3 ms·

It's not just pronounciation of specific words though, it's also combinations of words, and abbrevations like "would've". English basically consists entirely of

It's not just pronounciation of specific words though, it's also combinations of words, and abbrevations like "would've". English basically consists entirely of special cases, while in japanese you can straight-up just match the written letters to the sound and get it right in most cases. In fact, i can tell you the exceptions in this post right quick: Sometimes the u sound is swallowed when it would be more comfortable to say the word without it. "Wo" is almost always pronounced as "o". "Ha" is very often pronounced as "wa" due to a specific grammatic rule. Now try listing all the exceptions to english pronounciation. :)

schoen 11y ago
You can deal with the irregularity of spelling by using a pronouncing dictionary, which has the correct pronunciation of every word in a lexicon. For example, CMU has the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict Spelling irregularities are fully taken account of. But a problem is heteronyms, where the same spelling is pronounced in two different ways depending on the meaning, like English initial stress derivations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun A pronouncing dictionary will record each of the options but might not provide a way to determine which one is correct in a particular context. Combinations of words, as you mentioned, do pose problems for speech synthesis because of suprasegmentals, where for natural speech you might need to adjust features of one word because of the presence of others, for a variety of linguistic reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29 Japanese has suprasegmental issues too, so you can't expect to make realistic speech synthesis easy just by synthesizing a language with a regular orthography and a simple sound structure. Also, imagine trying to create text-to-speech for Japanese texts written in kanji rather than kana; you'd have irregularity problems in some ways even more challenging than English orthography presents! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Kanji https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Kanji
- majewsky 11y ago
  A pronouncing dictionary does not help you when people invent new words or import new words from a different language, in which case readers familiar with the subject at hand might identify the pronounciation from their familiarity with the source language or subject. Unless, of course, you have an AI attached to your TTS that can understand the context in a similar way.
  - delecti 11y ago
    Depending on the context, you could potentially just include the pronunciation of all the new words in the context a video game set in a fictional setting.
airesQ 11y ago
The script/site below is able to transcribe whole English texts into phonetics. It does take word context into account (e.g. "the" becomes "thee" if it is before a word starting with a vowel). Just checked "We've" and it does manage to produce a good phonetics transcription. http://lingorado.com/ipa/ http://lingorado.com/ipa/

schoen 11y ago

You can deal with the irregularity of spelling by using a pronouncing dictionary, which has the correct pronunciation of every word in a lexicon. For example, CMU has the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict Spelling irregularities are fully taken account of. But a problem is heteronyms, where the same spelling is pronounced in two different ways depending on the meaning, like English initial stress derivations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun A pronouncing dictionary will record each of the options but might not provide a way to determine which one is correct in a particular context. Combinations of words, as you mentioned, do pose problems for speech synthesis because of suprasegmentals, where for natural speech you might need to adjust features of one word because of the presence of others, for a variety of linguistic reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29 Japanese has suprasegmental issues too, so you can't expect to make realistic speech synthesis easy just by synthesizing a language with a regular orthography and a simple sound structure. Also, imagine trying to create text-to-speech for Japanese texts written in kanji rather than kana; you'd have irregularity problems in some ways even more challenging than English orthography presents! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Kanji https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Kanji

majewsky 11y ago
A pronouncing dictionary does not help you when people invent new words or import new words from a different language, in which case readers familiar with the subject at hand might identify the pronounciation from their familiarity with the source language or subject. Unless, of course, you have an AI attached to your TTS that can understand the context in a similar way.
- delecti 11y ago
  Depending on the context, you could potentially just include the pronunciation of all the new words in the context a video game set in a fictional setting.

airesQ 11y ago

The script/site below is able to transcribe whole English texts into phonetics. It does take word context into account (e.g. "the" becomes "thee" if it is before a word starting with a vowel). Just checked "We've" and it does manage to produce a good phonetics transcription. http://lingorado.com/ipa/ http://lingorado.com/ipa/