an incomplete program for looking for cross-linguistic "minimal pairs" involving English flapped coronals and Spanish [r] between English and Spanish

engspan.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import re

"""
American English flapped /t/ or /d/ (both realized as [ɾ]) might
sound to a Spanish speaker as being closer to a Spanish /r/ than
either Spanish /t/ or /d/ (especially since Spanish /d/ is often
realized as [ð]). Wanted: real English words that would "be" real
Spanish words if you interpreted the English [ɾ] as a Spanish /r/.

If we symbolize English /t/ and /d/ as T, we can look for words
that have intervocalic T in a phonetically transcribed database.
We'll use the readily available CMU pronouncing dictionary:

http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict

Our program will look for the pattern VTV in this dictionary,
then replace the T with r, and search for words that match the
resulting string in a Spanish wordlist.

"""
SPANISH_WORDS = 'spanish-words.txt'

spanish_words = [w.strip() for w in open(SPANISH_WORDS,'U').decode('utf-8').splitlines()]

spanish_words = set(spanish_words)

cmu_dict = process_cmu_dict(CMUDICT)

spanish_words = set(spanish_words)

def process_cmu_dict(cmudict_file):
  # create a phonetic wordlist 
  pass

flappablePATTERN = '' # something that will find intervocalic t and d

def rhoticize(word):
  return re.sub(flappablePATTERN, 'r', word)

for word in cmu_dict:
  if rhoticize(word) in spanish_words:
    print word

""" 
What's needed to make this happen:

1) figure out how to write process_cmu_dict()
2) find a suitable spanish-words.txt, the bigger the better
3) figure out how to define flappablePATTERN
4) run it.

Extending this to look for English/Korean (or any other language)
would involve a similar process, but would involve a transliteration
stage for many languages.

"""