[lojban] Re: Text-to-speech

["Matt Arnold" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

Fantastic! Thanks for doing this!
-Eppcott

On Jan 15, 2008 8:31 PM, Jonathan Duddington <jsd@clara.co.uk> wrote:
> 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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>
>


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