[ExI] chinese synthesis

[Stefano Vaj]

On 25 May 2013 05:56, spike <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

> A local Mandarin speaker made a comment yesterday that really got the
> wheels spinning.  The topic was the tonal aspect of Chinese languages.  She
> commented that the tonal aspects to pronunciation makes Chinese easier to
> understand in some ways than English, because the pitch and transition
> conveys meaning about the word, helping differentiate it from other similar
> sounding words.
>

What if you are tone-deaf? This is the prob with Chinese words in Japanese
(when "On" pronounced). There are no tones in Japanese, so you end up with
innumerable homophones.

Spoken English, btw, used to be a nightmare for me even when I already had
a good command of passive written English, Shakespeare or Chaucer included.
Even today, background noise, poor audio res, accents and slurry speaking
make me wish for undertitles.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20130531/90fd9f2f/attachment.html>