This is a phonetic-access dictionary (beta) of English for Polish learners.
Like in other electronic dictionaries, specific words can be looked up in this dictionary
or wildcards can be used to generate lists of words meeting predefined
criteria. Unlike in other dictionaries, however, no semantic information is
provided of any type: there are no definitions of English words or
'translation-equivalents' of English words in Polish. There are also no
examples of usage or syntactic information.
Instead, this dictionary offers a lot of phonetic information of many kinds.
For example, it is possible to check, for a given word:
(1) its phonetic transcription in British, American and "Polglish"
accents,
(2) its syllable structure, in terms of C(onsonats) and V(owels),
(3) its length in phonemes and syllables,
(4) its phonetic difficulty to Polish learners, expressed a the Phonetic
Difficulty Index (PDI).
What is important, all this phonetic information is not only displayed when the
word is found in an ordinary way (i.e. via its spelling), but can also be used
actively to SEARCH for words in the dictionary meeting specific phonetic
criteria; hence Phonetic-Access Dictionary. For example: (a) words containing a
specific phoneme can be found, (b) words with a particular syllable structure
can be found, (c) words of predefined length can be found, (d) words with given
phonetic difficulties can be found, or, indeed, all these criteria, plus many
others, can be combined in arbitrary ways to pinpoint phono-lexical areas with
very high precision. Some example searches are shown here.
There are other similar resources accessible on-line, for example, Mike Hammond's phonetic-access dictionary or The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (see below for a list of links), but none offers such a
comprehensive list of phonetic search criteria over an equally extensive
word-list. Also the Phonetic Difficulty Index is of course unique to this
dictionary.
The PDI appers in this dictionary in two forms. First as a simple numeric
measure of the rated phonetic difficulty of the given word to Polish learners
of English (integer value between 0-easy and 10-hard); second as a set of 57
difficulty codes,
each coding a specific pronouncing problem, such as "contains X " or
"has more than 5 syllables". The two PDI indicators can be used
singly or in combination with any other phonetic criterion accessible in the
dictionary to find words with given pronouncing (difficulty) characteristics.
My full bibliography on PDI, its genesis, structure, functions and use, is to
be found here.
This dictionary, technically referred to as CUV3, is a revised version of the
original 1992 Roger Mitton's CUV2 list, which was itself an edited wordlist
derived from the computer-usable version (CUV) of the Oxford Advanced Learner's
Dictionary of Current English, third edition, published by the Oxford
University Press in 1974 (for history of CUV2 see: here). The revisions and additions which I made to
CUV2 in the process of converting it to CUV3 are explained, described and
exemplified here, in a
chapter from my in-press book devoted to the phonetics of EFL dictionary
definitions (see abstract of the book). The original CUV2 file was also
independently revised by Jennifer Pedler into so-called CUVPlus, which is, however, rather different in its
composition from CUV3.
One important difference between CUV2 and CUVPlus on the one hand, and CUV3 on
the other, is the system of transcription. The latter rigorously adheres to
grapho-phonemic bi-uniqueness, i.e. one-symbol-one-sound principle, also for
diphthongs (coded with digits) and affricates, while the former use the more
traditional scheme, where two characters may be used for one phoneme, e.g. /aI/
for the diphthong in "type". It should be noted that neither system
conforms to the standard of SAMPA, by now the most respected and wide-spread
ASCII rendition of phonetic transcription.
This
beta version of the PDI-enabled PAD is offered free of charge, exclusively for
research and educational purposes, to registered participants of the sixth
national conference on teaching foreign language phonetics in Poland, Mikorzyn,
8-10 May 2006. Further distribution in
any form, uploading to the Internet, file-sharing, and other methods of dissemination
of this application, including all necessary support files and programs, would
be in breach of applicable intellectual property rights of Włodzimierz
Sobkowiak, Aleksandra Wojnowska-Siekierska and Oxford University Press.
Last update: 29 April 2006, by WS