Abstract
Natural languages dispose of a rich vocabulary. Although most natives hardly use more than 5,000 words,1 the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (Hornby, 1974) and the French Petit Robert (Robert, 1972) both denote more than 50,000 lexical entries. And the latter is merely, with its 2,000 pages, a simplified version of the more exhaustive Robert (5,600 pages). Similarly, the Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 500,000 entries. Yet only full forms are included. Taking plural, feminine, and conjugated forms into account increases the total number of common words to be transcribed up to at least 1 million, not to mention proper nouns, the pronunciation of which is not always clearly established.
Let me take this opportunity of answering a question that has often been asked me, how to pronounce “slithy toves.” The “i” in “slithy” is long, as in “writhe”; and “toves” is pronounced so as to rhyme with “groves.” Again, the first “o” in “borogoves” is pronounced like the “o” in “borrow.” I have heard people try to give it the sound of the “o” in “worry”. Such is Human Perversity. Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snake
“Mine is a long and a sad tale!” said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing. “It IS a long tail, certainly,” said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s tail; “but why do you call it sad?” Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
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Dutoit, T. (1997). Automatic Phonetization. In: An Introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5730-8_5
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