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speech - Are there rules of pronunciation for words in English?



I know that there is at least one language we can pronounce based on the word's form (Vietnamese) which means that once you know how to write it, you will also know how to pronounce it.


But in English, are English words like Chinese words, meaning that we can't pronounce the word based on its form and we must know the sound of the word in order to pronounce it correctly ? (like Pinyin for Chinese). For instance, the word read you must know it's sound is /ri:d/ in order to pronounce correctly.



Answer



It is true that you cannot determine an English word's pronunciation based only on its spelling. As an extreme example, English has a number of groups of words which are heteronyms, meaning that they have the same spelling but different pronunciations. For example, "read" can be pronounced in two different ways, with the vowel being a long e or a short e, depending on whether it is a present tense verb or past tense verb. (Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with phonetic notation or IPA to be sure of writing it out properly. Hopefully someone else will post a better answer that includes that information.)


As I understand it, these pronunciation "irregularities" occur in a large but limited number of words. A text-to-speech engine would need to store pronunciation information specific to those words, and it would need to have information about the grammatical context to choose the proper pronunciation in each case. But other than that limited set of words, and especially for words that have been recently introduced to the language, you usually can figure out the pronunciation based on the spelling. So a TTS engine would have a set of rules programmed into it that it falls back on whenever it encounters a word that it doesn't have a special pronunciation for. (Speakers of English do the same thing: there is a set of rules that people will fall back on when they don't know how to pronounce a word, although the specific rules vary by dialect.)


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