From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Thu Jan 17 10:44:37 2008 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:44:37 -0800 (PST) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.68) (envelope-from ) id 1JFZjA-0002zj-Ub for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:44:37 -0800 Received: from relay3.mail.uk.clara.net ([80.168.70.183]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.68) (envelope-from ) id 1JFZj4-0002yi-5n for lojban-list@lojban.org; Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:44:36 -0800 Received: from adsl-solo-80-168-224-43.claranet.co.uk ([80.168.224.43] helo=pcr) by relay3.mail.uk.clara.net with smtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1JFZix-0001XU-Uf for lojban-list@lojban.org; Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:44:24 +0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 From: Jonathan Duddington To: lojban-list@lojban.org Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:44:10 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [lojban] Re: Text-to-speech Message-ID: <4f62b4afd8jsd@clara.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <20080117175100.GV31951@nvg.org> References: <4f61d245b9jsd@clara.co.uk> <20080117175100.GV31951@nvg.org> User-Agent: Pluto/3.04e (RISC-OS/4.02) POPstar/2.02 Content-Type: text/plain X-Spam-Score: -1.0 X-Spam-Score-Int: -9 X-Spam-Bar: - X-archive-position: 14111 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: jsd@clara.co.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list On 17 Jan, Arnt Richard Johansen wrote: > Nice! As you may know, I have been working on a Lojban diphone > synthesizer, but that project has not been going anywhere for the > past year, due to lack of time and energy to do the grunt work. Thanks for your reply. No, I knew nothing about Lojban until a few days ago. I still know almost nothing. It will be interesting to learn more sometime, but unfortunately not now because I have much work to do. It may be possible to use one of the mbrola diphone voices with eSpeak as a front-end (to the the spelling-to-phoneme translation and intonation) to give more natural sounding speech than eSpeak's internal formant-synthesis voice. See: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/mbrola.html > Here are some suggestions: > * ALWAYS have an intonation boundary before .i. It's the sentence > separator, after all. Oh, and make sure that you separate cmavo > clusters first, since people are apt to write .ije, .iku'i, and an > infinite variety of combinations as one. How do you define (and how do I recognise) a "cmavo cluster"? ".ije" is in the reference cmavo list, but ".iku'i" and presumably others are not. I note that there are some cmavo which start with the letters ".i" which re not compounds of ".i". > * ni'o should have an intonation boundary in front of it, and > possibly a long pause. "Paragraph break". If this always occurs together with a blank-line or with ".i" then I can ignore it, but I expect it can occur apparently within a "sentence"? > * The following, and possibly some more, should have minor intonation > boundaries in front of them: (na) gi'A nai (where A is any of aeiou); > noi, poi, no'u, po'u; goi; to I'm not sure what you mean by: "(na) gi'A nai" Do you mean "gi'A" when followed by "nai" and optionally preceded by "na" ? > * The following, and possibly some more, should have minor intonation > boundaries after: toi Also other terminators: ku, boi, vau, kei ? > Do not stress any single-syllable cmavo. That means "any single-syllable word which ends with a vowel" ? > Unless you can insert a pause after it. ("le NO bliprenu" becomes "le > nobli prenu", but "le NO. bliprenu" is okay.) Possibly not even then, > since it sounds strange. Probably some other multi-syllable cmavo should also be unstressed. Can you recommend any important ones? > People often stress the first syllable in "go'i". To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.