On Sun, Jan 10, 2021 at 03:52 PM, Dan Beaver wrote:

While listening I heard him say to type S N D V O L and press enter.  But what I actually heard was tinvol not S N D V O L.  I am still frequently disgusted with how messy the pronunciation tables are for the different synths.

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Well, it's never easy to decide how to "pronounce the unpronounceable."   Without getting too "linguist geeky" every language has what are called phonotactic constraints, which means certain sound combinations that are, and are not, allowed to occur in combination with each other.  In English, S N D, as those three letters alone, violates phonotactic constraints.  There's no English word where those three consonants, in succession, exist or can be pronounced.

And when any effort to try to pronounce this as anything other than a letter sequence is made, the result is, in one way or another, wrong.

You'll often hear people say "send vol," turning the opening into an English word that conforms to the phonotactic constraints of the language.  But they're not saying what's written on the page, but trying to come up with something that they can get out of their mouths.

Very often a number of entries in my default dictionary are acronyms that are unpronounceable under English phonotactic constraints as their single letters.  NVDA as N V D A being a perfect example.  Words, and particularly surnames where I grew up, that have their roots elsewhere in the world are hell for an English reader because you often have no idea how to pronounce them.  My favorite example, and a real one from my younger days, was the surname spelled D Z I A G W A.  I challenge any native English speaker to come even close to guessing how that one sounds.  It was pronounced as jungwa.  (that leading j is like the g in giraffe).

The poor synth folks really can't win, and I suspect this sort of things occurs in any language when something is spelled out in a way that language just doesn't allow.
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Brian - Windows 10 Pro, 64-Bit, Version 20H2, Build 19042  

The depths of denial one can be pushed to by outside forces of disapproval can make you not even recognize yourself to yourself.

       ~ Brian Vogel