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Was watching football today and heard a player's name as "Hugh Jackson." Realized I'd heard it in my head as "huge axon" (had been reading physics earlier) and wondered if this was a common enough construction to have it's own name? Tough to search for online. Gotta be something better than "homophonic phrase."
Does that qualify as an eggcorn?
Sarkes Tarzian started WPTA-TV i the 1950s - it was supposedly going to be educational, hence PTA, but sprang to life as an ABC affiliate. Their sister radio station was WPTH-FM. In 1981, they changed their call letters to WFWQ-FM and branded themselves as "Q95". About 1985, they changed their call letters to WAJI, calling themselves "Magic 95.1" which may have been inspired by a local potato chip magnate. John C Seyfert had sold Seyfert's potato chips to Borden and when his non-compete expired, formed JCS which started marketing Magic potato chip about 1983 or 1984.
I wrote a nice letter to the station saying that I really enjoyed their new music format, but they need to caution their announcers to enunciate carefully because at times, it sounds like they are saying WAJI instead of the correct WHAI. Apparently, I had my tongue hidden too far in my cheek, because I was visited by three DJs the next day, trying to find out if I was serious.
And thirty years later, they are still Magic 95.1, and it still sounds to me like they are saying WHAI.
Glenn (Admin) supplied the term "oronym" in May of this year; Gyles Brandreth seems to have coined the term in his 1980 The Joy of Lex. They crept into my life years ago when I found myself saying "deep rest" for depressed and "soul doubt" for sold out. They keep coming; for example, if you were making an omelet for two people, you might find "four eggs ample". Even whole sentences arise, if from another era: "Newt axes new taxes" and "Troops urge troop surge".
They have put to use in speech recognition studies; have a look at this http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1994&context=theses
"Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms to Validate the Correctness of Frequency Dictionaries"
Jennifer “Jenee” Gayle Hughes, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, 2013
"In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between “a nice rock” and “a gneiss rock”. These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words."
Thanks faresomeness, I knew there had to be a word for these things. Learned another word today. Now knowing what to search for, I found this interesting exposition on oronyms. The story about "Toyota" vs. "toy Yoda" was pretty funny.
I followed the link you provided. Didn't have time to read the whole paper, but I can see how this all ties into computer speech recognition. And I follow the distinction between mondegreens (which I'd heard of) and oronyms. Also, I see the algorithm used in speech recognition for sorting out oronyms is based more on word frequency and less on context. Not the best model, but as AI improves hopefully context will be more doable.
I don't have a Siri or comparable digital assistant, but friends of mine do. And some of the "mis-hearings" are amusing (or embarrassing). A search for "humorous speech recognition errors" gets 154,000 hits. This includes both digital assistants and voice-to-text apps. Funny stuff, if you have the time to browse.
Heard one of these a little while ago on TV, a three-way homophone. The product is called "Emergen-C", and it's one of those things you're supposed to take when you feel a cold coming on. The name, of course, is a play on the word "emergency", and the ad invites you to "emerge and see" what it can do for you.
I use Kindle's text-to-speech often, to read myself to sleep with my eyes shut. It often pronounces words wrong, and I've mostly gotten used to it, but one night, the character was talking to his pet cat, calling it Pussy, but Kindle kept pronouncing it as the word that means covered with pus. I kept laughing, and then trying to settle down, then he cat would enter he narrative again, and by fifteen minutes of that, I was not a bit sleepy at all.
This may not directly answer the question, and it has been a long (in excess of fifty years) time since I encountered a discussion of this phenomenon, but most of these are examples of juncture, i.e. real or perceived pauses between sounds. The classic example, as I recall, is nitrate, night rate, nye trait which, depending on the speaker's dialect, may have only very subtle differences or no differences at all.
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