Syllables

[kanen]

I'm doing something which requires me to understand how many syllables are in a word I've retrieved.

Anyone have any experience figuring this out in newLisp?

[rickyboy]

Kanen,

To answer your question, no. But, assuming you mean English words and you want a purely algorithmic approach, it looks like the best you can do it is by heuristic. The first (highest voted answer) on this stackoverflow post has a link to the TeX hyphenation algorithm. That looks pretty promising.

Also, maybe there is an on-line dictionary of English words that are already hyphenated to which you could appeal (i.e. have a lookup table).

Good luck, man!

[ralph.ronnquist]

If you are looking at syllables in terms of sound (rather than the hyphenation problem), you might do something fun with
http://svn.code.sf.net/p/cmusphinx/code ... udict.0.7a
which is an english phonetic dictionary (copyright CMU). You'll probably need to compound certain phoneme series into syllables before counting.

[rickyboy]

Looks like that could be made into a nice lookup table. It's easy to see the pronounced vowel sounds (in the code) and count them. That count should equal the syllable count. Nice find, Ralph!

[kanen]

You guys are very helpful. With a little training and some newLisp magic, I figured it out and created a giant table from my results.

Code: Select all

(set 'phonetics '(
  ("AABERG" 2) 
  ("AACHEN" 2) 
  ("AACHENER" 3) 
  ("AAKER" 2) 
  ("AALSETH" 2) 
  ("AAMODT" 2) 
  ("AANCOR" 2) 
  ("AARDEMA" 3) 
  ("AARDVARK" 2) ... )

[Lutz]

… now with the phonetics association list, you can quickly create a context for lookup:

Code: Select all

> (new Tree 'Syllables)
Syllables
> (Syllables phonetics)
Syllables
> (Syllables "AARDEMA")
3
> 

see also here: http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/newlis ... .html#hash