" rhyme? and so on...) I think that would be asking too
much. Easier to say, "Where, broadly, do you come from?"
If we work at the level of words rather than phonemes, then we will
have a larger database, but, if we have a well-populated database, we
will be able to produce a perfect transliteration every time (assuming
that all homographs have been added and that the user selects each one
accurately), because the really intelligent work will have been done
by the people who created the database records.
I have to think more about this, but the word-by-word approach feels
right to me, because it is simple and simple is usually good. This is
the approach that was taken by the earlier, PC-based version of
Ghoti-Fingers. I could always rely on it to produce an accurate piece
of text as long as all homographs were accounted for, but I don't
think I could expect the same of a more sophisticated (and
error-prone) method.
LG
--- In shawalphabet@yahoogroups.com, "Philip Newton"
<philip.newton@...> wrote:
>
> On 5/17/06, Lionel Ghoti <Lionel.Ghoti@...> wrote:
> > 2) It should store pronunciations in different accents, and would
> > allow the user to select their target accent. If no pronunciations
> > were available for the target accent, it would use the default accent.
> >
> > I'm leaning towards the second option.
>
> Sounds like a good idea.
>
> > 2) If we were to go down the many-accents path, what are the different
> > accents that you think should be covered?
>
> I think it's better to approach this in terms of mergers and splits,
> rather than in terms of countries, since Shavian is phonemic, rather
> than phonetic. So if Australian "age" sounds like British "ice", and
> *always* does so, then I think the "age" letter is appropriate, so
> Australian wouldn't need a separate accent just because of that.
>
> Some mergers and splits I can think of:
> - broad-A vs non-broad-A (e.g. Sam-psalm: some have 'ash' for both,
> some have 'ash' vs 'ah', aka the trap-bath split)
> - short-o variants vs those that don't have this (for some, short-o as
> in 'on' merges into 'awe' or 'ah' or both -- the father/bother and/or
> cot/caught mergers)
> - distinct vowels before 'r' in addition to rhotics (do "mirror" and
> "nearer" / "furry" and "hurry" / "merry" and "Mary" rhyme?)
> - yod-dropping ("new" = "nM" or "nV"?)
>
> and possibly
>
> - shwi vs shwa ("dasFd" or "disFd" for "decide"?)
> - representation of final -i/y ("siti" or "sitI" for "city"?)
> - NORTH/FORCE (are "or" and "oar" separate?)
> - variants with a "wh" vs those that lack that as a separate phoneme
> (are "which" and "witch" pronounced the same?)
> - flapped intervocalic "t" (do "bitter" and "bidder" / "rated" and
> "raided" sound the same?)
>
> If this kind of approach is taken, though, it might be better to see
> it as a set of features that your accent has or hasn't, rather than a
> set of accents to choose from (since lacking broad A is independent of
> whether short-o exists or not, for example).
>
> Cheers,
> Philip
> --
> Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
>