Is there a metric by which the pronounceability of of a combination of letters can be judged? And is there anything that Perl can do to measure it?

Pronounceable by whom is a variable, xkz might be pronounceable in Czech or Polish; but since I am chronically monoligual; let's stick to 'by native English speakers'.

That still leaves plenty of scope for sounds made by the native English speakers from some parts of the world that are totally unreproducible by those from others; but its a place to start.

To be useful, the pronunciations would need to be distinct; and changing the pronunciation of known word, to enable a less common spelling to (re)use that sound defeats the purpose.

Ie. Deciding to pronounce 'are':ah-rey, so that 'aar' can be pronounced as ah doesn't work.

Also, I think that the Dutch could intone a difference between 'six' and 'syx' and hear the difference; but I'm pretty sure I can't do either.

For the 'Perl content' and 'what have you got' criteria, this produces all 17,576 3-letter combinations. Can you add code to eliminate the unpronounceable?:

use Algorithm::Combinatorics qw[ variations_with_repetition ];;
$i = variations_with_repetition( [ 'a'..'z' ], 3 );;
$" = ''; print "@$_" while $_ = $i->next;;
aaa
aab
aac
aad
...

[download]

I thought perhaps that any combination that contained a vowel or y might work:

$" = ''; $_ = join( '', @$_ ), m[[aeiouy]] and print while $_ = $i->ne
+xt;;

[download]

But I don't think any of these would qualify: xxa xxe xxi xxo xxu xxy xza xze xzi xzo xzu xzy.

And there is a distinguish-ability problem with things like gga gja jga & jja. Again the Dutch might get something like kh-yah & ye-gah for the middle two, but I probably wouldn't be able to pronounce either to their satisfaction.

The application, albeit a light-hearted speculation rather than yet a serious pursuit, is the Huffman encoded (I really just mean 'short' here) naming of a few (3-7?) thousand items (variables; values) in a phonetically pronounceable way, for clarity of verbal communication, and memorability.

And why not just use numbers? The hope is that at least some of the more common items could be named in some vaguely mnemonic way; to aid in the second of the above goals in a way that "Item 237' never will.

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In reply to Pronouncible TLA's? by BrowserUk

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