<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">My guess is that humans have a hard time pronouncing correctly the names of the drugs they're taking. But most of time one doesn't need to: one either grabs the container off the shelf or presents a written prescription to the pharmacist (or talks about what ails them rather than what medicine they'd like to buy). However, there are documented cases of serious errors, some resulting in fatalities, when people in emergency rooms mispronounced the names of the medicines they were taking. FDA and USP's Institute for Safe Medication Practices collect data about drug name confusions (both orthographic and phonetic), but the general sense is that there is a lot of underreporting. <br><div><br></div><div>Lucian</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>* * *</div><div><b style="font-weight: bold; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Lucian Galescu, PhD</span></b></div><div>Research Scientist, IHMC</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span> </div><br><div><html>On Mar 28, 2008, at 3:38 PM, <a href="mailto:maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu">maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu</a> wrote:</html><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">Donna K. Byron wrote:<br><blockquote type="cite">Med names are notoriously OOV and the preferred<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">pronunciations are difficult to predict<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">from the spellings.<br></blockquote><br>That strikes me as odd--surely they're mostly OOV for humans, too; so how<br>do humans decide how to pronounce them when they read e.g. the label on a<br>medicine? (That's assuming of course that you're under 20, or you have a<br>microscope to read the label :-).)<br><br>Or is it the case that people have lots of different pronunciations for a<br>single medicine?<br><br> Mike Maxwell<br> CASL/ U MD<br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Corpora mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Corpora@uib.no">Corpora@uib.no</a><br>http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora<br><br></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>