Currently phonemes are written as one string, for example:
espeak -x -q -z thai
results in a string
t'aI
However this is ambigous -- because espeak uses such phonemes (mnemonics) as "a", "I" and "aI".
Please add separator (spaces?) so the output would be:
t' a I
or
t' aI
This would eliminate ambiguity.
If you do:
espeak --ipa=1
it uses a tie character to join multiple characters within a phoneme name.
espeak --ipa=3
separates each phoneme with an underscore character.
Does this meet your need?
Yes, thank you for your answer (I assume it works as you describe, because I have difficulties compiling the latest version right now).
Ok, finally I got working espeak (latest released).
So my wish still stands -- ipa=3 indeed adds underscores, but it changes the phonemes as well.
My point is, there should be a way/option/default to add separators without changing anything else.
I can do this, but I'm not sure what is the best way to control it from the command-line interface.
1) Add an optional value to the -x and -X optiond, similar to the value after the --ipa option. The problem is that commands such as the convenient short-form:
espeak -Xvde
don't work, because the -v must now be a separate argument since the -X may have a parameter.
2) Use the --ipa=3 option to be used together with the -x and -X options, where
espeak -x --ipa=3
means produce ascii phoneme output with underscore separators. The --ipa option is used only to specify the separator, but the -x means that the output is ascii phonemes, not ipa phonemes. This is confusing.
3) Use a new option.
Sugestions?
3.a) deprecate --ipa=3 smoothly
introduce new option (--sep?) with default value underscore
So ipa=3 would for now silently add this option, but user could override it with different separator.
"x" would work as always, unless user would provide either just "--sep" or with value for example "--sep=/".
In general move in the direction that producing phonemes in format X is independent concept of separating them.
Done in eSpeak 1.48.11, now at:
http://espeak.sf.net/test/latest.html
I added command-line options --sep (default is space) and --tie (default is U+361).
Details are in the updated:
http://espeak.sf.net/commands.html
Thank you very much!