The Story of Speech Synthesis: From Talking Tubes to Neural Networks, Part 1/3

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What would we do without the helpful voices in our GPS systems guiding us to our destinations? How would we look up esoteric facts without the silky voices of the virtual assistants on our phones? And how would we remember our belongings as we leave the train without a considerate voice reminding us to do so? Artificial voices suffuse our day-to-day worlds and fulfill practical functions, but where do these voices come from, and how do you ‘synthesise’ speech?

    The first stones of the story of speech synthesis were laid over 200 years ago where mechanical devices produced speech sounds by emulating the complex structure of the human articulatory system. Technological innovations in the early 20th century then allowed for

Can sounds have meaning? The peculiar case of West-Flemish tj and dj

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As linguists, we investigate all sorts of building bocks of language, such as sentences, predicates, prefixes and suffixes, and even individual sounds like p and z. Most of these building blocks have some kind of meaning. For example, a sentence like The cat sat on the mat means something, a predicate like is crazy in John is crazy means something, and even prefixes and suffixes mean something, such as pre- in pre-heated, which means something like ‘done in advance’, so that pre-heated means ‘heated in advance’. But, you may ask, do sounds like p and z also have meaning?

We know that sounds may distinguish meaning, but it is not so obvious that they have meaning. For example, …

When Rihanna ‘mumbles’ in her native language

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You probably noticed that you can’t understand what Rihanna is singing in the chorus of her song “Work”. What most people don’t know, is that she isn’t singing in English. The language she is singing in is the creole language ‘Bajan’.

A creole language is a type of language that can arise under certain circumstances, where people who don’t have any language in common need to communicate. Bajan arose several hundred years ago among West African slaves who were transported to the Caribbean island of Barbados and bought by plantation owners. The slaves needed to communicate with each other, but since they came from many different places in Africa, they didn’t have one language in common. However, when people need …

A good sign! Myths about sign languages

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Lingoblog continues to celebrate International Day of Sign Languages! Today, Linguistic Mythbusters explode myths about sign languages.

Most people have a pretty clear intuition about the most basic idea behind sign language: If you, for some reason, can’t communicate efficiently through ‘normal’ language, you can use a language that consists of hand movements instead of sounds. But apart from this, there are actually quite a few misconceptions about sign language that flourish among people with normal hearing.

One of the biggest misconceptions about sign language is that it is one single language that has been designed deliberately to be used by deaf people. In reality, there are hundreds of different sign languages, which have all naturally emerged from interaction between …

Did Denmark get a new dialect?

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When the Danish news agency Ritzau sent out the announcement: “Researcher: Denmark has a new dialect” on the morning of February 4th, my phone started ringing non-stop from 6:20 am. Several Danish news outlets, radio stations etc., including TV2 News, P1, P2, P3, P4, Radio Nova, Radio 4 and about 50 other media agencies, couldn’t find anything else to cover but the exact same story that everyone else wanted to cover. The news about this “new” dialect even reached Iceland.

The reason for all of this was a short interview in the Danish paper Kristeligt Dagblad where I explained that despite Danish dialects being used less and less, new dialects are simultaneously coming into existence. And that I …

Why has a rape only “allegedly” taken place?

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Editor’s note: This is a translation of an article originally written in Danish based on a Danish study. The conclusions thus apply to a Danish context, and whether or not they could be true for other contexts/languages is not considered here.

When journalists write articles on burglaries, they most often describe them as events that are matter of fact. There is no reason to question whether the victim really had their tv, computer or valuable jewelry stolen. The same goes for robberies – the journalist does not question whether the victim of the crime has actually had their wallet and phone stolen in broad daylight. The same, however, does not apply to sexual assault or rape. Here, the journalist usually …

What is schwa?

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A friend asked me this question recently. I thought the answer was simple, something along the lines of ‘it is the sound you make in unstressed syllables when your oral articulators are doing nothing and your vocal folds vibrate’. A sort of unmarked setting of the articulatory muscles if you will. But alas, nothing is ever as simple as it seems which I quickly realised during my reading. And what better way to share my new insights than with a Lingoblog entry! The focus of this blog post is the articulatory aspects of schwa, though many other interesting fields are relevant to a description of the sound.

Is schwa a mid-central vowel?     
Schwa (named after a Hebrew diacritic by German …