@nerdbond/talk
A tool to convert traditional writing across languages into a normalized form for pronunciation.
Welcome
A bunch of utils for transforming traditional orthography into Chat Text, which makes it available as well for Tone Text, amongst other things. Basically thing normalizes the way you write pronunciation, into a more human readable (and easier to type on the computer) form.
Check out the
./code folder for
the list of languages we are starting to work on. It's not always
possible to do this across every language, especially on a language like
English, where it is impossible to generate pronunciation based on
written words. You must memorize individual cases in English, and in
some other languages. However, some languages do have the ability to get
pretty close to correct pronunciation based purely on the native
spelling, which is pretty cool. Taking advantage of that fact here!
Table of Languages
Here is a table explaining which languages we've looked at so far which can and can't have pronunciations automatically done.
| language | automatic | note |
|---|---|---|
| Chinese (Mandarin) | yes but not perfect | Pinyin can be used to auto generate pronunciations, but it doesn't always accurately reflect how people actually say each word, so it would be better to manually write each pronunciation if possible. |
| Korean | yes but not perfect | |
| Sanskrit | yes | With Devanagari, each sound has an exact pronunciation in Sanskrit, so we can get pretty close to exact pronunciations automatically done. |
| Finnish | yes | |
| Navajo | yes | Since it was fairly recently transcribed intoa Latin alphabet, it is phonetic for the most part. |
| Akkadian | yes | Because it is no longer spoken, we have at least a standard way f representing things. |
| Spanish | yes | Because it is no longer spoken, we have at least a standard way f representing things. |
| Hebrew | partially yes, but only for consonants unless diacritics given | |
| Arabic | partially yes, but only for consonants unless diacritics given | |
| English | no | Too many words need to have pronunciation memorized. |
| Tibetan | no | Modern Tibetan has evolved to where the script no longer is phonetic. |
| Vietnamese | no |
Goals
- Include romanization transliterations of texts in various forms.
- Include pronunciation of words and word parts in Chat text and possibly IPA.
- Maybe include keyboard layout data for various languages.
- Have structured script data, such as what are the vowels, etc..
- Script detection.
License
Copyright 2021-2023 NerdBond
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
NerdBond
This is being developed by the folks at NerdBond, a California-based project for helping humanity master information and computation. Find us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Check out our other GitHub projects as well!