Phonetic Matching

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.

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

That's not the similarity the author is trying to point out. The idea is that the spelling is a lot more different than the pronunciation is, and that's true. The pronunciations are as similar as it's possible to be, measured by substitution count, without actually being identical. (You could use a measure of phonetic similarity, in which case e.g. fought and thought would be much more similar than fought and caught, but he's not doing that either.)

The pronunciation of sure comes from (1) the old, dead idea that the letter u should be pronounced /ju/ rather than /u/ (compare cure); and (2) the still vital English reduction of /sj/ to /ʃ/. Shore has to indicate the same sound in a radically different way, since it doesn't have and never had a medial /j/ to transform a bare s.