My only claim to being *possibly* on-topic is the age of the article (1974) and the fact that it inspired many of the early phoneme-driven speech synthesizers (Votrax, etc.). Does anyone have access to a suitably good engineering library with a copy of: McIlroy, M D, "Synthetic English Speech by Rule", Bell Telephone Labs, CSTR #14, 1973 (though I have also seen it referenced as 1974!) or: Ainsworth, W A, "A System for Converting English Text to Speech", IEEE Trans Audio & Electroacoustics AU-21 #3 pp 288-290, 1973 The former is far more interesting to me than the latter :-( (sigh) There are *some* advantages to being a student (though those days are long past, in my case!) I can try my local public library to see if it is available via ILL. I guess I could also try the local university's engineering library. Thanks! --don