phon

The goal of phon is to make available the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (cmudict) in an R friendly format, and to collect some tools which use the pronunciation information.

The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary includes pronunciations for 130,000 words. By matching the phonemes between words, phon provides

• phonemes('threw') - Returns the phonemes for the pronunciation of “threw”.
• homophones('steak') - Returns words which are homophones of “steak”.
• rhymes('carry') - Returns words which rhyme with “carry”.
• sounds_like('greater') - Returns words with a similar sound to “greater” by limiting the mismatches in phonemes the other word can have.
• contains_pronunciation('threw') Returns words which contain the the pronunciation of ‘threw’ within their pronunciation
• syllables("useless") Returns the count of syllables in “useless”.

The phon::cmudict data is a named vector which lists all availables words along with their phoneme string.

This is a companion package to the syn package. syn finds related words based upon meanings, while phon finds related words based upon pronunciation.

Installation

You can install phon from github with:

devtools::install_github("coolbutuseless/phon")

Phonemes

Phonemes are the sounds which make up a word.

The phonetic encoding in phon come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (cmudict) which encodes words using ARPABET.

phon::phonemes("cellar")
#> [1] "S EH L ER"

Since some words have mutliple pronunciations, the results of phon::phonemes() can be a vector with more than 1 element, e.g. carry has two slightly different pronunciations.

phon::phonemes("carry")
#> [1] "K AE R IY" "K EH R IY"

ARPABET phonetic encoding includes stress markers as suffixes to vowel phonemes. The markers are:

0. No stress
1. Primary stress
2. Secondary stress

You can ask for phonemes without the stress markers, e.g.

phon::phonemes("fantastic")
#> [1] "F AE N T AE S T IH K"

phon::phonemes("fantastic", keep_stresses = TRUE)
#> [1] "F AE0 N T AE1 S T IH0 K"

Syllables

The number of syllables in a word is obtained by counting of the number of phonemes with stress markers.

phon::syllables("average")
#> [1] 3

phon::syllables("antidisestablishmentarianism")
#> [1] 12

Matching Phonemes within Words

phon allows you to search for the sound of one word within another.

In the following example, phon::contains_pronunciation_phonemes() finds all the words that include the pronunciation of “through” within their pronunciation.

phon::contains_pronunciation('through')
#>  [1] "bathroom"      "bathrooms"     "breakthrough"  "breakthroughs"
#>  [5] "drive-thru"    "drive-thrus"   "overthrew"     "threw"        
#>  [9] "throop"        "throughout"    "throughput"    "throughs"     
#> [13] "throughway"    "thru"          "thruway"

Use the keep_stresses argument to match with/without the stresses included (default is to ignore the stresses).

Homophones

Homophones are words with the same pronunciation but different spelling.

phon::homophones("steak")
#> [1] "stake"

phon::homophones("carry")
#>  [1] "carey"  "carie"  "carrey" "carrie" "cary"   "kairey" "kari"  
#>  [8] "karry"  "kary"   "kerrey" "kerri"  "kerry"

Rhymes

To find rhymes, phon compares trailing phonemes. If the phonemes at the end of a word in the dictionary match those at the end of the given word, then they rhyme.

The rhymes are returned in multiple vectors:

• Words with the most matching trailing phonemes are returned first.
• Subsequent vectors have fewer matching trailing phonemes.

phon::rhymes("drudgery", min_phonemes = 2)

rhyme_length         word
            3  challengery
            3      forgery
            3      gingery
            3       injury
            3      margery
            3     marjorie
            3      marjory
            3    menagerie
            3 neurosurgery
            3      perjury
            3      surgery
            2        acary
            2    accessory
            2       adoree
            2     adultery
            2     advisory
            2   alimentary
            2   alphandery
            2       ambery
            2        amery
... [results trimmed]

In the above example:

• The phonemes for “drudgery” are “D R AH1 JH ER0 IY0”
• Where rhyme_length == 3, the words match the -gery sound, i.e the last 3 phonemes.
• Where rhyme_length == 2, the words only match the -ery sound, i.e. the last 2 phonemes.

Similar sounding words

Similar sounding words are found by comparing words with the same number of phonemes but with a number of mismatches allowed.

phon::sounds_like("statistics", phoneme_mismatches = 5)
#>  [1] "anaesthetics" "anesthetics"  "centronics"   "gymnastics"  
#>  [5] "heuristics"   "onomastics"   "scientific's" "scientifics" 
#>  [9] "statistics'"  "stochastics"  "subsistence"  "synbiotics"

CMU Pronouncing Dictionary

This package relies on the great Pronouncing Dictionary by CMU. You can access this data using

phon::cmudict[200:210]
#>                  abductions                  abductions 
#>  "AE0 B D AH1 K SH AH0 N Z"  "AH0 B D AH1 K SH AH0 N Z" 
#>                    abductor                    abductor 
#>       "AE0 B D AH1 K T ER0"       "AH0 B D AH1 K T ER0" 
#>                   abductors                   abductors 
#>     "AE0 B D AH1 K T ER0 Z"     "AH0 B D AH1 K T ER0 Z" 
#>                     abducts                       abdul 
#>         "AE0 B D AH1 K T S"             "AE0 B D UW1 L" 
#>                   abdulaziz                     abdulla 
#> "AE0 B D UW2 L AH0 Z IY1 Z"         "AA0 B D UW1 L AH0" 
#>                    abdullah 
#>         "AE2 B D AH1 L AH0"

CMU Pronouncing Dictionary Copyright notice

CMUdict  --  Major Version: 0.07

$HeadURL$
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