[DECtalk] why is dectalk's alphabet so strange?

[Edward Bruckert]

Not true. The available dictionaries were too full of errors to use,
The arpanet symbols were originally different from later. For parsing issues and the set was changes to all two
characters. The IPA symbols were never used because they were
too difficult to enter.

On May 24, 2015, at 11:25 PM, Carlos Fernandez via Dectalk <dectalk at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:

> That would be a logical conclusion. The founders of Cepstral are speech researchers that graduated from CMU.
> 
> Carlos
> On 5/24/2015 20:51, Blake Roberts via Dectalk wrote:
>> Alex, Are you saying that  Dectalk is based off another synthesizer's
>> dictionary? That explains to me why the phonetic dictionary of Dectalk and
>> the one used by TTS company Cepstral are  similar.
>> Blake
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Dectalk [mailto:dectalk-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] On Behalf Of Alex
>> H. via Dectalk
>> Sent: Sunday, May 24, 2015 7:19 PM
>> To: DECtalk
>> Subject: Re: [DECtalk] why is dectalk's alphabet so strange?
>> 
>> Looks like DEC was loosely based on the CMU dictionary... there's
>> definitely some crossover somewhere...
>> 
>> [1] http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict
>> 
>> It's worth noting that between DEC 4.3 and 4.64, and FonixTalk
>> thereafter, there were some trivial changes, both with auditory
>> phonemes and what is accepted in brackets of phonemic text. For
>> example dashes choke FonixTalk, but work fine in 4.3. You can still
>> use underscores or commas to insert pauses, durations are optional as
>> always.
>> 
>> Alex
>> 
>> On 5/24/15, Mohamed via Dectalk <dectalk at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
>>> Hi guys, so, I have another dectalk question. So, why is its phonemic
>>> alphabet so strange? Like, uw, jh, hx, nx. I get what they're supposed
>>> to say, but in phonemes like h, j, etc, what's the purpose of the other
>>> character, like with the j sound, what's the purpose of the h?
>>> Thanks
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>>> 
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