Is there a homepage or online tool that gives you a list of, let's say, the 2000 most common syllables sorted by their international phonetic alphabet spelling?
(e.g. /sɜː(r)/ = the first syllable from the word circle which is the same as for circus)
and gives some examples next to it like:
sɜː(r) For example: circle, circus, …
I'm not looking for a usual dictionary with IPA characters.
Neither am I looking for a phonetic dictionary that lists several thousand words ordered by spelling.
Do you know a syllable-based online webpage that lists the most-used prefixes and suffixes in an alphabetic IPA spelling order (and may give some word examples in brackets next to the listed syllable)?
Best Answer
A tentative answer - I'm not a phonetician or computational linguist. I would be interested in a more authoritative response.
You can get this information from the CELEX corpus. There is a web interface for this here: http://celex.mpi.nl
You can extract a list of all (or some) syllables, with their frequency (per million or raw) in the corpus. You can also get syllable information for words in the corpus and use this to construct your own frequencies. This has the advantage of also giving access to examples. I wrote some quick code to do this a while ago which we didn't in the end use. It could be (and I'm sure has been) substantially improved upon. Here is one row from the resulting data:
syllable (in the notation that CELEX uses: hIm
frequency:53007 typical consonant vowel structure:CVC
examples: him himself hymn hymnal hymnals