| | | Double Metaphone | |
The :double-metaphone
The Metaphone algorithm, published by Lawrence Philips in 1990, improved early phonetic approaches, such as Soundex, by attempting to correctly code cases where “gh” is pronounced as “f” as in “laugh” and when it is silent, as in “dough,” or where “t,” “c,” and “s” are pronounced as “sh” (or “ch,” which is treated as a sound that is similar enough to “sh” to be mapped to the same encoding value) as in “ratio,” “ciao,” and “erosion.” Although Metaphone was an improvement, it failed to encode many common words accurately, including the silent “l” in “lincoln,” and the case of “school” where “ch” is pronounced as “k.” Also, by using the Soundex style of encoding an initial vowel as it appears, Metaphone results in different encodings for “Otto” and “auto,” which sound similar enough to match.
Double Metaphone was published by Lawrence Philips in 2000 to improve accuracy further than was achieved by Metaphone. It maps all initial vowels to “A,” matching “Otto” to “auto.” It attempts to correctly encode a number of common words and names commonly found in the United States that are of non-english origin and are usually pronounced correctly according to their non-english spellings, by Americans, such as “Jose” or “pizza.” It also attempts to account for cases where more than one pronunciation may be common in the United States, such as the Spanish name “Cabrillo” which might be plausibly pronounced as “cabreeyo” or “cabrillo.” Double Metaphone addresses exceptions in regular English pronunciation, such as the many cases of silent consonants, such as the silent “l” in “lincoln” or the silent “s” in “island,” as well as the pronunciation of “s” as “sh” in “sugar,” or an anomaly like “caesar,” an unusual case of a “c” followed by an “a” where the “c” is pronounced as “s.”
Even with this more detailed treatment, Double Metaphone still misses a number of common exceptions, such as the silent “p” in “receipt,” many cases where “ch” is pronounced as “k” instead of “ch” as in “monarch,” many cases where Americans pronounce words of non-English origin according to their non-English pronunciations, such as “chutzpah,” and exceptions such as “colonel,” pronounced “kernal,” and “tucson,” pronounced “tooson.”
In addition to providing strict adherence to the Double Metaphone algorithm, this Common Lisp implementation also supports an extended-encoding option that activates additional encoding rules that separate the sounds used for “B” and “P,” for “D” and “T,” for “F” and “V,” and for “S” and “Z.” The extended-encoding option often produces phonetic-code results that are more natural and intuitive.
Entities
The GBBopen Project
| | | Double Metaphone | |