Keith nuttle wrote: > Is anyone aware of a program that can generate all of the possible > spellings for the phonetic sounds in a name? > > It should include the phonetic variations of the sound, in most common > dialects. > > It should also consider letter degradations. over time, t's degrade to > d's. > > Examples Bur, Ber, Bir could all be pronounced and heard as being the > same sound. > > Yeah, but it runs on an IBM30/60 (or, wait!, was it a 30/90?) Anyway, I'm not sure you _really_ want that (g). As I recall the program produced about an inch thick pile of print-out on the old green-and-white wide computer paper. About half of it was pure gibberish. You can get a flavor by visiting the surname thesaurus at http://www.imagepartners.co.uk/ It will give you several flavors of possibilities. BUT: 1. some folks made their H look more like an A than their A did. 2. what the clerk who wrote it down HEARD is a little more important than what the applicant SAID -- my grandson has a toy which says the French for Red Blue and Yellow, except that what it says for Red sounds more like Orange than Red to me. [It's a pretty simple little program to write, I'd imagine some of the gurus over on soc.genealogy.computing could whip one out in an hour or two. BUT as I said, about half the output will be gibberish, and sorting out the gibberish from the potentially useable (or coding in enough fail-safes to prevent that) took a lot longer than making up the list by hand.] Cheryl