ABCD is an English pronunciation
dictionary of an unusual sort. The name is an acronym for
Alan's Basic Codes with Diacritics. A typical online
pronunciation dictionary will use a relatively simple phonemic
notation. If this sounds like what you are looking for,
please follow this link to CAAPR
- ABCD is something different.
I have called the ABCD notation a blend of spelling and
pronunciation. The ABCD spelling of a word is a spelling in
an extended alphabet from which both the pronuciation and the regular
spelling can be derived, and which is in most cases very similar to the
regular spelling. A typical example is the word advise, spelled advíZe in
ABCD. The í
indicates a long i, and the Z
an s pronounced as z. Almost all of the units of ABCD
notation work in this way, indicating both a pronunciation and a
spelling.
The word advise
illustrates one other important property of ABCD, one that is easy to
see as a negative. It is ambiguous about certain aspects of
pronunciation. It does not indicate stress - which means you
can't tell from looking at advíZe
whether the stress is on the first or second syllable. A
side-effect of this ambiguity is that in general you cannot distinguish
the schwa from an ordinary short vowel. The word advise is
pronounced either with a short a and with a schwa in the first
syllable. The spelling advíZe
describes either pronunciation equally well. (This was a
choice I made in the design of ABCD - it improves the resemblance of
ABCD to regular spelling at what seems to me a small cost.)
ABCD is highly systematized. There are about 200 symbols and
symbol combinations with defined meanings in ABCD, exploiting both
capital letters and diacritics. This would be too complex to
use and remember without the twin aids of ABCD's resemblance to regular
spelling, and the consistent way in which the diacritics are
used. For instance, vowels with the acute accent are all long
vowels. All the conventions are described in detail in the
ABCD documentation.
Here are a few more examples of ABCD in action, to give you a better
idea of how it works. The italics are the regular spelling of
the selected words and the boldface the ABCD spelling.
abundant:
abundant
alienate: álîenáte
charisma: KHariZma
handsome: han(d)som(e)
awareness: aWâre+nêss
accordion: a^ccòrdîon
demoralization:
dem~Öral~Ízátion
laugh: l[au:~À][gh:f]
abundant
is a word spelled entirely according to English patterns, and requiring
no markings for vowel sounds. alienate also
conforms to patterns, but requires some vowels be marked with
diacritics to clarify the pronunciation. Note that no special marking
is required for a final silent e following a long vowel. The
word charisma
also conforms to high-frequency patterns, but both the ch and the s
need to be altered to correspond to the pronunciation. (The
spelling KH
is used rather
than CH,
because CH
is equally plausible as a spelling for the ch of machine.) handsome has two
silent letters, and, in contrast to alienate, the e is
marked as silent since the previous vowel is not long.
Finally,
the word awareness
shows some ABCD techniques for resolving some of the
subtler ambiguities of regular spelling. The W in awareness is
capitalized to show that aw is not to be interpreted as a single vowel
sound (as in law),
while the +
sign after aWâre
shows that the first e
is not pronounced as a short e or a schwa, but instead is silent,
because it ends the root word aware.
Unlike the words above it, the word accordion does not conform to basic English patterns, because the double c follows a vowel representing a schwa. The ^ flags this situation. The word demoralization displays a different difficulty - the British and American pronunciations differ. The ~ flags a code which is interpreted differently for the two varieties of English. And finally, the word laugh is completely defiant of standard English patterns, and so the ABCD representation simply shows how the letter combinations map to sounds.
To
comment on this page,
e-mail Alan at wyrdplay.org