British Dialects Book

[Mark A Mandel]

On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, Mark A Mandel wrote:

#Uh? Actually, what we used as a pron for "hi" (and "high") was something
#like    hI      , adapting the pre-Windows IBM-PC code page 437
#character set for our symbols. And that is a phonemically-spelled word.
#Two phonemes:
#        h
#        I, representing the diphthong aI with primary stress
#
#You may not like the term. I'm not telling you to use it. We found it
#indispensable, and when Lernout & Hauspie bought Dragon their people
#adopted it eagerly.

I should add: We needed, invented, and used the term for the same basic
reason any group of specialists does. In developing and maintaining our
lexicons for speech recognition and speech synthesis, we were constantly
talking and writing about the written forms of words -- "spellings" or
"orthographies" -- and the strings of symbols we used to represent their
pronunciations in terms of the phoneme models known to the recognizer or
synthesizer -- "phonemically-spelled word" or "phonemically-spelled
pronunciation", if you like; "pron", to us.

-- Mark A. Mandel