Innovation in rhyming words, pronunciation

Hashmi does not have any formal academic background. He has only studied till the PUC - that too, till SSLC in the Urdu medium!

His painstaking script ‘A Book Of Rhyming Words With Pronunciation’ is a work on rhyming words with pronunciation using phonetic symbols and consists of 78 foolscap pages with about 16,000 words and about 350 word endings. It is like a dictionary of rhyming words and their pronunciation.

What made him to venture on such an uncommon task? “I had difficulty learning English words. I had a glimpse into the world of phonetics. I extensively searched on the net, and finally decided to bring out a dictionary-like book,” says Hashmi.

People abhor learning words which are difficult to pronounce, and therefore they cannot remember them. Even if they remember them, they hesitate to pronounce them, for fear of mispronouncing them. “It is necessary to make such people’s pronunciation strong by making them recognise words difficult to pronounce and spell, give them sufficient knowledge of phonetics, and encourage them to use dictionaries which use phonetic transcription as pronunciation key,” he says. The work is said to be beneficial to beginners and struggling learners, among others.

They can look at the challenging word and find words in some ‘word families’, simultaneously referring to sound symbols. For instance, the words beak and peak share the phonetic sound /ik/ in the end. Words in this rhyming group include beak, peak, cheek, greek, eke, antique and clique.

Komali Prakash, head of the Department of Phonetics and Spoken English of the English and Foreign Language University , Hyderabad, admires Hashmi’s work, saying it is very innovative. “A lot of effort has gone into the work, and I am sure it will help students of English at all levels.” John Mathew George of EFLU said, “It is capable of inspiring further research in the field of phonetics. The work is helpful even to students of prosody.” Hashmi is now looking for a publisher.