word endings "tion, sion, cion"

[Tom Zurinskas]

Analysis of the vowel sounds for the endings "-tion, -sion, and -cion"
as spoken in m-w.com (USA English accent).

There are 150 words in the top 5,000 words of English that end in "ion"
as derived from the multi-million word-count analysis of media text
by Collins Cobuild.  The top 5k words of English represent about 90%
of the words on a typical media (newspaper) text page.

Of the 150, the top half instances showed that 93% were spoken as ~in
(~shin, ~chin, or ~zhin).   7% were spoken as ~shoon (~oo as in "wood").
Based on this large sample, the trend is conclusive.  Thus, all words
ending in "tion, sion, or cion" are spelled phonetically in the  truespel
dictionary as ~in, not ~un as has often been done prior to now in phonetic
renderings.


Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
See truespel.com - and the 4  truespel books plus "Occasional Poems" at
authorhouse.com.

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