antedating "hobo" 1885

Randy Alexander strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM
Tue May 26 04:21:43 UTC 2009


On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 3:49 AM, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
> What's great about truespel phonetics is that it's spreadsheet friendly.

What's great about the ADS-L archives...

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?S1=ads-l

...is that you can search for {spreadsheet friendly} (without braces), and
find that that phrase has already been mentioned on ADS-L no less than
*eight* times, all by Tom Zurinskas!  Isn't that overkill?

Using the 62k word list (column A) I searched the tradstreeng (letters in
> sequence in traditional spelling) for o?o as in hobo (the ? stands for any
> letter) and got 1,269 hits.  Of those I searched the foestreeng (phonetic
> string) of ~oe?oe (column B) as in hobo (long o followed by any letter and
> then another long o) and got 159 hits.


I did a similar thing using a spreadsheet I made.  The first column is a
word list compiled by Alan Beale, called "2 of 12".  It is a list of 41k
words, each of which was found in at least two out of a group of twelve
dictionaries.

http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/12dicts-readme.html

The second column shows the vowel/consonant letter pattern.  Vowels are
represented by ^ consonants by #.  AEIOU are vowels; all others are
consonants.  I made the patterns just by doing search and replace operations
on each letter.

The third column shows the pronunciations with accents.  These were taken
from the Carnegie-Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary and modified to a
form of SAMPA.

The fourth column shows just the accent patterns, so I can search just on
them.

The fifth shows the pronunciations without accents.

The sixth column shows the vowel/consonant pattern of the pronunciations,
also using ^ and #.

All of it is "spreadsheet friendly".   You can even put IPA in a spreadsheet
now if you want.

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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