vozme

[Herb Stahlke]

Tom,

I went to the site and tried your spellings.  The ones that gave me
the most typically General American pronunciations were <english> and
<linguist>, both pronounced with a "short <i>," the lax high front
vowel found in "pit."  "leenguist" and "eenglish" which were the
spellings you preferred, gave the very unnatural "lean gwist" and "een
glish" each clearly pronounced as two words, not one. However, there
is a more fundamental problem with using this site and that is that it
makes use of rule-based text to speech software that produces an
approximation of English pronunciation that most native speakers would
be able to understand.  It does not purport to be, nor is it, the
speech of a native speaker.  I worked for several years with devices
like this, especially the early DECtalk speech synthesizer, and, while
it was surprisingly well designed, it required about 625
letter-to-sound rules as well as a dictionary of 8000 phonemically
spelled words that don't obey rules, like "were."

Herb

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 10:35 PM, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      vozme
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Vozme.com changes text to voice at edress below.  Just paste in text and click "create MP3" to hear.
>
> http://vozme.com/index.php?lang=en
>
> I entered the following to see which were pronounced better
>
> english english english
> eenglish eenglish eenglish
> inglish inglish inglish
>
> linguist linguist linguist
> leenguist leenguist leenguist
>
> Which would you think sounded most like m-w.com pronunciation?  I'd say eenglish leenguist.
>
> I'm thinking now that text run through the truespel converter would be easy to encode into voice.  All one need to do is assign sounds to each of the 40 phoneme spellings of truespel.  Stressed syllable is shown as well.
>
> tz
> _________________________________________________________________
> Enjoy 5 GB of free, password-protected online storage.
> http://www.windowslive.com/skydrive/overview.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_Refresh_skydrive_062008
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org