[OSM-talk] pronunciation tag
Robert Vollmert
rvollmert-lists at gmx.net
Tue Jun 24 10:02:18 BST 2008
Disclaimer: based on a little of web research; I have no particular
knowledge of linguistics or speech synthesis.
On Jun 24, 2008, at 03:54, SteveC wrote:
> On 23 Jun 2008, at 18:52, Lauri Hahne wrote:
>
>> I think some standard form should be used if we ever want to do
>> something like this. Although IPA is the official standard, it isn't
>> very computer or user friendly. Therefore I think something like
>> SAMPA, MRPA or X-SAMPA should be used. These are used to some extend
>> among linguistics and are all based on ASCII. These would also
>> relieve
>> the pain of trying to figure out what something would be in phonetic
>> pseudo-english.
>
> can you summarise these with examples?
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
IPA: /ˌsuːpɚˌkælɪˌfrædʒəlˌɪstɪkˌɛkspiːˌælɪ
ˈdoʊʃəs/
CXS: /"su:p@`"k&lI"fr&dZ at l"IstIk"Ekspi:"&lI'doUS at s/
CXS is basically X-SAMPA, which is basically an ASCII-encoding of IPA.
Since we do unicode, I'd think we should rather go with IPA. See http://www.theiling.de/ipa/
for an online converter.
I didn't find any speech synthesis package that does IPA directly,
though. Festival's "Sable" markup language http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/manual/festival_10.html#SEC33
provides for IPA, though festival doesn't implement this. It does
allow e.g.
<PRON SUB="toe maa toe">tomato</PRON>.
A possible alternative is the free-as-in-beer mbrola http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola/
. It's a speech synthesis backend based on diphones (two halves of
phones). Its input format appears to be SAMPA plus additional data.
There's still some language dependency in there, though. Espeak http://espeak.sourceforge.net/
can target mbrola, perhaps IPA could be added as a language?
Cheers
Robert
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