Re: phonetic markup

On Thu, 20 Nov 1997, Jason White wrote:

> The main limitation of the "phonetic dictionary" approach is that
> it is unable to accommodate homographs, which occur sometimes in
> English and perhaps in other languages as well. Modern speech
> synthesis software, such as recent versions of DECTALK, attempt to
> analyse sentences containing homographs and to choose the correct
> pronunciation, but this is one area in which phonetic markup could
> be useful. Would RDF make it possible to control the pronunciation
> of a specific word within a particular sentence, without affecting
> it in other contexts? 

This doesn't necessitate changes to HTML though, if the
pronunciation is expressible as a CSS property, since these
can already be expressed in HTML via the style attribute.

In my talk I raised the issue of where the pronunciation depends on
the grammatical context, and also where it depends on the knowing
the topic at a deeper level. There is some value to being able to
represent grammatical constraints on which pronunciation to use, but
when it comes to understanding the deeper meaning of the text, this
is way beyond what is practical.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2984 (or 2521) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Thursday, 20 November 1997 07:23:18 UTC