Prons (was: British Dialects Book)

[Wendalyn Nichols]

To confirm the ubiquity of "pron": in the world of commercial lexicography,
"pron" is shorthand for "pronunciation" which in turn means "the IPA or
phonemic respelling of a word that tells the reader (one hopes) how to
pronounce it." That's certainly how I meant "pronunciation" when I posted
the comment that started this train of discussion.

At 04:50 PM 9/23/02 -0400, Mark A Mandel wrote:
>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