If you are a professional linguist and would like to write articles about or share your research in linguistics and phonics you think would be helpful to steno learners, I would be beyond-belief thrilled with anything you wish to contribute to our courses and/or resource center.

Back in 1989, I sold everything I owned, gave up a great job, found a new home for my cat and headed to Europe with my bicycle and a backpack intending to spend the summer doing the gypsy wanderlust thing (not knowing then I'd end up spending the next five years on the road).  Landing in London, excited and overwhelmed by the simple fact I'd actually done it, I'd actually left America to chase my dream of world travel, having managed somehow to clumsily navigate my way through customs and immigration with my still-boxed bicycle and backpack, I asked a passerby where the nearest bathroom was.

"The what?"

"The bathroom.  A restroom.  Is there a restroom near here?"

She looked at me slightly confused for a moment, then began smiling as she said, "Oh, I love your accent!  You mean the toilet!"

Shocked by her calling a bathroom a toilet, I didn't know what to say so I responded, "My accent?  I don't have an accent."

She burst out laughing, then said, "You Americans are just so funny!"  Still laughing, she pointed me in the right direction

I'd been in Europe about 30 minutes and unbeknownst to me, the shattering of my worldview had begun (and continues to this day).

I have an accent?  No I don't, I speak great English, just ask any of my teachers, friends, family ...  

That moment in time is etched deeply in my mind.  Even now, over 30 years later, I can still feel that moment so distinctly, the sheer shock of the realization that I have an accent.

Up to that singular moment, it was my belief that the English I spoke was "normal" and everyone who didn't pronounce English the way I did had an "accent".  At the time, I wasn't a particularly isolated or insulated American; or rather, at least I didn't think I was.   I read widely, had a huge vocabulary and had already traveled and explored more than 20 states and much of eastern Canada extensively.  I'd lived in Washington, DC for the prior three years surrounded by people from every imaginable corner of the world yet never once in the 25 years I'd lived to that day did it occur to me that I had an accent.

Much less the simple fact that every single human speaks with an accent and all accents are valid.  That paradigm would take me a few more years to truly grok.

I would go on to misunderstand the English language I was immersed in quite a bit over the next three months as I rode me pushbike along the southern coast of England, the coastline of Wales to Lands End then through Scotland all the way up to John O'Groats.  Yet by the time I boarded the  ferry across the channel to Brussels, most English sounded "normal" to me.

I had changed, fundamentally, at my core.  What I thought was English was enhanced and expanded, my brain encoded these previously unfamiliar to me word meanings and pronunciations and interlaced them within my prior existence.  The arrogance of my cultural indoctrination of "right" and "wrong" pronunciations, what is "standard" and "correct" English got completely and utterly smashed to bits, annihilated.

I'm sure you're rolling your eyes about now and thinking, "Get to the point, Greygal, what's this all got to do with steno?"

When learning steno, we often have a strong desire for there to be just one "right" way to stroke a word-sound.  We look up a word and get frustrated when we see six different ways to stroke a particular word and want to just delete all the entries we (often mistakenly) think are "misstroke" entries.  We want steno to be like spelling is with just one way to spell a word ... oh but wait!  There are two predominant approaches in English spelling, the UK approach and the North American approach!  Even spelling isn't universally standard!

Banging your head on the desk yet?

If I may, let me try and give you a bit of a framework, a paradigm, to approach the beautiful variety of English pronunciations to help reduce your potential frustrations in steno.  Admittedly, I am not a linguist; my intention here is not to get into a deep linguistic explanation of phonemes and the complexities of lexical stress; a thorough linguistic explanation is beyond both my abilities and the scope of this website.   Just know I am doing my best to avoid triggering knee-jerk reactions and offense here and should that happen, accept my sincere apologies in advance.

Greygal's Pronunciation Paradigm

My pronunciation paradigm begins with three simple premises:

1.  All pronunciations are valid.

2.  Some pronunciations are more widely used than others.

3.  My inability to understand a speaker is a lack of exposure on my part.

When we frame what we hear within these three premises, the frustration over whether or not someone is pronouncing a word the "right" way is eliminated, we free ourselves from the arrogance of assuming one way of pronouncing a word is "standard" while another is "wrong", and we shift the responsibility of understanding from the speaker to ourselves.

By framing what I hear within these three premises, this paradigm, I have eliminated virtually all frustration that I use to stress myself out with when transcribing the hundreds of different clients I transcribe on a near daily basis.

I am rarely challenged to understand a speaker when I am transcribing the English of England, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Germany, India, Mexico and Iceland.  Why?  Because I have been extensively exposed to and/or immersed within speakers of English from these countries.  I don't even really hear an "accent" at all, I simply hear English.

Yet I have several clients from a few southern US states who I struggle with understanding every single time I work on their dictation.  It takes 3-5 minutes for my ear and brain to adapt to their enunciations and lexical stresses, the "shape" of their vowels and more often than not, I am still guessing on many words based on context.  My struggles understanding them is not their fault; it is MY lack of exposure and immersion in the nuances of some southern American English that is at fault.

Whether we are using stenography to provide realtime live translation services like a certified CART provider does or capturing the back-and-forth of a deposition or trial like a court reporter does, transcribing previously recorded audio like I do, or captioning live broadcasts, the responsibility for understanding and accuracy falls on us as the stenographer, transcriber, captioner, translator, reporter.  It is futile and a waste of emotional energy to rage about "right" and "wrong" pronunciations, what is "standard" English and what is not.  Ultimately, it is our responsibility to understand what is said and write it accurately.  So, how do we do that when faced with literal thousands of pronunciation variations?

Pronunciations and the Steno Dictionary

Of course, it would be a massive undertaking for any steno dictionary to have entries for every single possible variation in pronunciation.  Having said that, the Plover steno dictionary does provide quite a few solutions.

1.  There are strokes for the most widely used variations in pronunciation of the most common 1,000 or so words.  

Let's look at the word "either", which depending on which top 1000 list you look at, is either the 559th most common word or the 807th most common word.

The most widely used pronunciation variations of "either" are "ai-ther" and "ee-ther".

Using the Spectra Lexer lookup plugin in Plover, we find, among others, the following two phonetic-syllabic entries:



From a "steno is phonetic and syllabic" perspective, we would stroke AOE/THER when we here "ee-ther" and AO*EUT/ER when we hear "ai-ther".  The dictionary knows these are two widely used pronunciations and therefore, it contains a stroke for each pronunciation.  These strokes are NOT "misstroke" entries, they are phonetically aware stroke entries.

Of course, since "either" is a top-1000 commonly used English word, Plover has a single-stroke brief for it!  In keeping with the essentially phonetic principle of stenography, there is a single-stroke brief for both of these most widely used pronunciations.



Which brief you use is entirely up to you.  You may choose to stroke AOERT when you here "ee-ther" or AOEURT when you here "ai-ther" ... or just pick one and always use that whenever you hear the word "either" no matter how it is pronounced.  It's entirely up to you!  (Side note:  It drives me nuts that most online steno practice websites use AOERT as the stroke hint, since I pronounce it as "ai-ther" and want to stroke it that way lol!)

You will find the same pattern of phonetic-syllabic entries and brief entries for the word "neither" - which is widely pronounced as either "nee-ther" or "nigh-ther".  Say that three times fast!  

"But Greygal, I still know that someone means 'either' whether they pronounce it one way or another."  That may be true with the word "either" for you, but it may not be true for someone who has never been exposed to one or the other pronunciation, and it may not be true for you with the pronunciation of a different word.  

There are literal thousands of English words within the Plover dictionary that contain entries for the most widely used pronunciations.  Some are phonetic-syllabic entries, some are briefs, but the dictionary does its best to cover as many of the most widely used variations as it can.   The next time you look up a word in Plover and see a bunch of entries that make no sense to you, resist the urge to delete them thinking they are "misstroke" entries and instead, try sounding them out.  More often than not, I bet you find what you once thought was a "misstroke" entry is, in fact, a pronunciation variation!


2.  Nearly all of the 100 most often used English words are written with a brief, no matter how they are pronounced.

As frustrating as it is at times for a new learner of steno to deal with learning briefs for common words, "but I thought steno was writing by sound!", these briefs greatly speed up our transcriptions, real-time translations, coding and writing.

Let's take a look at the word "the".  "The" is the #1 most commonly used word in the English language.  That is true around the world everywhere English is spoken.  Although it is always spelled "the", it may be pronounced "thee", "thah", "theah", "thuh", "daah", "duhr", and other variations with the most widely used pronunciations being "thuh" (usually when "the" is before a word that begins with a consonant) and "thee" (usually when "the" is before a word that begins with a vowel).

So why doesn't the dictionary have separate strokes for "thee" and "thuh"?  Simple:  It's the single most used word in the English language.  You will write the word "the" more than any other word you will ever write.  It makes absolute sense to use a brief for the word you write the most, doesn't it?

This is true for most of the 100 most used English words.  Yes, having to memorize briefs instead of just writing these words phonetically is a bit of a hassle but the time saved is worth it.  Not to mention, by briefing these common words (especially the top 20 most used words), it enables the creation of briefs for common phrases such as "he did", "they are", "with the" etcetera so much simpler and straightforward.  [note to self - I think I need to do a better job connecting this to how it helps us with understanding what we hear ... I know it helps me!]

Some Tips and Advice

1.  When in doubt what word a speaker is saying, use context to guide you.

A speaker is doing a presentation on reconstructive surgery about dog bites.  He keeps clearly and distinctly saying "dock beat" and you're starting to stress out trying to figure whether or not he is actually saying "dog bites".  Take a deep breath and relax for a moment.  Focus on what you do know:  (1)  You know the subject of the presentation is about dog bites.  (2)  "Dock beat" does not fit within the context of statements such as "The parents brought the child to the emergency room after the dock beat"  and "Prior to surgery, the area of the dock beat was flushed with...".  With the overall and specific context to guide you, it's a safe assumption that the speaker is saying "dog bite".  You confidently stroke "dog bite" and everyone is happy and amazed at your steno super powers!

2.  Write the word they are saying exactly as they are pronouncing and *fingers crossed* trust your dictionary.

I was transcribing a deposition summary report that was part of a class action suit.  The speaker kept saying "ah sigh".  At first, I thought he was saying "I sigh" but that simply didn't fit in the context, especially in the context of "choked on ah sigh berries".  At first, I simply kept writing !!!! (my personal "I need to go back and check this later" mark), hoping that eventually, he'd say it in a way I could figure it out but eventually, after hearing it for the umpteenth time, I paused the audio and stroked several variations of "ah sigh", "I sigh", both single and double.  On my third attempt, A/SAOEU came back with "acai" and like a thunderstorm, it hit me he was talking about acai berries ... a word I thought was pronounced "ah kee ah"!  A perfect example of my Pronunciation Paradigm No. 3!  As someone who just isn't all that into fruit smoothies and whatever the latest health food fad is, my exposure to what acai fruit is and how it is pronounced limited my understanding of the speaker.

I had exactly the same thing happen with the word "quinoa" - client said what sounded like "keen wa" or "keen wha", and I had no clue what word he meant so I stroked what I heard:  KAOEPB/WA and first time was the charm - he's saying "quinoa"!  (Then I googled what quinoa was, bought some, tried it, liked it and eat it regularly ever since.)

3.  Expose yourself to a variety of English speakers.  Immerse yourself when you can.

George Mason University's Speech Accent Archive is excellent http://accent.gmu.edu/

4.  Focus on how they are saying their vowels in common, simple words you do understand to aid your understanding of the more complex words they say.

5.  Take a deep breath and relax.  Remember, the longer you listen to a particular speaker, the easier it becomes to understand them.
For the record, when typing on a standard keyboard, I misspell the word "pronunciation" every single time.  Why?  Because I pronounce it as "pro-nounce-see-ai-shun"!  I have for years and years.  Way back in the WordPerfect days on a DOS computer, I even created a shortcut for the word "pronunciation" because I misspelled it so often; it's been in my Word autocorrects for literal decades.  Imagine my shock and joy the first time I ever attempted to write "pronunciation" in steno and I got it write the very first time!  Excitedly, I looked it up in the Plover dictionary and was overjoyed to find there was at least three entries that were logically consistent (to me) with my pronunciation of pronunciation!

It was only about 2 years ago - when I first started building StudySteno - that I realized with some shock that my pronunciation of the word "pronunciation" isn't considered a "linguistically acceptable" variation at all!  Thankfully, Plover's dictionary disagrees because I'm not about to stop pronouncing pronunciation as "pro-nounce-see-ai-shun" :D  It's just too ingrained in me.  


Last modified: Thursday, 21 December 2023, 7:21 AM