Language desk
< April 2	<< Mar \| April \| May >>	April 4 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

April 3

Comprehensive book about language features

I am trying to remember the title of an encyclopedic work with loads of comparisons across languages. For example, it would list what languages have SOV or SVO order, or what color names could be found as well in Icelandic as in Papua New Guinea languages, and so on. --Llaanngg (talk) 01:09, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

See "World Atlas of Language Structures".—Wavelength (talk) 01:36, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That was it. Thanks. --Llaanngg (talk) 14:49, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Accented forms of English...

I recently started looking at various "free" synthetic speech generators.

However, I was trying to make them do something unusal, which was to speak English, but with a distinctly accented form for dramatic purposes.

In particular, in the context of an audio-drama idea I was prototyping, I had 2 'maid' robots, that were speaking at a much higher (possibly soprano) pitched voice, but they were talking in a sterotype french accented english ("We will azzzizt you!") , and a German accented controller robot ("You are complying vith our Insturtions now!"). In E-Speak I have the option of French or German voices, but I find I'm having to recode a lot of English words phonetically, as the translation dictionaries (to phonemes) are obviously different. ( Some words I have had problems with include "now", "comply", amongst others.)

Does anyone here have a table which maps English phoneme sounds onto the ones a speaker of another language might use? (The Speech tool I am using at the moment is E-Speak which uses a modified version of Kirshenbaum's chart, but with some tweaks.)

Longer term, it would be nice to also map other English languge sounds, to produce other accented voices, to give a wider range of options. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 12:42, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

See Non-native pronunciations of English. Loraof (talk) 18:18, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, One item missing in that article, (although not of relevance to what I was looking for) is the absence of a Hindi/Urdu pronounciation of English. Presumably that needs a separate question. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 22:40, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

See Indian English#Phonology, and also Pakistani English#Phonology for references. Loraof (talk) 23:20, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]