I’m really glad you said that because, although it’s probably the main reason I can’t listen to Amy (although well above that is just a real fondness for Raveena), when I mentioned it to Karl, I also mentioned that I thought there was no need to change it, but as someone else noticed it, too, it seemed fair to add.
Maybe what we can do to ‘fix’ this, is just give some more detail to Amy’s back story. Although she was born in England, she moved to the States and pick up some influences. There: .
I just listened to Raveena for comparison, and she does indeed pronounce the “u” much shorter. This amounts more to how most Europeans / Westerners who don’t know Pali would pronounce Buddha (I also would before I understood a bit more about Pali pronunciation).
I think perhaps we should simply leave Amy as is. She is managing as best she can. I can’t really change her pronunciation much–her phonemes are much more restricted than either Raveena or Aditi.
Is this good? I know I might have accidentally marketed myself as an expert, but I really don’t know. I know little of audio recording, despite having sinfully extensive materials to record with.
Poor Amy really struggles with the doubled consonants. We’re fighting a battle hard to win with Amy. She was never trained to pronounce Hindi, so her range is quite limited. The same sounds flow effortlessly off Aditi and Raveena’s voices. I have thought of splicing in Aditi’s voice for Pali words, but the result would be quite Frankenstein. And it would be hopeless with poor Russell. Every now and then we find a trick like SCMatt did with the dipthong.
Like what kind of bell is it? It’s a mid-range singing bowl, rather cheap, the kind you find in New Age stores in shopping malls. It even has fake Tibetan writing on it!
@Aminah, I’m working on the Thig/Thag content update with Bhante Sujato’s wonderful new translations. I have gotten them from staging.suttacentral.net and they seem to work fine. However, there’s a bit of a chicken/egg issue here with the release. I don’t want to release production code that refers to staging. I’d rather release SCV 1.1.2 at or after SC release of newer content so that I can release production code that points to production code. How does this affect the planned SCV release date?
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