Converting "born" from IPA to espeak is causing a mispronunciation.

[mmoody-vv]

If you convert "born" in ipa (bˈɔːɹn) to espeak, the result is [[b'O:r3:n]], which is pronounced "boren". The issues appears to be the code to add an implicit vowel before NL, which drops the added vowel if the next letter is a consonant or a syllable separator, but not if it's the end of the word.

Adding this line of code after line 2859 fixes this specific problem, but I'm not sure if it opens up other cans of worms:
if ret[-2].endswith(maybe_bytes('*added',ret[-2])): del ret[-2]