I’m not aware of any statement by Tolkien to this effect, but it just
seems natural to me, and the [ŋ] is at least found in the Omikhleia
Sindarin dictionary [1] (e.g. entry tinc, [tˈiŋk]).
Based on a similar phoneme rule in ph_english.
[1]: https://www.jrrvf.com/hisweloke/sindar/index.html
For ⟨ae⟩, we used to use the Latin [[aI]] phoneme, which sounds like
/ae/. Call that phoneme [[aE]] for us and introduce a separate [[aI]]
one, which sounds more like /ai/ (since Sindarin has both, and they’re
supposed to sound different, though Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings
notes that there is nothing closely corresponding to ⟨ae⟩ in English and
that it may be pronounced like ⟨ai⟩). Furthermore, for ⟨oe⟩, just remove
the TODO – the Latin phoneme is called [[OI]] but sounds more like /oe/
than /oi/, so it’s actually just fine for our purposes. Finally, the
⟨ui⟩ diphthong is copied from Finnish, just like in Quenya.
Both are copied from the Finnish phonemes, since Finnish was a major
inspiration for Quenya. This means that the ⟨iu⟩ diphthong is a
“falling” one – according to Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings, this
is the original pronunciation, but by the Third Age (the time in which
The Lord of the Rings is set) it had become a “rising” one, so I may
change the phoneme later, not sure.
According to Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings, ⟨ph⟩ stands for /f/
when final (because ⟨f⟩ is pronounced as /v/ in that position), and
otherwise is used instead of ⟨f⟩ either because it’s derived from ⟨p⟩
(in which case it’s presumably pronounced just like ⟨f⟩), or to
represent an especially long /f/. We can’t really tell which case we
have, but from the Omikhleia Sindarin dictionary [1], it appears that
all the long ⟨ph⟩’s are between two vowels, and all the short ones have
at least one adjacent consonant, so let’s use that as a rule and hope it
works out. (The Ambar Eldaron Quenya dictionary [2] is less easily
searchable, so I’m just hoping that this rule works reasonably well for
both languages.)
[1]: https://www.jrrvf.com/hisweloke/sindar/index.html
[2]: https://ambar-eldaron.com/telechargements/quenya-engl-A4.pdf
Not all of the diphthongs in Quenya and Sindarin are defined in the
Latin phonemes, and for now we’re sticking to those, so some diphthongs
just get TODOs for now. Also, we’re temporarily using the same phoneme
for ⟨ae⟩/⟨ai⟩ and ⟨oe⟩/⟨oi⟩, which should really be different (though
Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings notes that ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ don’t have
close English equivalents, and that they “may be pronounced as ai, oi”).
A circumflex “specially prolonged” vowels; according to Appendix E of
The Lord of the Rings, only in Sindarin, but the Ambar Eldaron Quenya
Dictionary [1] also has some very few circumflex words (sû, lîs), so
let’s support the circumflex in Quenya as well. Marking extra-long
vowels with two colons seems to work well and is also done in several
other languages.
[1]: https://ambar-eldaron.com/telechargements/quenya-engl-A4.pdf
Long vowels, marked with an acute accent or a circumflex, are longer
than short vowels (duh) and always make a heavy syllable (i.e. we don’t
include the rules to move stress to the previous syllable). In Quenya,
⟨é⟩ and ⟨ó⟩ are “tenser and ‘closer’” than the short vowels, according
to Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings, while in Sindarin they’re
supposed to be the same; the phonemes we inherit from Latin seem to
reproduce this reasonably well for Quenya, and for now we use them for
Sindarin too, which works nicely for the most common Sindarin word with
a long o, “Lothlórien” (because Lórien is actually a Quenya name, and
therefore I assume *that* ⟨ó⟩ should actually be /o/ and not /ɔ/). I
might adjust the phonemes later (at which point Lothlórien will
presumably have to go in sjn_list).
In Elvish languages, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨dh⟩, and ⟨th⟩ count as single consonants for
the purposes of stress, since they represent single letters in the
original scripts. The easiest way to implement this is to replace them
with single letters at the beginning – ⟨ð⟩ for ⟨dh⟩ and ⟨þ⟩ for ⟨th⟩ are
natural, and ⟨x⟩ for ⟨ch⟩ also makes some sense, though it means we need
to replace real ⟨x⟩ first (it’s not mentioned in Appendix E of The Lord
of the Rings, but does occur in some Quenya words, notably Helcaraxë).
Real ⟨x⟩ is pronounced like /ks/, but of course we need to spell that as
⟨cs⟩, since ⟨k⟩ does not occur in Elvish languages.
The Elvish languages have the same general stress rule as Latin [1]:
stress falls on the penultimate syllable if that is heavy (contains a
long vowel, a diphthong, or a vowel followed by two or more consonants),
otherwise on the antepenultimate syllable. For Latin, espeak-ng
implements this by declaring “penultimate syllable” as the general
stress rule in espeak-ng-data/, and then adding rules in dictsource/
that match light syllables and move the primary stress to the previous
syllable, i.e. the antepenultimate one. We use the same basic principle
for the Elvish languages here (but using the terms “heavy” and “light”
rather than “weak” and “strong” like in the Latin files).
Note that this doesn’t fully implement the stress rules yet: we have no
concept of diphthongs, long vowels aren’t really properly handled yet,
and we also still count ⟨ch⟩, ⟨dh⟩, ⟨th⟩ as two consonants rather than
one as it should be. This will be improved separately (I prefer doing
this in small incremental steps).
[1]: https://menegroth.github.io/stress-in-sindarin.html
Also, inherit the Elvish phonemes from Latin, because Esperanto doesn’t
have /y/. (Quenya doesn’t need that – ⟨y⟩ is a consonant there – so
maybe I’ll separate their phonemes at some point. For now, Latin works
well enough for both as far as I can tell.)
This prepares the languages of Quenya and Sindarin, setting up their
infrastructure without declaring a lot of rules yet – just enough for
“Eä” (a Quenya word, but I can’t think of a similarly simple one for
Sindarin). Phonemes are inherited from Esperanto for now.
Found with the following script:
for file in phsource/ph_*; do
grep -qF "$file" Makefile.am || echo "$file missing!";
done
I’ve left out one of the files highlighted by that script: ph_burmese
exists, but isn’t actually used by phsource/phonemes (there’s no
`include` directive for it).
This commit adds the usual English pronunciation of my name to the English dictionary.
We could, alternatively, add the native pronunciation, `kS'I2StOf` (or the closest approximation to it I could get out of the English synthesizer), but I'm not sure what the policy on that sort of thing is within the project.
without this fix (assuming it does, what the original author intended to check for), the configure script spits out an error:
checking for ndk-build no
checking for gradle no
${_source}/configure: line 13806: 0: command not found
checking if zsp-gcc supports C99 without any flags yes
checking if zsp-gcc supports C99 with the -std=c99 flag yes
that's because the condition in AM_CONDITIONAL is expected to be a valid shell expression for an if-statement, not just plain value:
{ printf "%s\n" "$as_me:${as_lineno-$LINENO}: checking for gradle" >&5
printf %s "checking for gradle... " >&6; }
if test -e ${GRADLE} ; then
{ printf "%s\n" "$as_me:${as_lineno-$LINENO}: result: ${GRADLE}" >&5
printf "%s\n" "${GRADLE}" >&6; }
if 1; then
HAVE_GRADLE_TRUE=
HAVE_GRADLE_FALSE='#'
else
HAVE_GRADLE_TRUE='#'
HAVE_GRADLE_FALSE=
fi
else
{ printf "%s\n" "$as_me:${as_lineno-$LINENO}: result: no" >&5
printf "%s\n" "no" >&6; }
if 0; then
HAVE_GRADLE_TRUE=
HAVE_GRADLE_FALSE='#'
else
HAVE_GRADLE_TRUE='#'
HAVE_GRADLE_FALSE=
fi
fi
Some words have been added to the dictionary for street language. But Espeak really mispronounced them.
I removed the mispronounced words.
And I wrote a better pronunciation rule for the following words:
* bağışlamak ba:@@Sla'mak
* bağışlayın ba:@@S'laj@n
These words should be lengthened by 1.5 in the first letter "i", in a subtle tone. (letter "ğ" is the reason for this. Normally there is no such rule.)
Previously, the letter "ı" (305) here was ignored.
Although the street language for Turkish looks like this, it is not. Since we have a dynamic language, it is not possible to implement all of them.
Therefore, I request you to accept these changes.
The tests were done on Windows. Pronunciations improved.
Lucas Werkmeister