eSpeak in Norwegian, part 1

[Jonathan Duddington]

In article <45770DEF.7060807 at ubuntu.com>,
   Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> The results from my first listening test:

> menneskenes [1] The 3rd 'e' is too long
> [2] 'r' needs to be more pronounced
> [3] The last 'e' has the wrong tone/flavour Sounds like an æ, should be 
> like 'Long E' on [*]

Just a quick comment now, I'll look at this in more detail later.

If a word sounds wrong, it's important to distinguish between:
1.  The spelling-to-phoneme translation rules give the wrong phonemes.
2.  A phoneme is incorrectly or poorly implemented. 
3.  The stress is on the wrong syllable.
4.  General prosody rules are wrong (eg. relative lengths of stressed
and unstressed syllables).

First, check the spelling-to-phoneme rules. Find which phonemes eSpeak
translates the word into, by using:
   speak -x -vno "menneskenes"
which gives the phoneme mnemonics:
   m'Enn at sk,e:n at s

or, for more trace information about how the rules are being used:
   speak -X

Then speak the word by specifying the phoneme mnemonics explicitly,
enclosed within double square brackets:
   speak -vno "[[m'Enn at sk,e:n at s]]"

Then try substituting different phonemes to determine whether the
spelling-to-phoneme rules got it wrong.
   speak -vno "[[m'Enn at sk,En at s]]"
or
   speak -vno "[[m'Enn at sk@n at s]]"

Then try and work out how to change the translation rules to match the
real language.  In this case the third "e" is translated as a long [e:]
because it's followed by a single consonant, but perhaps here you have
a class of words that are an exception to that naive rule.

> måter [2] 'r' needs to be more pronounced

This is a probably case of a poorly implemented phoneme, but try:
   speak -vno "[[m'o:tEr]]