Initial conversion of documents from HTML to markdown

2026-11-10 00:11:11 +00:00 · 2015-12-21 23:18:54 +02:00
parent f10b2ccb85
commit 78aec60405
14 changed files with 2518 additions and 0 deletions
@@ -0,0 +1,125 @@
+3. LANGUAGES {.western}
+------------
+
+**Languages**. The eSpeak speech synthesizer supports several languages,
+however in many cases these are initial drafts and need more work to
+improve them. Assistance from native speakers is welcome for these, or
+other new languages. Please contact me if you want to help.
+
+eSpeak does text to speech synthesis for the following languages, some
+better than others. Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Cantonese, Catalan,
+Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French,
+German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian,
+Kurdish, Latvian, Lojban, Macedonian, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish,
+Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili,
+Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh.
+
+
+#### Help Needed {.western}
+
+Many of these are just experimental attempts at these languages,
+produced after a quick reading of the corresponding article on
+wikipedia.org. They will need work or advice from native speakers to
+improve them. Please contact me if you want to advise or assist with
+these or other languages.
+
+The sound of some phonemes may be poorly implemented, particularly [r]
+since I'm English and therefore unable to make a "proper" [r] sound.
+
+A major factor is the rhythm or cadance. An Italian speaker told me the
+Italian voice improved from "difficult to understand" to "good" by
+changing the relative length of stressed syllables. Identifying
+unstressed function words in the xx\_list file is also important to make
+the speech flow well. See [Adding or Improving a
+Language](add_language.html)
+
+#### Character sets {.western}
+
+Languages recognise text either as UTF8 or alternatively in an 8-bit
+character set which is appropriate for that language. For example, for
+Polish this is Latin2, for Russian it is KOI8-R. This choice can be
+overridden by a line in the voices file to specify an ISO 8859 character
+set, eg. for Russian the line:
+
+~~~~ {.western style="margin-bottom: 0.5cm"}
+     charset 5
+~~~~
+
+will mean that ISO 8859-5 is used as the 8-bit character set rather than
+KOI8-R.
+
+In the case of a language which uses a non-Latin character set (eg.
+Greek or Russian) if the text contains a word with Latin characters then
+that particular word will be pronounced using English pronunciation
+rules and English phonemes. Speaking entirely English text using a Greek
+or Russian voice will sound OK, but each word is spoken separately so it
+won't flow properly.
+
+Sample texts in various languages can be found at
+[http://\<language\>.wikipedia.org](http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias)
+and [www.gutenberg.org](http://www.gutenberg.org/)
+
+### 3.1 Voice Files {.western}
+
+A number of Voice files are provided in the
+`espeak-data/voices`{.western} directory. You can select one of these
+with the **-v \<voice filename\>** parameter to the speak command, eg:
+
+~~~~ {.western style="margin-bottom: 0.5cm"}
+   espeak-ng -vaf
+~~~~
+
+to speak using the Afrikaans voice.
+
+Language voices generally start with the 2 letter [ISO 639-1
+code](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1) for the language. If the
+language does not have an ISO 639-1 code, then the 3 letter [ISO 639-3
+code](http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp) can be used.
+
+For details of the voice files see [Voices](voices.html).
+
+#### Default Voice {.western}
+
+### 3.2 English Voices {.western}
+
+### 3.3 Voice Variants {.western}
+
+To make alternative voices for a language, you can make additional voice
+files in espeak-data/voices which contains commands to change various
+voice and pronunciation attributes. See [voices.html](voices.html).
+
+Alternatively there are some preset voice variants which can be applied
+to any of the language voices, by appending `+`{.western} and a variant
+name. Their effects are defined by files in
+`espeak-data/voices/!v`{.western}.
+
+The variants are `+m1 +m2 +m3 +m4 +m5 +m6 +m7`{.western} for male
+voices, `+f1 +f2 +f3 +f4 +f5 `{.western}for female voices, and
+`+croak +whisper`{.western} for other effects. For example:
+
+~~~~ {.western style="margin-bottom: 0.5cm"}
+   espeak-ng -ven+m3
+~~~~
+
+The available voice variants can be listed with:
+
+~~~~ {.western style="margin-bottom: 0.5cm"}
+   espeak-ng --voices=variant
+~~~~
+
+### 3.4 Other Languages {.western}
+
+The eSpeak speech synthesizer does text to speech for the following
+additional langauges.
+
+### 3.5 Provisional Languages {.western}
+
+These languages are only initial naive implementations which have had
+little or no feedback and improvement from native speakers.
+
+### 3.6 Mbrola Voices {.western}
+
+Some additional voices, whose name start with **mb-** (for example
+**mb-en1**) use eSpeak as a front-end to Mbrola diphone voices. eSpeak
+does the spelling-to-phoneme translation and intonation. See
+[mbrola.html](mbrola.html).