Note: the hyperlinks from the phonemes on this page are under construction

THE PRONUNCIATIONS

The pronunciation uses a set of characters very like the one adopted by the Alvey Speech Club for representing IPA in ASCII [2]. The system is as follows:

 i   as in  bead       N  as in  sing
 I           bid       T         thin
 e           bed       D         then
 & (ampsnd)  bad       S         shed
 A          bard       Z        beige
 0 (zero)    cod      tS         etch
 O (cap O)  cord      dZ         edge
 U          good
 u          food       p t k b d g
 V           bud       m n f v s z
 3 (three)  bird       r l w h j
 @  "a" in about

eI   as in   day      R-linking (the sounding
@U            go      of a /r/ at the end of a
aI           eye      word when it is
aU           cow      followed by a vowel)
oI           boy      is marked R
I@          beer      eg fAR for "far"
e@          bare      (compare "far away"
U@          tour      with "far beyond").

Primary stress: apostrophe eg @'baUt ("about")
Secondary stress : comma eg ,&ntI'septIk
Plus-sign as in "courtship" and "bookclub" 'kOt+Sip 'bUk+klVb

When the spelling contains a space and/or a hyphen, the pronunciation has one also, eg above board @,bVv 'bOd air-raid 'e@-reId

REFERENCES

[2]: Wells J.W., "A standardised machine-readable phonetic notation", IEE conference "Speech input/output: techniques and applications" London, Easter 1986

[This list is extracted from:]

A DESCRIPTION OF A COMPUTER-USABLE DICTIONARY FILE BASED ON THE OXFORD ADVANCED LEARNER'S DICTIONARY OF CURRENT ENGLISH

Roger Mitton,
Department of Computer Science,
Birkbeck College,
University of London,
Malet Street,
London WC1E 7HX

June 1992 (supersedes the versions of March and Nov 1986)

Information provided by the Say... Maintainer as part of the Say... text to speech interface