Re: Things to do with text

One interesting application I've seen is cantillation synthesis of the 
Hebrew Bible. Kinnor Software (www.kinnor.com) markets a product called 
Trope Trainer that chants any selection from the Torah using a voice, 
pronunciation, and melody that the user selects. They have a free demo that 
gives a good idea of its capabilities. (For those unfamiliar with Jewish 
ritual practices, there is a tradition of weekly public readings from the 
Hebrew Bible. High priority is given to accuracy in chanting. This software 
is a study tool for readers.)

The Kinnor software appears to be built on top of the DECtalk system 
developed in the 1980s. I don't know what data representation it (the Kinnor 
software) uses internally, but it's reasonable to think that the system is 
built on top of a straight text encoding. The musical aspects set it off 
from the usual text-to-speech application.

Ted Hopp
ZigZag, Inc.
[email protected]
+1-301-990-7453

Hebrew in Hand, for your mobile device
http://www.zigzagworld.com/hebrewinhand/


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Hudson" <[email protected]>
Cc: "Unicode Discussion" <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 12:02 AM
Subject: Re: Things to do with text


> Michael Maxwell wrote:
>
>> Like the things corpus linguists do to build applications, or field 
>> linguists do to analyze a language?  And if so, are you interested in 
>> annotated text (footnoted text, interlinear text, text tagged for names 
>> or numbers...), or just plain text in one or more languages?
>
> I'm primarily interested, at the moment, in activities or operations that 
> rely heavily on the fact that the text is computerised, i.e. that would be 
> difficult or impossible to do with 'analogue' text. I'm particularly 
> interested in the sort of things that can be said to happen invisibly, 
> i.e. operations performed on text as encoded entities that might only be 
> secondarily displayed using fonts, or perhaps not displayed at all. So 
> yes, I think the sort of things corpus linguists might do would be of 
> interest, and I'd like to gain an understanding of some examples.
>
> Thanks.
>
> John Hudson
>
> -- 
>
> Tiro Typeworks        www.tiro.com
> Gulf Islands, BC      [email protected]
>
> A bilabial velaric ingressive stop is essentially a kiss.
> -- Pullum & Ladusaw, _Phonetic symbol guide_
>
>
>