Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 May 19

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May 19

IPA to speech

Is there any software or service that can take a phonetic (emphatically not phonemic) transcription, and synthesise its pronunciation?

Amazon Polly is very close, but it takes a phonemic transcription for a specific (known) language, so that the synthesis doesn't distinguish between segments which the chosen language doesn't distinguish between. --46.116.127.9 (talk) 10:45, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

IBM SPR supports IPA. 2600:1004:B154:6625:77EB:C50C:F78B:D57E (talk) 15:02, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

So does Amazon Polly; but both take phonemic input. --46.116.127.9 (talk) 17:21, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

46.116.127.9 -- I don't know anything about speech-synthesis software, but as a practical matter, it's very common for phonetically-transcribed text to be in a "broad" transcription which is meant to be understood in the context of one particular language. An ultra-"narrow" phonetic transcription which was intended to be language-independent would be very different... AnonMoos (talk) 01:28, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Yes, that's exactly what I'm after: a TTS which could be used for uncommon and fictional languages, after the user himself converts the text into the ultra-"narrow" phonetic transcription. --46.116.127.9 (talk) 08:43, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Chinese R and L sound

Why is it a common thing for Chinese to pronounce the L-sound in English words as an R-sound when both R and L sounds exist in the Chinese languages?—KAVEBEAR (talk) 15:09, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Take a look at Perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese speakers. --Thomprod (talk) 15:58, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

This is not particular to the Japanese. Consider, for example Sp. playa (beach) and plaza (square) and the corresponding Portuguese words praia and praça.87.112.145.168 (talk) 16:34, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Which variety of Chinese? Cantonese does not have 'r'. Mandarin Chinese does have an 'r' sound, but its use varies between different speakers, especially between northern and southern speakers of Mandarin. But it’s a phenomenon not limited to those sounds or to Chinese: it is at least as much true the other way. E.g. English speakers often mangle the name of China’s president, Xi Jinping, as both the sounds and the tones don’t exist in English.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 21:06, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Remember that there's more than one "L" sound and there's a great variety of "R" sounds. When you say that somebody is pronouncing an L-sound in English words as an R-sound, who is it that makes this judgment, and what tacit assumptions is this person making about what constitutes an "R" sound? -- Hoary (talk) 10:19, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Do Mandarin speakers really struggle to distinguish r/l in English? Maybe this is one of those impression of Chinese people that originates with Cantonese speakers (who used to make up the bulk of the overseas Chinese), but doesn't apply to other parts of China. From my experience living in Sichuan, I don't have the impression that confusing r/l was common. A thing things to point out though:

• Chinese /l/ does not occur at the end of syllables, and /r/ not in all types of syllable onsets (for example, there is no /ra/) so a few things happen:

1. Many Chinese speakers will turn English /l/ at the end of a syllable into a vowel. So "ball" [bɑɫ] will be [bɑʊ̯].
2. When borrowing foreign names, /r/ and /l/ often become switched, I think to match whatever works or sounds better for breaking the name up into syllables. "Niagara" for example is "Níyǎjiālā", and the country "Albania" is "Ā'ěrbāníyǎ".

• Unfortunately our articles don't seem to describe this, but my impression of Sichuanese (and perhaps Mandarin as well) is that the phoneme /r/ has two allophones. Speakers tend to use some sort of rhotic approximant (maybe [ɹ]) in front of high vowels /i y u/, and a fricative (or maybe approximant) like /z/ elsewhere. This then carries over into English, so some Sichuanese will pronounce "zoo" like "roo".
• Many Chinese dialects also merge /na/ and /la/, and those speakers then often end up pronouncing English "line" as "nine" or vise versa.

So in summary: I don't think Mandarin speakers really commonly confuse English /r/ and /l/, except in the syllable coda, but they may confuse /r/ and /l/ with other sounds. --Terfili (talk) 19:56, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

The article on the Beijing 2008 Olympics Parade of Nations can be used as a catalogue of Chinese-language names of countries and their pinyin romanizations. --Theurgist (talk) 12:48, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Nowadays, so many young Chinese people study abroad in American universities. These young people tend to have near-perfect pronunciation of American English, in my experience. They are almost as good as Americans of Chinese descent. But Americans of Chinese descent tend to have a more natural intonation pattern and word choice than the Chinese international students. SSS (talk) 15:58, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

This is misleading and some would say stereotyping. First you need to distinguish Americans of Chinese descent who are born in the United States and those who are not. Americans of Chinese descent who are born and raised in the United States are generally native English speakers and their speech patterns on the whole are indistinguishable from other Americans who are native English speakers. --216.15.48.37 (talk) 10:01, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

I mentioned specifically Chinese people as in international students from China in American universities and comparing them to Chinese-American students who tend to be second- or subsequent-generation. These Chinese-American students, of course, speak English natively. Chinese international students nowadays also speak highly fluent, almost native-like English. Of course, there are also first-generation Chinese-Americans from the older generations. Depending at the age of immigration, they may be as good as subsequent-generation Chinese-Americans. I am neither stereotyping nor misleading anything. However, my previous post was poorly written and thus poorly understood. SSS (talk) 01:41, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

Is there any relation between the shape of niqqud to their vowels?

Is there any relation between the shape of current Hebrew niqqud to their vowels? For example, talking about Patach, it looks like _ which represents the open mouth. Maybe you know some information about the current shape of niqqud, or you cen refer me to such information? --93.126.116.89 (talk) 18:58, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

I very strongly doubt it. Such motivations were present when deriving some Korean Hangul symbols, or Bell's Visible Speech, but there's no evidence that I'm aware of that devisers of liturgical recitation diacritic systems in the middle east after 500 A.D. were thinking that way at all. The first form of "niqqud" was probably writing tiny Greek vowel letters after letters of the Syriac alphabet. Then two systems of Syriac pointing developed (eastern and western), and three systems of Hebrew pointing (Tiberian, Palestinian, and Babylonian). The diacritics were generally simple shapes suitable to be written with a scribal ink pen, and reasonably distinguishable from each other at a small size... AnonMoos (talk) 01:09, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

Arabic diacritics for vowels are quite comparable in their origin and function to niqqud, but at least damma has a non-arbitrary shape, being a small waw. --46.116.127.9 (talk) 08:43, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

I mentioned Syriac because the development of diacritics in Syriac influenced the development of diacritics in Hebrew. Arabic diacritics didn't influence Hebrew, but of course they are comparable to both Syriac and Hebrew as a written system for augmenting a Semitic consonantal alphabet with indications of vowel sounds, consonant gemination, etc. -- AnonMoos (talk) 11:32, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Better Call Saul... Is this a wordplay?

Fictional caracter J.M.Mc Gill, as explained in the linked wiki article, takes the alias "Saul Goodman" as a play on the phrase "S'all good, man". Then, when he starts a career as a lawyer for small criminality, he also invents the advertising slogan "Better Call Saul!". My question is: is this another wordplay, maybe based on a (mis)pronounciation of "counselor"? --pma 21:58, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Unless someone connected with the show has said so (which I doubt), I don't know how we would be able to answer whether they had that in mind. All I can tell you is that "better call Saul" doesn't sound much like "counselor" to me. I always thought it was just a really good imitation of a certain sort of late-night TV ad. See Cal Worthington for the general tradition it's in (though that's used cars rather than lawyers). --Trovatore (talk) 22:30, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Here's Saul Goodman and his dog Spot! —Tamfang (talk) 23:06, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

It rhymes. Is that wordplay enough? --Jayron32 15:31, 21 May 2018 (UTC)