Like some other spelling systems, my system DRE has a dictionary, TARDRE. I am not using the
classical meaning of "dictionary" here. TARDRE is not a
collection of words with definitions, etymologies, etc. In the
context of alternative spelling systems, I use the word "dictionary" to
mean a list of English words, paired with their respellings.
TARDRE was a very time-consuming project, but I believe it was time
well-spent. Though it took a long time to produce TARDRE,
DRE has a characteristic that made producing a dictionary much easier
than it would have been for any of my other systems: its
similarity to TS. About 1 in 3 English words is unchanged when
spelled with DRE, and most words are changed only in a few
letters. This made generating the dictionary a much less
laborious process than it would otherwise have been.
Having a dictionary for one's system provides the following benefits:
It enables the writing of a conversion program, to automatically convert a TS text into the target system.
The labor of composing the dictionary gives one a very
strong hands-on experience with one's own system. It is likely to
expose flaws in the system which otherwise would have remained dormant
for quite some time.
It gives the system designer experience with the patterns and subtleties of the English vocabulary that is hard to get any other way.
Much of the labor in constructing TARDRE had little to do with DRE per
se - the hard part was establishing standard pronunciations, given that
I could not trust my own pronunciation to be acceptable. It
occurred to me that it might be possible to modify the DRE dictionary
so that it became a useful tool for other system designers, especially
by allowing them to create their own dictionaries without having to
repeat the pronunciation research. I undertook such a project and
eventually developed the FEWL dictionary, written in a specially
designed notation called FLEWSY. Using FEWL and FLEWSY, plus some
programming, it is possible to produce a high-quality dictionary for a
reformed spelling in weeks or even days rather than months.
FLEWSY, the Fonemic Latin-1 English Writing SYstem, may be thought of
as a spelling system itself - though it is too complex to actually be
useful in that capacity. It encodes phonemic, morphological and
traditional spelling information in a way that can be easily
transformed by a program into a wide variety of alternate spelling
systems. FEWL, the FLEWSY Encoded Word List, is a list of
relatively common English words, paired with their FLEWSY
encodings. To produce a dictionary for a new spelling system, all
that is necessary is to write a program to convert the FLEWSY notation
into the target system. For those capable of the programming (or
of finding someone else to do it for them), this can generate a
dictionary in fairly short order. Attributes of FEWL that make
this process attractive include the following:
The vocabulary of FEWL represents the most commonly used English words, other than proper names. While there are other digital pronunciation dictionaries online, by and large they represent a much larger and less accessible vocabulary.
The pronunciations shown in FEWL represent standard American English, as determined by a majority vote of 3 authoritative dictionaries. While these pronunciations will probably not match anyone's speech exactly, they are common and generally considered acceptable.
The FLEWSY notation was carefully designed to provide the information most relevant to reformed spelling systems. This includes making important non-phonemic distinctions, such as distinguishing the broad a sound from the short o sound (identical in American English, but different in British English), and marking the plural and past tense endings distinctly from s/z and d/t.
A final advantage of using FEWL/FLEWSY as the basis of a dictionary is
that it offers the same opportunities as a more manual method for
getting acquainted with the English lexicon, and for discovering
weaknesses in one's system. The difference is that, when a
weakness is discovered and one's system is modified to avoid it, it is
generally a trivial matter to update the programming and generate a new
dictionary. Often, one can try out several variants of a notation
in a day, rather than having to laboriously correct the dictionary by
hand each time.
As FEWL was being finalized, I was in the process of designing my
spelling system WMM (a.k.a.
GASS). WMM made an excellent test
case for the use of FEWL in building a dictionary. The process
exposed some serious design issues with WMM which otherwise might have
been unnoticed for months, and the greatest part of the work was done
in a day. I would not have had the patience to develop a
dictionary for WMM manually - because WMM is so unlike TS, the
process would have taken much longer than for DRE.
WMM was finalized in a couple of weeks; without the use of the FEWL
dictionary, it would surely have taken months to bring it to the same
point, and there would never have been a WMM dictionary.
It must be noted that there are certain kinds
of systems for which using FEWL to construct a dictionary may not be
successful. FEWL is not appropriate for systems which basically
modify TS (like DRE), systems which depend on information not encoded
by FLEWSY (such as syllable boundaries), and systems which insist on
non-dictionary pronunciations. In the first case, it may be
possible to produce a dictionary by modifying the DRE dictionary.
In the other cases, one option is to do an approximate conversion using
FEWL anyway, and then edit the results manually. Whether this is
practical or not will depend on how pervasive the trouble spots are.
Since I wrote this page, I've put
out another list like FEWL, using a variant of Bob Boden's Bobdot notation (Bobdot-ph)
in place of FLEWSY. Bobdot-ph is much easier to describe and
process than FLEWSY, but has some limitations. If your system is
based solely on American English, does not reflect secondary stress,
and makes no special provisions for compound words, prefixes or
suffixes, an approach based on Bobdot-ph is likely to be simpler and
easier than using FEWL. Also, I have another project similar to
FEWL called CAAPR, oriented towards both RP and GA rather than solely
towards American English. Though CAAPR is, at this time, less
developed than FEWL, it may be useful for systems not content to target
a single variety of English.
For all the gory details about FEWL and FLEWSY, click here. See here
for infomation on Bobdot-ph, and here for
information on CAAPR.
To comment on this page,
e-mail Alan at wyrdplay.org
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