DE4 - a male German voice de4 is a male German voice, but it also provides English and French phones. English and French phones very often occur in foreign words in German texts, and some of them can't be replaced by similar German phones. Those were added to the phone set of de4. For a complete list of the additional foreign phones see below. Phone set --------- Phones are from the SAMPA phone sets for German, English and French with the following exceptions: EI instead of SAMPA eI, E~ instead of SAMPA e~, L instead of SAMPA l for English variant. All German phones were covered, as well as those phones from English and French which do not have a similar counterpart in German. German phones ------------- (examples taken from http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/german.htm and modified): Vowels: I Sitz zIts E Gesetz g@zEts a Satz zats O Trotz trOts U Schutz SUts Y hübsch hYpS 9 plötzlich pl9tslIC i: Lied li:t e: Beet be:t E: spät SpE:t a: Tat ta:t o: rot ro:t u: Blut blu:t y: süß zy:s 2: blöd bl2:t aI Eis aIs aU Haus haUs OY Kreuz krOYts unstressed "schwa" vowels: @ bitte bIt@ 6 besser bEs6 Glottal stop: ? Verein fE6?aIn Glottal stops occur in German at syllable-initial vowels (as in fE6?aIn ("Verein"), which is syllabified fE6 - ?aIn). We chose not to treat glottal stops as independent phones. Instead, all diphones of the form - were recorded twice, once across a syllable boundary and once within a syllable. We used the vowel symbols preceded by a ? for the cross-syllable boundary variants. Thus, the fE6?aIn example would involve a 6-?aI diphone. Consonants: p Pein paIn b Bein baIn t Teich taIC d Deich daIC k Kunst kUnst g Gunst gUnst pf Pfahl pfa:l ts Zahl tsa:l tS deutsch dOYtS f fast fast v was vas s Tasse tas@ z Hase ha:z@ S waschen vaS=n Z Genie Zeni: C sicher zIC6 j Jahr ja:6 x Buch bu:x h Hand hant m mein maIn n nein naIn N Ding dIN l Leim laIm R Reim RaIm2: additional English phones ------------------------- (examples taken from http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english-uni.htm and modified): EI raise rEIz @U nose n@Uz T thin TIn D this DIs r wrong rQN L long LQN w wasp wQsp The L phoneme corresponds to the English l phoneme. We use capital L to distinguish it from the German "light" l variant. additional French phones ------------------------ (examples taken from http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/french.htm and modified) Z gens Za~ E~ vin vE~ a~ vent va~ o~ bon bo~ ------------------------------------------------- Diphones provided by: Institute for Natural Language Processing Experimental Phonetics University of Stuttgart contact: antje.schweitzer@ims.uni-stuttgart.de