[lojban] Re: Text-to-speech

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

On 17 Jan, Arnt Richard Johansen <arj@nvg.org> 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".



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