7.3.2.1 Things that come in handy

First of all, you need to have a large word list of the language you want to make phonetics for. It should contain about as many words as the dictionary of the spell checker. If you don’t have such a list, you will probably find an Ispell dictionary at http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/ispell-dictionaries.html which will help you. You can then make affix expansion via ispell -e and then pipe it through tr " " "\n" to put one word on each line. After that you eventually have to convert special characters like ‘é’ from Ispell’s internal representation to latin1 encoding. sed s/e'/é/g for example would replace all ‘e'’ with ‘é’.

The second is that you know how to use regular expressions and know how to use grep. You should for example know that:

grep ^[^aeiou]qu[io] wordlist | less

will show you all words that begin with any character but ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’ or ‘u’ and then continue with ‘qui’ or ‘quo’. This stuff is important for example to find out if a phonetic replacement rule you want to set up is valid for all words which match the expression you want to replace. Taking a look at the regex(7) man page is a good idea.