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Open licensed database of EO pronunciations

de cannona, 2013-januaro-22

Mesaĝoj: 14

Lingvo: English

cannona (Montri la profilon) 2013-januaro-22 23:44:19

Hi all.

I've recently been thinking that it might be nice to have a Creative Commons or similarly licensed collection of Esperanto pronunciations that could be integrated into online dictionaries, and other electronic tools. So, I thought a good place to start would be the Baza Radikaro.

I have recorded all the words which begin with a, and would like some feedback from other speakers before I proceed further. If my pronunciation is terrible, please be so kind as to tell me. I'd prefer to learn that now, rather than after I've invested dozens more hours into this. Other suggestions or feedback would also be welcome and appreciated.

Not all of the A words are included due to some of them needing to be rerecorded, but the vast majority should be there.

You can find a zip file of the MP3s at
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/arzufue4qqj431j/a-words-m...

Thanks in advance!

Aaron

eojeff (Montri la profilon) 2013-januaro-23 00:42:56

That's an interesting idea!

Though I wonder if it could be made more efficient by breaking down words into parts and only recording the unique part of the word and then reconstructing the audio for the whole word via regular expression match. This would save a lot of effort, especially because Esperanto word creation is rather free form.

Now, if I only had a better grasp of Perl...

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2013-januaro-23 01:13:31

We had discussed doing some massive recording of words for the new lernu, in fact. No concrete work has been done yet in that regard, however.

Oijos (Montri la profilon) 2013-januaro-23 03:17:52

erinja:We had discussed doing some massive recording of words for the new lernu, in fact. No concrete work has been done yet in that regard, however.
That would be a massive waste of resources! You only need to learn the letters and their pronunciations and that's it! I don't get it. The letters in Esperanto are always pronounced the same no matter where they are within a word.

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2013-januaro-23 03:27:16

It's true that Esperanto is totally phonetic. But some people get the hang of it easier than others, and some people really struggle with getting pronunciation without a good number of models. And sometimes people just want their hand held, they think they know how to pronounce something but they feel unsure, and they feel better about it if there's a sound file to confirm (or refute) what they think might be correct.

Bemused (Montri la profilon) 2013-januaro-23 05:27:27

There are 28 letters in the Esperanto alphabet.
So 28 examples should be sufficient.

It could be presented in the form of:
- sound
- example in a word

eg:
- a
- bona

By the time this was completed each sound would have been presented a number of times in different words.

cannona (Montri la profilon) 2013-januaro-23 15:24:32

Bemused:There are 28 letters in the Esperanto alphabet.
So 28 examples should be sufficient.
What about those who wish to learn how a word is pronounced in Esperanto, but who don't want to learn the language. In many other languages this is no problem. If I wanted to, I could probably look up the word for chair in any number of different languages online, and not knowing anything else about that language learn how to say that word in that language thanks to audio pronunciations.

Also, if just 28 examples were sufficient, no one would struggle with knabo, or scii, and the like. I also think it's easy for some learners to get the stress of a word wrong.

In addition, I would submit that there are numerous ways such a collection of words could be used, aside from just in an electronic dictionary. Electronic flashcards is the example that comes most readily to mind.

Finally, I'm willing to donate these recordings (Assuming Lernu wants them, and they don't suck), so the only resource wasted would be my time and some development time to integrate them into the site.

Aaron

cannona (Montri la profilon) 2013-januaro-23 15:29:02

eojeff:That's an interesting idea!

Though I wonder if it could be made more efficient by breaking down words into parts and only recording the unique part of the word and then reconstructing the audio for the whole word via regular expression match. This would save a lot of effort, especially because Esperanto word creation is rather free form.
Were you to do so, you would have developed a speech synthesizer, and would also discover that it is unfortunately not that simple, at least not if you want it to be comfortable to listen to and reasonably intelligible.

Google for ESpeak to hear the only speech synthesizer that I'm aware of for Esperanto. It's not great, (I'd say not even good) but it's passable.

Aaron

acdibble (Montri la profilon) 2013-januaro-23 17:04:02

[url=forvo.com]forvo.com[/url] is already doing this with practically every language.

creedelambard (Montri la profilon) 2013-januaro-23 23:48:34

I speak Perl (better than I do Esperanto, actually) if it ever comes to that.

I think the real utility of a system like this would be in combinations of sounds rather than just nailing single sounds together. Just off the top of my head I think English speakers might have trouble with sounds like these that don't occur naturally (or at most very often) in English:

kn (knabo)

kv (kvieta)

initial c (cent)

ĥ (ĥoro)

sv (svati)

eŭ (Eŭropo)

You get the idea. Internal versions of some of these sounds (e.g. akvo) aren't so bad because you can attach half of each pair to the vowels on either side, but initial versions of the sounds could be more difficult. Other sounds might pose difficulties to speakers of other languages; for instance in a language where the "ĵ" sound doesn't appear it could go on such a list.

Just one more example: The Esperantization of my home state of Washington is "Vaŝingtono", which includes the "ngt" cluster (this cluster appears in a few other words as well, like "longtempe" ). Each of these letters really should be pronounced individually, and it might be beneficial to have someone demonstrate proper pronunciation.

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