Pro-NOUNCE-it is innovative software that uses a graphical approach to illustrate English pronounciation. It solves a crucial problem for children learning to read and for the 1 billion or so people who are currently struggling into English from other languages: that we all lean on spelling to guess (or remember) the pronunciation of words, yet correct spelling does not always reflect correct pronunciation. Even people who speak English regularly may mispronounce such common words as work, wander, wonder, worm, warm; while rarer words, including unfamiliar place-names and surnames, are a persistent trap even for the highly literate.
Not yet for sale, demonstration copies can be obtained for commercial and educational use. Pro-NOUNCE-it is protected by 'International PCT patent no. pct/au00/00286: Text Processing and Display Methods and Systems' in the name of Mark O'Connor. The software is being developed by Carl Hindle of Blue Wizard software http://www.bluewizard.com.au. See below for further information and details on obtaining a demonstration copy.
Text may be instantly pasted into Pro-NOUNCE-it from any source - web, email, or Word. Information about the pronunciation of each word - and in fact each letter - is automatically added. Some or all of that information is then displayed, at the user's choice. Correct spelling and punctuation are retained. The pronunciation of each letter is shown by slight yet clearly perceptible alterations to its shape and sometimes its color. Because the eye scans 3 to 4 times faster than the tongue speaks, such visual information is much more swiftly absorbed than that provided by an ‘audio display’ – though this too is available.
This method of showing pronunciation is quite different from the pronunciation-guide you might find in a dictionary, where the only way to show a word's pronunciation is to write it out a second time in a different alphabet. (No one is going to read continuous text in which each word appears twice; whereas texts in Pro-NOUNCE-it are quite easy to read. Indeed for those who are troubled by their inability to form an "audio-image" of those words they know only on the page, it should be easier than normal text.)
Most importantly, the amount of information offered is under the user's control. There are ten levels of display available. The first shows no visual changes to the text, and the last shows full phonemic information about the pronunciation. In all levels you can place the cursor on a given letter to bring up an explanation of exactly how it is pronounced in a particular word (in a particular dialect).
Here are some "texts" comprising words that are pronounced differently in different dialects:
1. For Australian versus British:
nephew, tryst, dance, chance, glance, example, sample, Ralph, exam, ensure, sure, assure, insure, poor, moor, boor, Moorish, mooring, ambiguous, assiduous, twelfth, garage, actual, actuary, annual, bureau, lingerie, lure, pure, women, vitamin
2. For British (or Australian) versus American:
herb odd zenith asthma Monday vase half calf after clerk erase example exam been
tomato syrup quinine dynasty schedule mauve garage chagrin medicine centenary
stationary, figure leisure path glass grass can’t ask laugh pass basket era Sahara
corollary frontier laboratory bastard military nuclear new territory what tuna
hurry scurry cataract cooperate occur worrisome
occurrence actual sexual actuary bureau, cough, dew, encore, glance,
lingerie, lure, ordinary, past, poor, prayer, rarely, rendezvous, sure, there,
what, vitamin, tuna, perpetual, situation, student, duke, due, assume, engine
nude, tune, Tuesday, apricot, beta, charade, cordial, fillet, privacy, route,
schedule, semi, strychnine, banana, zebra
Those who have a copy of the Pro-NOUNCE-it software can simply place this list in the top panel on their screen, then click on Convert, then change the choice of Dialect, and see the resulting changes.
For further information about Pro-NOUNCE-it see:
For other enquiries or to obtain a demonstration copy for commercial or educational use contact Mark O'Connor for a demonstration-copy. [ mark@australianpoet.com ]