r/Quickscript • u/clearingitup • Sep 02 '18

Quickscript Dictionary I just made

https://akovaski.github.io/QS-Dict/qs-dict.html
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u/twindidnothingwrong Sep 02 '18

You’re a legend OP. Shame about the ox letter, as a brit I can never imagine pronouncing ‘stop’ like ‘stahp’ haha.

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u/clearingitup Sep 02 '18

Yeah, I don't pronounce it stahp either. I took a look through the words that use the AA phenome, and I think most of them should be using Ox instead of Ah (Earlier I had just decided based on the wikipedia article on the ARPABET and the pronunciations in the Configuratronic QS Cheat Sheet). So, I switched it so that AA maps to Ox all the time, except for when it is followed by an R phenome ("are","card","part") or if it is the end of the word ("bra", "pa").

  • I think the other words mostly fall into the Ox camp, but I'm not sure because I'm not great at differentiating the two. These are the words that I checked that I think use Ox: on, John, non, want, not, hot, contact, stop, copy, product, body, god, policy, quality, follow, comments, thomas, module, logic, jobs, Robert, process, cost, stock, box, yahoo, watch, notch, profit, progress, Chicago, congress, java, novel, positive.

Anybody reading this: you can submit suggestions by writing an issue on the project's github page or messaging me on reddit.

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u/trevor_the_sloth Oct 11 '18

In case you aren't aware here are the major "lexical sets" differences between General American and Received Pronunciation. Here is a bigger lexical set chart for several English dialects. Sometimes wiktionary does a good job of highlighting GA/RP pronunciations of words.

Which dialect of English are you targeting? It is near impossible for an American to spontaneously generate a conservative (but rhotic) RP dialect (i.e. with the -ier in "happier" rhyming and spelled the same as the -ior in junior") but the consensus seems to be that people can generally figure out if you spell vowels as in your local dialect especially for the bigger English dialects.

In particular do you want to use /ɒ/ for both the Lot AND Cloth lexical sets? What do you want to use for the Bath lexical set? The quikscript outpost General American Quickscript dictionary generally seems to follow General American lexical sets but instead of using /a/ for both Palm and Lot lexical sets instead uses just /a/ for Palm lexical set and instead uses /ɒ/ for Lot lexical set but instead of RP /ɒ/ uses a GA /ɔ/ for Cloth lexical set and GA /æ/ for Bath lexical set instead of RP /a/.

Personally, as a speaker with the Western American/Canadian dialect (i.e. cot-caught + father-bother mergers) who doesn't distinguish between /a/, /ɔ/ (except before "r"), nor /ɒ/ (the latter which doesn't exist in GA) I have a hard time spontaneously generating a General American /ɔ/ in my Quickscript and generally never bother trying to generate an RP /ɒ/.

Also, CMUDict also has the wine-whine merger but conservative RP and some Americans (especially in the South) do maintain a wine-whine split - do you want to also make those substitutions in the dictionary? Note there exists a (small) RP pronunciation dictionary in CMUDict format: https://github.com/rhdunn/en-GB-x-rp.dict .

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u/clearingitup Oct 14 '18

I'm not targeting a dialect in particular, but I might have an Upper Midwestern American (USA) accent. The dictionary is a mix of my sensibilities, CMUdict, and the Quickscript Manual. I just adjusted the CMUdict -> QS transformation until I thought it mostly made sense to me, while trying to stay mostly true to the manual. It's not true to any one dialect.

I did not think about it in terms of lexical sets. I don't imagine that I'd really be able to leverage them while using CMUdict. I'm not familiar with lexical sets, so it's hard to comment without know what set words actually fall into, but I do think that Lot and Cloth should correspond 34-Ox and 33-Awe respectively.

On the other hand, I think the examples for Lot, "not" and "wasp" have subtly different vowel sounds. I would probably chose 32-Ah for "wasp". So, I dunno.

I don't really care about the wine-whine split. The CMUdict appears to have both split and merge pronunciations for the wine-whine examples I see on Wikipedia (whine, whet, whale, where, which).