[math-fun] Spoonerisms
Do there exist dictionaries of spoonerisms analogous to rhyming dictionaries? One could imagine a program that would go through a phonetic dictionary of English words, looking at each pair of words and trying to spoonerize them; usually this would fail, but if n is the number of words in the dictionary, there would be n-choose-2 pairs to try, so I'm guessing there'd be lots of hits. Jim Propp
the national puzzlers' league probably has a database of spoonerisms. here is one page on them https://enigma.puzzlers.org/guide/common#spooner On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 6:36 PM James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
Do there exist dictionaries of spoonerisms analogous to rhyming dictionaries?
One could imagine a program that would go through a phonetic dictionary of English words, looking at each pair of words and trying to spoonerize them; usually this would fail, but if n is the number of words in the dictionary, there would be n-choose-2 pairs to try, so I'm guessing there'd be lots of hits.
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-- Thane Plambeck tplambeck@gmail.com http://counterwave.com/
You could some of them easily by grouping all words with a common tail, such as: (b, c, k, m, n, r, s, sm, tr, qu)ite and then look for words with a common prefix pair (b, c, f, h, l, m, qu, r, s, t, w, br, fl, ...)ake to find unremarkable Spoonerisms like: "That a cake bite" vs. "That's a bake cite". Hilarie 5 Nov 2020 James Propp:
Do there exist dictionaries of spoonerisms analogous to rhyming dictionaries?
One could imagine a program that would go through a phonetic dictionary of English words, looking at each pair of words and trying to spoonerize them; usually this would fail, but if n is the number of words in the dictionary, there would be n-choose-2 pairs to try, so I'm guessing there'd be lots of hits.
Jim Propp _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 1:20 AM Hilarie Orman <ho@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
You could some of them easily by grouping all words with a common tail, such as: (b, c, k, m, n, r, s, sm, tr, qu)ite and then look for words with a common prefix pair (b, c, f, h, l, m, qu, r, s, t, w, br, fl, ...)ake to find unremarkable Spoonerisms like: "That a cake bite" vs. "That's a bake cite".
That will find spoonerism candidates, but will have both false positives and false negatives, because spoonerisms are defined by pronunciation, not spelling. The example you gave is a good one: "cake bite" => "bake cite" is not a spoonerism, but "cake bite" => "bake kite" is. Is there an dictionary, either online or otherwise publicly available, tat has the map from spelling to pronunciation (for example in IPA) in machine-readable form? That would be really useful for things like this. Andy
On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 5:39 AM Andy Latto <andy.latto@pobox.com> wrote:
Is there an dictionary, either online or otherwise publicly available, tat has the map from spelling to pronunciation (for example in IPA) in machine-readable form? That would be really useful for things like this.
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike https://reperiendi.wordpress.com
participants (5)
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Thane Plambeck