“ananuruddhaappaṭiviruddhassāvuso”: Aditi pronounces the double “a” in the middle of the word as only one “a”. I think it should be two separate letters; as far as I understand it, this is a compound word, composed out of “ananuruddha”, “appaṭiviruddhassa”, and “āvuso”.
Me too. The word in the sound sample is acchariyaabbhutasutta, which is another double a obtained by word concatenation. I wanted a shorter sample to minimize confounding factors.
Here’s a new clip for Bhante @sujato and you with an accentuated break combined with a vowel change. The apostrophe stresses the second a which is a slightly different vowel: əcchəɾɪjə’abbʰʊt̪əsʊt̪t̪ə
Since Pali was essentially the written down Esperanto of ancient times, perhaps correctness should also consider the ability of different native listeners to distinguish the sounds. Our current global languages may introduce a need to amend traditional Asian Pali pronunciation slightly so that we don’t mis-hear the Pali.
The fix is to replace “aa” with “ə’a” everywhere. This may (?) cause new problems if there are exceptions to this rule. Fixes that are word-specific are undesirable given the vast number of rules that would be needed.
Thanks to Bhante Sujato. Ang. Sabbamitta, and SCMatt, in v0.9.2 we have a much improved Pali pronunciation as voiced by Aditi, our chosen AWS Polly voice. Aditi is a bilingual voice capable of Hindi as well as English.
Thanks to Aminah, we have a much simplified SCV page that should work much better with mobile phones and smaller screens.
@blake I am currently updating SCV sutta content via SC api. This will hammer the SC servers. If you have any concern please reply and I will shut down the job. I’m not sure how long it will take. Perhaps an hour or two. It’s doing about 4 suttas/second.
Apparently Bhante Sujato has been quite busy these past few months. My git commit list is getting quite long and has already reached 919 files.
In SuttaCentral Voice v1.0, you will be able to download any search result as a single MP3 file less than 3 hours long. You will have your choice of languages:
Pali/English
Pali
English
Here is SN12.23 spoken by Aditi/Amy as a sneak preview (audio updated 1/11 due to software bug that truncated file):
For example, if you want two suttas, you will be able to type something like: “an3.76, an3.77” or even “an3.76-77”. Etc.
I’ve been trying out this feature and I’m finding it quite compelling to hear Pali followed by English for each text segment. The neurons are clicking and making connections I haven’t had before.
Questions and comments welcomed. It’s easier to change the code now rather than later.
With the download as is now, that’s English only, I think the introductory part could perhaps do with some improvement. It says:
SuttaCentral Voice recording, AN 8-dot-6-slash-en-slash-s-u-j-a-t-o
The name of the translator is spelled out letter by letter, and it actually took me a few times listening until I understood what Amy is saying here. Maybe it would be nicer if the name could just be pronounced as such.
Interesting! I think I had given up on a general implementation initially, but since translators names are typically Pali, we can now simply ask the software to speak the word. I’ve added this as an optional v1.0 feature “below the line”. If it isn’t easy enough to get into v1.0, we can tuck it into a future release. Thank you!
For example, your own name would be pronounced thus:
it’s not quite right, but seems better than s-a-b-b-a-m-i-t-t-a?
I just realized that it is Jan. 11 with a release promised on Jan. 15. The current release status is posted here. As you can see, I have been aggressive at downsizing v1.0 commitments, but even with that Jan. 15 is about 50% with Jan. 19 looking much better.
The download work was a bit trickier than anticipated.
Just had a look at the plan, looks like you’re making pretty fine progress and that you’re pretty much on course to me.
I notice there was a question mark over one issue, sorry that was my addition, I made a quick note of it when listening one day, but never came back to explain. I haven’t checked again to confirm this bug, but as noted when I was listening to a sutta with multiple sections the player stopped reading after the first section and didn’t complete the sutta (I did reproduce this with another multi section sutta, but if you can’t replicate I can check again).