SaypYu in Rust

SaypYu ("Spell as you pronounce, universally") is a phonetic alphabet of 24 letters to spell languages, including English. It allows one to very easily determine how to pronounce words by spelling them as they are pronounced.

This crate allows one to convert the mighty and complex International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) into something far more readable and usable by the average person. This was originally a small part of my other project, The Everything Dictionary, in which I created it to allow non-linguists to quickly and easily learn the pronunciations of words without being forced to consult with complicated and hard to use pronunciation keys.

Learning how to pronounce words should be simple, fast, and accurate.

I decided to make the code open-source since there's next to no resources online on how to convert IPA to SaypYu. Even the section about it on the SaypYu Wikipedia page is very incomplete. And this happens to be very useful if you have IPA and you're trying to make it more readable.

Example

// let's learn how to pronounce crustacean
let ipa = "krʌˈsteɪʃən";
let result = saypyu::ipa_to_saypyu(ipa);
assert_eq!(result, "krɘsteyshɘn");

In case you're wondering, 'ɘ', called schwa, is the only special letter you need to know in SaypYu. It's pronounced like the first letter in the words "ago" and "about". Compare that to the extreme complexity of the IPA just above it and you'll see just how simple and useful SaypYu can be!

The file ipa_to_saypyu.test is used for testing but also contains a good many different English words with their IPA and SaypYu pronunciations

Notes

There were three primary sources used in creating the map from IPA to SaypYu. These were all extrememly useful but even official sources were sometimes contradictory or illogical (look at some of the comments in the test file I linked above to see what I'm talking about). These contradictions had to be reconciled in the most consistent and logical way possible, and as a result of this you might occasionally find an example of SaypYu in the wild that disagrees with what this crate thinks the SaypYu should be. There may be different opinions out there, but this crate is always consistent and always outputs the most logical pronunciation based on all the sources I have on SaypYu.

Even so, if you do find something wrong, or just aren't certain about something, please make an issue! I'd love to make this crate the best it can be for SaypYu 😄

This crate does use a few reforms to SaypYu suggested by Phillip West as they greatly help in making SaypYu even more easily understandable and immediately usable to people who know nothing about it. If one needs to learn what each pattern of letters means before they can even try to pronounce a word, that defeats the entire purpose.

Sources:

• saypyu.com
• Converting English Words into SaypYu by Phillip West
• Necessary Reforms to SayPyu : The Next Steps by Phillip West

License

This crate is distributed under the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE for details. Note that while this code has been made open-source, the rest of The Everything Dictionary codebase remains All Rights Reserved.