Work with text to speech in lojban in 30 minutes

["vilkoos" <w.dijkhuis@home.nl>]

HELLO,

Being a starting lojban student I felt a burning need for lojban sound
files. 
There are some, but not nearly enough to satisfy my need.
So I made them myself (by means of quick and dirty text to speech).
The results and the method (TEXT TO SPEECH FOR LOJBAN) might be of
interest to others.

Interested? Go to my web site:
http://members.home.nl/w.dijkhuis/z0300_txt2speech_01.htm

The page you arrive on goes like this:
(for more info use the links on that page)

- - - - - - - - -

TEXT TO SPEECH IN LOJBAN
It would be nice to have a lojban text to speech program.

>From the start, loglan/lojban orthography was engineered to
unambiguously result in one and only one "speech stream", thus text to
speech should be relatively easy. Some have taken up the challenge,
they have not succeed yet.

QUICK AND DIRTY
We do not have to wait until a lojban TTS is available. There is a
-quick and dirty- alternative: take one of the available TTS's (e.g.
Italian, Spanish or English) and trick it into speaking lojban.

For example: a British English TTS does not pronounce the U in the
correct lojban way. But when we substitute all the U's in the lojban
text by OO, the TTS produces acceptable U sounds. Likewise we
substitute all J with ZH, all C with SH etc.
The end result is more or less acceptable sounding lojban.

Using different rules we can "mutilate" lojban text in such a way that
Italian or French TTS's produce acceptable sounding lojban. Especially
the Italian TTS can be seduced to produce nice lojban.

This approach to TTS in lojban produced these results.

LOJBAN TTS SAMPLES
*       Two haiku's and a prayer
*       Listen to the lojban anthem.
*       TTS audio for genesis 1.1 thru 1.5 in lojban
*       Using TTS in lojban we can finish the lojban tapes project
(recording 400 basic lojban words on tape to assist the learning
process of beginning lojban students). Here is the first installment
of the lojban tracks (mp3) project.

Give me your feedback, is this really quick or dirty or is it fast and
clean?

MAKE YOUR OWN SOUNDS
You can make your own TTS sound files using a Perl program.