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Pronunciation keys are provided in the jargon listings for all entries
that are neither dictionary words pronounced as in standard English
nor obvious compounds thereof. Slashes bracket phonetic
pronunciations, which are to be interpreted using the following
conventions:
-
Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or back-accent
follows each accented syllable (the back-accent marks a secondary
accent in some words of four or more syllables). If no accent is
given, the word is pronounced with equal accentuation on all syllables
(this is common for abbreviations).
-
Consonants are pronounced as in American English. The letter `g' is
always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant"); `ch' is soft
("church" rather than "chemist"). The letter `j' is the sound
that occurs twice in "judge". The letter `s' is always as in
"pass", never a z sound. The digraph `kh' is the guttural of
"loch" or "l'chaim". The digraph 'gh' is the aspirated g+h of
"bughouse" or "ragheap" (rare in English).
-
Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names; thus
(for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aych el el/. /Z/ may
be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect.
-
Vowels are represented as follows:
- /a/
- back, that
- /ah/
- father, palm (see note)
- /ar/
- far, mark
- /aw/
- flaw, caught
- /ay/
- bake, rain
- /e/
- less, men
- /ee/
- easy, ski
- /eir/
- their, software
- /i/
- trip, hit
- /i:/
- life, sky
- /o/
- block, stock (see note)
- /oh/
- flow, sew
- /oo/
- loot, through
- /or/
- more, door
- /ow/
- out, how
- /oy/
- boy, coin
- /uh/
- but, some
- /u/
- put, foot
- /y/
- yet, young
- /yoo/
- few, chew
- /[y]oo/
- /oo/ with optional fronting as in `news' (/nooz/ or /nyooz/)
The glyph /*/ is used for the `schwa' sound of unstressed or occluded
vowels.
The schwa vowel is omitted in syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or
n; that is, `kitten' and `color' would be rendered /kit'n/ and
/kuhl'r/, not /kit'*n/ and /kuhl'*r/.
Note that the above table reflects mainly distinctions found in
standard American English (that is, the neutral dialect spoken by TV
network announcers and typical of educated speech in the Upper
Midwest, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Philadelphia).
However, we separate /o/ from /ah/, which tend to merge in
standard American. This may help readers accustomed to accents
resembling British Received Pronunciation.
The intent of this scheme is to permit as many readers as possible to
map the pronunciations into their local dialect by ignoring some
subset of the distinctions we make. Speakers of British RP, for example,
can smash terminal /r/ and all unstressed vowels. Speakers of many
varieties of southern American will automatically map /o/ to /aw/; and
so forth. (Standard American makes a good reference dialect for this purpose
because it has crisp consonents and more vowel distinctions than other
major dialects, and tends to retain distinctions between unstressed
vowels. It also happens to be what your editor speaks.)
Entries with a pronunciation of `//' are written-only usages. (No,
Unix weenies, this does not mean `pronounce like previous
pronunciation'!)
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