A while back, I hinted at the concept of ear anagrams and ear palindromes, which would behave like their visual counterparts but feature rearranged or symmetrical sounds instead of letters. Since then, I have been studying up on the concept a little more.
Assigning a pronunciation to many different words is a tricky proposition, though, even when using IPA symbols. Some words have two common pronunciations or more, and that doesn’t even count heteronyms (as in bass drum versus fried bass for dinner), which are spelled the same but with different pronunciations and meanings. Lexical drift and regional dialects mean that pronunciations are always shifting, too.
However, the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary is a reasonably good source of word pronunciations. A couple of apps are also helpful, but for this research, I went with the CMU.
Ear anagrams, it turns out, are common enough that I could probably do some themed lists for them as grist for smaller puzzles. Maybe I will at some point. The longest such anagram pair I found was constellations and consultations—both are fifteen sounds long, with only the “t” sound migrating a couple of places south. Consultations is [kɑˌnsʌltejˈʃʌnz], constellations is [kɑˌnstʌlejˈʃʌnz].
Some other interesting ones are Clintonites and Lichtenstein, deprecate and predicate (as a verb), anatomically and commonality, reiterated and deteriorate, analytics and inelastic, rocks and scar, downright and write down, pleasantry and presently.
Single-word ear palindromes, like single-word eye palindromes, tend to be short. The longest I could find was canonic, at seven sounds; no six-sound candidates worked out, but there were a number of five-sound ones that were not also eye palindromes, including Kazakh, revere, fief, and Zulus. Even some of the shorter ones have some interesting character: easy, caulk, judge, cease, cook, church, whoa.
The shortest ones mght not always meet your expectations, since some vowel sounds are considered to carry consonants with them. That’s why whoa is a palindrome: its long o is generally covered by a closing “w” sound. So O itself doesn’t pass muster as a palindrome, though A, E, I, and “Ooo!” do.
There are ways to develop this idea further, into ear-palindromic sentences, soundbanks (instead of letterbanks), add-a-sound exercises, phonetically nested words. But plenty of time to look into those later!
I wrote a few phonetic palindrome sentences a while back. (I used the phonetic alphabet Deseret at the time as I liked seeing them function as letter palindromes as well). Here are a few:
Finite time might tie knife.
Time: I fib if I might.
My rhyme? Might I fib if I time my rhyme?