[lojban] Text-to-speech

[Jonathan Duddington <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

I've added a Lojban voice to the development version of eSpeak speech
synthesizer for Linux and Windows:
  http://espeak.sourceforge.net/test/latest.html

The spelling-to-pronunciation rules are simple and regular, so that
shouldn't be a problem, but I need advice on prosody.

Lojban differs from other languages in its lack of punctuation.  I
recognise ".i" as a sentence marker, so I can break up a paragraph into
sentences.  But the sentences also need pauses and intonation within
them in order to sound natural.  In English, I would recognise commas
and other punctuation as breaks.  Also conjunction words such as "and".

What lojban words should I look for to break a sentence into clauses
(or their equivalent)?

This is not a problem of meaning or intelligibility.  It just sounds
unnatural to speak a long sentence without using pause and intonation
to indicate its structure (and to draw breath).

Another question is which words to emphasize.  In English eSpeak has a
list of common function words which are unstressed ("is", "the", "my",
"of" etc).  For Lojban, I could make all one-syllable words (or even
all cmavo) unstressed, but that's probably inappropriate.  I note that
the pronunciation rules say that stressed syllables are optional for
cmavo.
  

If you want to experiment, you can install eSpeak and use the "jbo"
voice (that's the ISO 639-3 language code for Lojban).  You can add
commas into Lojban text to hear what would be the effect of a
clause-break at that point.



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