http://ssb22.user.srcf.net/gradint/lexconvert.html might be what you need; it apparently converts between various text-to-speech software encodings, including SAMPA and IPA-Unicode; with this eSpeak can be made to pronounce the encoding. Good luck!
Go to http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict and you will find the download page for the pronunciation dictionary at https://cmusphinx.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cmusphinx/trunk/cmudict/ The latest version is currently cmudict.0.7a. This is what I am currently using to implement the syllable counter for http://www.haikuvillage.com. It’s in Ruby and I’d be happy to open source it for you if that helps.
I guess you could think of something like that if you could restrict yourself to pronounceable sounds in english. For me (I am French), words like szczepan or wawrzyniec are unpronounceable and certainly have a certain randomness. But they are actually Polish first names (meaning steven and lawrence)…
There are various different ways of doing this. Have a look at the Wikipedia “String similarity measures” page for links to other pages with algorithms. I don’t think any of those algorithms take sounds into consideration, however – so “staq overflow” would be as similar to “stack overflow” as “staw overflow” despite the first being … Read more