a blog about #phonetic pangrams

After spending last night writing that blog post about pokemon phonetic pangrams, I felt like I was done with this hyperfixation and could move onto other things¹. This morning proved me wrong when I had the thought

Hey isn’t making a pangram kind of just a very specific case of that daily word game you made last year?

Suffice it to say that that inkling was correct, and it only took me all day to remember how that all worked, copy it into a new project, modify that into working for phonetic pangrams, set that project up with Render² for hosting, upload the iframe pointed there from itch.io, and build out a new itch.io page for the project. Take a look below:

It works with pokemon and the CMU phonetic dictionary, which covers a bunch of English words and names. It only supports General American English³ for now, but I think there are ways to extend that to other dialects going forward, with enough data about how the phonemes change.

Anyway, in the interest of keeping it short, that’s it! Enjoy, and please share your phonetic pangrams with each other…

As a follow-up to my previous post, I have uploaded the data and my previous solution to codeberg. Last time, I learned that Slither Wing is the only pokemon across all current generations to contain the ð phoneme, which meant that only datasets that included gen-9 could form true phonetic pangrams for General American English. With this in mind, I scraped the rest of the generations and compiled them into one unified dataset for all pokemon. As expected, I was able to find several 11-pokemon pangrams¹ by simply using the new dataset, but it made me wonder if there existed any pangrams with even fewer pokemon. I tried running the 10-mon pangram attempt across all gens and found that nothing happened for a while, even with the caching I had explained in the previous post.

Technical Hurdles

After discussing this with some of my friends on Discord, it became clear that the size of the problem-space being explored had grown very quickly with the size of the dataset of pokemon, just as predicted. For gen-1, there were at most (151 choose 10) combinations of pokemon to find a set that covered all 37 represented phonemes in that…

As I mentioned in my previous post, a phonetic pangram is a sentence or phrase that covers every one of the sounds in a given dialect of a language. Since proper nouns can form a phrase, a phonetic pangram could potentially be made from any sufficiently large collection of names.

This led me to the question: “Is it possible to make a phonetic pangram from pokemon names?” and more specifically, “Can we do so using only the 151 from the first generation of pokemon?”

Phonetics

For General American English, wikipedia lists the following sounds that comprise every commonly spoken word:

Consonants (24¹)

m, n, ŋ, p, b, t, d, k, ɡ, tʃ, dʒ, f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, h, l, r, j, w

Vowels (14)

ɪ, i, ʊ, u, ɛ, eɪ, ə, oʊ, æ, ɑ, aɪ, ɔɪ, aʊ, ɚ

To make a pangram, I simply needed pokemon names that encompassed each of these 38 phonemes. You could imagine a worst case of 38, where each pokemon is picked for having exactly on phoneme represented in its name, though I figured there was probably more overlap than that.

Pokemon name pronunciations

I was able to…

Pangrams are single sentences or phrases that include every letter of a given language’s alphabet at least once.

Pangram Examples

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow

There’s another type of sentence(s) or phrase(s) that gets every vowel sound - or even every unique sound overall - from a language pronounced at least once. A few are presented below, but I believe with some time and effort, we could do better

Phonemic Pangram Example

With tenure, Suzie’d have all the more leisure for yachting, but her publications are no good.

Phonetic Pangram Example

The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen, before she heard that symphony again, just as young Arthur wanted.

My own, bespoke phonetic pangrams

1. Fear not, boy: our usual chutzpah may win over grouchy foodies. Aye, hand your battered shank lengthwise up to their closed jaws.

2. L’chaim! Yes, after showing what three blue powdered treasures their benevolent hook caught, guys are joyous.

3. “Johann Sebastian Bach athleisure wear for jungles zips together proudly,” my voice shook.