[nvda] Re: strange pronunciation quirks

Hello,
You are asking a lot for a speech synthesiser, but try the following with 
regard to your example of Spanish pronunciation,

Baja tor te a



The "J" in baja is pronounced  as a hard "H" sort of in the upper throat and 
eloquence does a fair job of this, whereas the two instances of "L" in 
tortilla are not pronounced as "L" at all, but as a "Y", and, of course the 
"I" is pronounced as an "E", if that were not enough the "R"  is rolled on 
the tongue. It's hard enough for us humans let alone the poor old 
synthesiser.   Note the spaces in the spelling which I have used, these can 
make all the difference, you can also use  punctuation to help with emphasis 
in some instances. I usually try out the words which I wish to have spoken 
differently, and I do this in Word. Don't be afraid to be really outlandish 
with your spelling, forget what you learned at school, just use phonetics to 
obtain the literal sound of words.

I have used "Eloquence" for my example, I've not tried the e speek 
synthesiser.

I hope this helps.

Best Regards, Jim.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: kendell clark
To: nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009 6:01 AM
Subject: [nvda] strange pronunciation quirks


Hello all:

I have a couple of questions. I read a lot of novels in my spare time, 
particularly clive cussler. Some of the novels I read have words in them 
other than english, for example someone might say an expression in spanish 
or french. The speech completely mangles the pronunciation to where It's 
completely unintelligible. I use both eloquence and espeak and neither one 
seems to get it right. Eloquence does a better job of it. My question is, is 
this due to NVDA or simply due to the synthesizer? I've tried fixing the 
words in the speech dictionary but either the pronunciation is wrong or the 
stress is placed at the wrong parts I can't seem to get it right. I'll give 
an example. baja tortilla. Eloquence mangles them completely and espeak 
pronounces them the same. I hope I don't sound like I'm complaining because 
I'm not, just curious how NVDA handles words written in another language. 
Does eloquence pronounce things the way  the synthesizer is programmed to, 
or is nvda sending the text to it wrong? I have no idea how this is achieved 
so I hope I make sense. When I try to fix the example I get bahha torteea, 
and it doesn't sound right. There are others but I don't want to make a 
list.
Thanks for any help
Kendell clark



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