Messages

1

Your Rhymes / Re: Orange/oranges

« on: October 31, 2016, 12:05:29 AM »

In the context of programming, "core engine" can rhyme with "orange in".

Note that this one, like 'door hinge', requires the Cot-Caught merger.

2

Accents and phonemes and rhymes, oh, my! / Ways to hear examples of words rhyming/not rhyming

« on: October 29, 2016, 11:49:09 PM »

Hi,

One of the goals of this dictionary is to make people more aware of their own accents and how accent-specific their rhymes might be. But it can be difficult to believe that accents exist where a given pair of words rhymes or doesn't rhyme. It can help to hear people with different accents pronounce the words. Here are some ways you can do that:

Text-to-speech
Your computer or phone probably has text-to-speech software built in, and it may have a selection of voices with regional accents.

On a Mac, you can go to System Preferences→Accessibility→Speech and choose a voice; you can download many voices with other accents and languages by choosing 'Customize…' at the bottom of that menu. Once you've chosen a voice, you can select text in any application and go to the Edit menu, Speech submenu, and choose 'Start Speaking'.

On an iPhone, you can change Siri's accent by going to Settings→Siri→Siri Voice and selecting an accent. Then you may need to turn on Speak Selection. Go to Settings→General→Accessibility→Speech and turn on Speak Selection. Now you can select text in any application and choose the 'Speak…' option.

On the web, acapela group has a text-to-speech demo with several accents and languages.

Speech sample databases
There are several websites with recordings of different speakers reading a sample passage. Some I like are:

The Speech Accent Archive by George Mason University. This has the same passage read by native and non-native English speakers from around the world, and phonetic transcriptions of their recordings.

The Language Index by Marburg University. This one has speech samples and information on not only different accents of English but also many other languages of the world, and even some languages of other (fictional) worlds. You will have to create a free account to see all the languages.

Do you know of any other such resources, or how to change accents of the text-to-speech on other computers?

3

That does(n’t) rhyme for me! / Re: bought/Clairaut

« on: October 29, 2016, 08:49:57 PM »

Indeed, I've heard there are several towns called Beaulieu with quite different pronunciations.

4

Suggestions / Re: New accent parameters

« on: October 29, 2016, 08:27:40 PM »

Panda/pander merger. In my experience, it correlates strongly with non-rhoticity (So that's where the r went! They tacked it on at the end of the word!), but it's apparently not a perfect correlation, otherwise I'd propose merging it into the existing rhoticity setting.

The current non-rhotic setting does include pander as a rhyme for panda. To have this as a separate thing there could be either a separate panda/pander parameter, or one or two extra Rhoticity settings ('non-rhotic except for panda/pander', and 'rhotic except for panda/pander'.)

Once in a sandwich shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I heard a customer order a "lodge tuner." I suppose he wanted to tune his lodge. At Logan Airport in Boston one frequently hears overhead pages involving "Delter Aihlines."

Delter Aihlines is non-rhotic with an intrusive R, and I suppose the same is true of 'lodge tuner' (with bonus father-bother merger) as well, though I'm not sure if it's called an intrusive R if there's nothing after it. I used to be amused by the 'alleluia ralleluia' while people were singing hymns in New Zealand.

I could perhaps add a setting for intrusive Rs, but I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the R that appears in the pronunciation of panda (or some other word ending in a vowel) when it is followed by an R word (which gives 'panda' two pronunciations, with the same rhymes all up but the rhoticity setting switched.)

5

That does(n’t) rhyme for me! / Re: bought/Clairaut

« on: October 29, 2016, 07:38:10 PM »

Indeed, this is one that the macOS speech synthesis pronounces incorrectly (at least, incorrectly according to French pronunciation) with an American English voice, which is where I get pronunciations from. Does anyone out there pronounce it to rhyme with 'bought'? I'll need to know whether to change the existing pronunciation or add the version that rhymes with 'though' as a homograph. Or maybe there should be an 'Pronouncing French words like a French person' accent parameter. 

6

That does(n’t) rhyme for me! / About this board

« on: October 29, 2016, 12:35:08 PM »

Welcome to the 'That does(n’t) rhyme for me!' board!

If you've found a purported rhyme on rhyme.science (or perhaps in someone else's poetry) which doesn't rhyme in your accent, even though your accent seems to have the accent parameters required for the rhyme, post about it here. The same goes for rhymes which work for you which you don't find in the dictionary. Maybe one of the words has the wrong pronunciation in the dictionary, in which case it will be fixed, or maybe your accent has an interesting feature which causes the words to rhyme or not rhyme, in which case perhaps a new accent parameter will be added to the dictionary to reflect that.

If you already know what is different about your accent that changes whether the rhyme works, check the New accent parameters thread to see whether I'm already planning to add that to the dictionary. You can comment there to register your interest in a planned feature so I know how to prioritise them. Otherwise, ask about it here and maybe we'll all learn something. It can be helpful to include the following:

• Where your accent is from, and anything you know about features of the accent, so we can work out how it affects the rhymes.
• Some examples of other words which the dictionary claims rhyme or don't rhyme with the word in question, and whether they rhyme for you, so we can figure out if an entire group of words rhymes or doesn't rhyme in a given accent, or just a specific word or subgroup of words has a different pronunciation in your accent.
• Perhaps an audio sample of the words rhyming/not rhyming; this could be either a recording of yourself, or a link to a song or similar.

To make the forum search on the main rhyme science page more useful, please only use the words themselves in the subject line, e.g. 'mass/pass' rather than 'mass and pass don't rhyme for me!' (Note: this particular example is due to the trap/bath split, which I will eventually add as an accent parameter.)

7

Your Rhymes / About this board

« on: October 27, 2016, 10:02:50 AM »

Welcome to the 'Your Rhymes' board!

Here you can ask for rhymes you couldn't find in the rhyme.science dictionary, tell people about interesting rhymes you've found (either in this dictionary or elsewhere) or share what you've done with rhymes in poetry or lyrics. There are no hard-and-fast rules as yet, but here are some suggestions to keep the board useful:

• The subjects on this board are searched whenever someone searches for a rhyme, so it's recommended you put the word(s) you've found rhymes for or are looking for rhymes for in the subject so that people looking for those rhymes will find the thread.
• It will also help people skimming the thread for rhymes if you put the rhyming words within the message in bold.
• Please search the existing threads first before starting a thread, and add to the existing discussion if it's relevant enough. It's okay to resurrect a long-dormant thread; that way we will have, for example, all the rhymes for 'orange' in one place.

To make the forum search on the main rhyme science page more useful, please only use the rhyming words themselves in the subject line, e.g. 'orange/oranges' rather than 'rhymes for orange/oranges'.

8

Your Rhymes / Orange/oranges

« on: October 22, 2016, 01:34:49 PM »

I know people are going to be searching for this, so until I add some to the dictionary I figured I'd give some examples here.

Tom Lehrer's example requires the Father-Bother merger, as well as enjambment (splitting a word at the end of a line) :

eating an orange
while making love
makes for bizarre enj-
oyment thereof

Some people use door hinge, which requires H-dropping, the Cot-Caught merger, and putting the stress on 'door' when it otherwise might not be. An example from Marian Call:

They drank all the pilsner and ate all the oranges
And she thought as the rotten and rusty door hinges

A perfect one (requiring only enjambment, but no particular features of the speaker's accent as far as I know) would be something worn with a very fancy kilt, 'sporran j-ewel'. Some other perfect ones I found online are Gorringe, Blorange, and Sporange.

I once rhymed 'orange S' with 'foreign ges-ture' in a poem about grapheme-colour synaesthesia.

Do you know of any more?

9

Suggestions / New accent parameters

« on: October 22, 2016, 01:20:08 PM »

Here's a list of the accent parameters (the options you get when searching for rhymes, such as rhoticity and Father-Bother) I currently plan on adding. Reply to let me know if there are any others you'd like, or if you'd find some of these more useful than others, so I can prioritise the work. I'll keep this list up-to-date with any that are planned, in progress, or finished.

• Merry-marry-Mary merger (with several different choices depending on which are merged.) This would allow the requirements behind such rhymes as 'marry 'em'/planetarium' to be made explicit. In the current rhyme database Mary and merry are merged (so I would have to go through manually and determine which words used which sound), and marry is split.
• Trap-Bath split because pass doesn't always rhyme with mass, nor does it necessarily rhyme with moss under the father-bother merger. These are currently merged, so again, they'd have to be split manually.
• Flapping, so that we can find rhymes like 'polluted' and 'all you did'
• Short-i schwa because apparently in accents other than my own, 'open' doesn't rhyme with 'hopin''. This has actually already been implemented, but I found some other issues related to it (for instance, the dictionary currently thinks that some words with the '-ising' spelling use a different vowel from the same words with '-izing' spelling, while they should be the same even without this new parameter) so I want to fix those first.
• G-dropping so that open will rhyme with hoping when the previous parameter is appropriately set. This one should be pretty easy to do.
• H-dropping because I know people are going to be searching for 'oranges' and 'door hinges'. (Another general improvement I plan to make is either creating special pages for expected searches such as 'orange', or adding in known examples manually, with attribution. Meanwhile, I've made a forum thread for it)
• The near-square merger so that Great Big Sea can have their conscience clear. Combined with the merry-marry-Mary merger (something which I suspect it rarely coincides with) this would give near-limitless rhyming power!

10

Suggestions / About this board

« on: October 21, 2016, 11:33:11 PM »

Welcome to the Suggestions board!

This is where you can make any suggestions about the site. This might include:

• Changes to the rhyme.science interface
• New accent parameters that you'd like to see added
• Changes to the structure of the forum

Please check the existing threads to find out what improvements are already planned or have already been suggested.

If you've found rhymes that don't rhyme for you, or didn't find rhymes that do, and you don't know of a specific feature of an accent that causes the difference, please post in the 'That does[n't] rhyme for me!' forum instead. There people can discuss the pronunciation and whether it rhymes in their accents, and eventually either a word's pronunciation will be fixed or a new accent parameter will be created.