[u-a-dev] [Bug 82015] Re: eSpeak in Russian

[Jonathan Duddington]

On 30 Apr, Luke Yelavich <themuso at themuso.com> wrote:
> I am packaging espeak 1.23 for gutsy at this moment, which appears to
> have a russian voice. Jonathan, if this is not the complete set,
> please let me know, so I can include the russian voice, to possibly
> try and get wider testing.

The Russian language has a problem.  There is no way to tell from the
spelling which syllable has the main stress in a word.

So Russian needs a large dictionary which holds this information.  It
doesn't affect which phonemes a word translates into, only the position
of the stress.  I don't want to include this information in the main
eSpeak distribution, because it's large and it's of no use except to
someone who wants Russian text-to-speech synthesis.

This extra data is available on the espeak.sourceforge.net site, and is
referenced from the entry for "Russian" in docs/languages.html.

In the future, other languages may have the same problem.  For example,
languages which use ideograms (eg. Chinese) would also need a large
dictionary.

Perhaps we need to identify which words are needed to be spoken during
system startup and installation, and include them in the basic set of
eSpeak data, but leave the main dictionary for such languages in an
additional package?

Regarding Ubuntu Gutsy and eSpeak 1.23.  I've had feedback recently for
the first time for Greek and Czech, and these voices have now been
improved since 1.23.  Also Cleverson told me to ask him for the latest
Brazilian and European Portuguese changes when I'm ready for the next
release.  I've just sent him an email request.

So, if you want to wait a couple of days, I'll make a version 1.24.

-- 
eSpeak in Russian
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/82015
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