This short epilogue struck me.

    This past Yom Kippur, my wife and I drove two hours to spend the afternoon at my aunt’s house, with my cousins. As the night drew on, conversation roamed from television shows and books to politics and philosophy. The circle grew as we touched on increasingly sensitive and challenging topics, drawing us in.

    We didn’t agree, per se. We were engaging in debate as often as we were engaging in conversation. But we all love each other deeply, and the amount of care and restraint that went into how each person expressed their disagreement was palpable.

Oh, hello, I didn't realize this was shared here! I guess let me know if anyone has any questions. I mostly wrote this piece as part of processing some hard feelings I've been having and seeing shared among Jewish folks around me, but I also ended up learning quite a bit about phonetic encoding algorithms, and I've spent several years at this point steeped in forced alignment via Storyteller.

It's about someone using Levenshtein distance for phonetic fitting against text learning about soundex.

One way to start playing around with it is to put some stuff in a database: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/string-functions.htm...

(or this module, https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/fuzzystrmatch.html if you're stuck with PG)

This is one of these cases where inheriting hacked-together piece of crap (English spelling) makes a lot of additional work higher up.

Another example is poetry. A regex can find rhymes in Polish. Same postfix == it rhymes.

In English it's a feat of engineering.

The idea that "shore" and "sure" are pronounced "almost identically" would depend pretty heavily on your accent. The vowel is pretty different to me.

Also, the matches for "sorI" and "sorY" would seem to me to misinterpret the words as having a vowel at the end, rather than a silent vowel. If you're using data meant for foreign surnames, the rules of which may differ from English and which might have silent vowels be very rare depending on the original language, of course you may mispronounce English words like this, saying both shore and sure as "sore-ee".

I'm sure there are much better ways to transcribe orthography to phonetics, probably people have published libraries that do it. From some googling, it seems like some people call this type of library a phonemic transcriber or IPA transcriber.