Re: [Espeak-general] his or her in sentences

[Geoff S. <geoff@QuiteLikely.com>]

On Fri, 15 May 2015, Jonathan Duddington wrote:

> On 15 May, kendell clark <cof...@gm...> wrote:
>
>> Sometimes in a sentence, if the word 'his' or 'her' are in a
>> sentence, they are said with the h silent, EG let her, hit him, get
>> her,  lots and lots of others. I'd like to make this change in espeak
>> to make reading a little more pleasant, but this could have all kinds
>> of consequences if I do it wrong
>
> I think you're saying that the 'h' should be silent in these phrases in
> US English, and you want "let her" to be spoken exactly the same as US
> "letter", and "bit her" the same as "bitter".

I would caution against trying to be too clever.  Nuances like this are 
often hard to get right consistantly, and what is right might vary from 
accent to accent anyway.

To give an example, I'm using eSpeak 1.46.02 under Debian with the default 
UK English and variant.  I've noticed some attempts to be a bit clever 
with the word "have".  Attempts have been made to drop the 'h' 
appropriately.  So phrases like "I have", "you have", "we have" etc all 
have the 'h' sound, but "could have" and "couldn't have" don't.

On the surface, this sounds like the right thing to do.  Take a sentence 
like "I could have been very rich if I'd applied myself".  Sounds 
perfectly normal.

But then take a sentence like "He could have it if he wanted it".  In this 
sentence, the word "have" needs to be stressed.  I'm not convinced that 
there's a way to define when this should happen with any accuracy.

The reason why I've noticed this is because it sounds more unnatural to 
have the "h" missing when it should be there than for it to be there when 
it's often dropped.  After all, if the author really wanted to say "could 
'ave", they could've written "could've", which is unambiguous.

HTH,
Geoff.