Which languages can you directly convert the spelling of the word into a "standard" pronunciation? From my understanding so far:
- Chinese (through pinyin)
- Hebrew (seem to have a rigid grammar for pronunciation if diacritical marks are present)
- Sanskrit (same here)
- Arabic (same here)
The languages which seem you cannot accurately generate the pronunciation from the spelling (without having a dictionary of individual words):
- English
- Tibetan (read there are too many edge cases, but not sure).
Could someone please help me identify the ones from this list which you can generate the pronunciation from some orthography? This way one can know which languages you have to collect a lexicon/pronunciation mapping for, vs. those that only require the lexicon without pronunciation. If nothing else, can you get "very reasonably close" to doing it, with only a few edge cases? (As opposed to English which has tons of edge cases).
Unknowns
- Pali
- Malayalam
- Sinhala
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Thai
- Korean
- Japanese (through some pinyin equivalent?)
- Spanish
- French
- Finnish
- Georgian
- Armenian
- Amharic
- Inuktitut
- Navajo
- Latin
- Greek (preferably Koine/Ancient greek)
- Cherokee
- Igbo
- Yoruba
- Xhosa
- Hausa
- Urdu
- Punjabi
- Coptic
- Gothic
- Old Norse
- Old Irish
- Russian
- Vietnamese
- Khmer
I would like to build a text to speech sort of thing (very basic), and knowing which languages I have to manually bite the bullet and collect individual words for would be helpful, as I'm sure linguists probably know this quickly.
While not all in the list necessarily need to have an answer, knowing what categories of languages from this list support this feature would help. For example, do all dravidian languages have the same feature of being + or - this feature?
By "standard pronunciation", I mean sort of like what you'd find in a general IPA transcription of some word, it doesn't have to be super perfect.
/t/
and/tʰ/
, Latin had a phonemic distinction between/k/
and/kʷ/
, etc. Which distinctions are indicated with separate symbols and which distinctions are indicated with superscripts and subscripts comes down to historical accidents, in most cases; there's no linguistic reason why ejectives should be marked with a diacritic and implosives with special symbols of their own, that's entirely historical coincidence. – Draconis Aug 19 '20 at 2:02