the "or" sound in American English

[troybowman]

I'm playing with my new Allison voice, getting her to pronounce a few words while looking at http://www.cepstral.com/cgi-bin/support?page=lexicon and I'm having a hard time finding just a plain long "o" sound (without the "w" on the end). Is there an undocumented phoneme? Or an "or" phoneme like "er"? For example, I have not found a way to be able to reproduce the default pronunciation of the "or" sound in the word "more":

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$ swift more

I've tried different variations to (unsuccessfully) get to the same sound...

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$ swift "<phoneme ph='m ow er'>"
$ swift "<phoneme ph='m ow r'>"
$ swift "<phoneme ph='m ah1 r'>"

The closest I could get is this:

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$ swift "<phoneme ph='m uh r'>"

But, of course, that's still not it, because that's saying "moore".

For example, I can't set up lexicon.txt to properly pronounce "abhor" (or other words with "or" in them) because I can't find the long O sound without the W tacked on the end.

I've wondered how to get swift to dump what it is doing phonetically to stdout so I can see what sounds it is using, but haven't found how to do that, either.

Another one I can't find is the "wh" sound. I know a lot of people seem to not use that sound, but it is indeed still in use where I live. Well, I still use it.

Thanks.

[troybowman]

I found the --events argument:

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swift --events more

and there was an "ao" phoneme in there! Wow. I don't know how I missed that one.

So, that was the answer. Sorry for the trouble.