Phonemes

This appendix lists the phoneme symbols for North American English that the MacinTalk synthesizer recognizes. Other languages and dialects use different phoneme collections. Whether you use a speech synthesis function to get the default phonemic representation of a word or you want to create it yourself, you need to know the symbols that represent individual phonemes. In addition, if you are developing a custom synthesizer that produces North American English speech, you must make sure it can interpret the phonemes listed in this appendix.

Phonemes divide into two groups: vowels and consonants. All phoneme symbols that represent vowels are pairs of uppercase letters. Consonants are represented by a single letter.

In Table B-1, a phoneme symbol is followed by a word in which a letter or combination of letters is displayed in bold font. The letter or letter combination in bold exemplifies the sound the phoneme symbol represents. The two exceptions to this are the first two symbols, which stand for silence and a breath intake.