From: Martin DeMello Date: 2011-11-14T10:44:06+09:00 Subject: Re: "A" and "an" articles in front of words What you want is the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary [http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict]. You needn't include the whole dictionary and read it in real time - just do a preprocessing run to find words whose spelling starts with a vowel but whose pronounciation starts with a consonant, and vice versa. martin 2011/11/9 Gonçalo C. Justino : > google hasn't helped: does anyone have or know of a "complete" list of > english words ? > > On 8 November 2011 17:20, Chad Perrin wrote: > >> On Tue, Nov 08, 2011 at 05:23:31PM +0900, Gonçalo C. Justino wrote: >> > >> > does different pronunciation comes from the subsequent  letters ? i'm >> > thinking uMBrella, uNCle, uRGengt, uNDer, uGLy, uPPer, uRGe but uNIcorn, >> > eULogy (or is this "an eulogy"? now i'm confused)... i'm wondering if two >> > consonants make it "an" and at least one vowel make in "a". Maybe I'm >> just >> > ramblingm, this sounds so un-rubyesque :S >> >> You're right about unicorn and eulogy.  I'm interested in checking out >> the correlation between second-and-third letters and vowels that become >> consonants in pronunciation now, to see how strong a correlation that is. >> I'm pretty sure there are exceptions to these perceived rules, though, in >> any case. >> >> It seems likely that, most often, you'd get the following results, where >> V means "vowel" and C means "consonant".  Lower case letters are >> literals.  In each case, two adjacent vowels are assumed to be >> *different* vowels. >> >>    uCC: treat as vowel >>    uCV: treat as consonant >>    VVC: treat as consonant >>    yC: treat as vowel >>    yV: treat as consonant >> >> These are only my immediate impressions, so far.  Assuming for argument's >> sake that they're correct for the general case, though, there would >> almost certainly be exceptions for every one of these correlations, and >> the question that arises then is whether the exceptions are rare enough >> to warrant using these correlations as rules with a set of exceptions >> used to override them, or numerous enough for it to make more sense to >> just use an extensive dictionary to handle such matters. >> >> If I get really bored, I may put together a really extensive dictionary >> to cover this, then use it to determine the strength of such >> correlations some day (or week or month), but not today. >> >> -- >> Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] >> >