Comment: '*' in the phoneme isn't a wildcard

[dcuny]

In the comments, it's noted that the character '*' in the second position of a phoneme, such as 'R*', is a "wildcard".

This is a bit misleading, as "wildcard" would indicate that "S*" should match "SH". This isn't the case.

The '*' in the second character position indicates the phoneme is only a single character long.

When matching phonemes, SAM first checks the two characters at the current buffer position against the 2 character phones phonemes (that is, they don't have a '*' in the second character). If this fails SAM then checks the single character at the buffer position against all the single character phonemes (the ones that do have a '*' in the second position).