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Generate the Pronunciation of a Word from Traditional Orthography

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@termsurf/text

Convert traditional orthography into Latin or pronunciation text.




Welcome

Text is a TypeScript library which transforms traditional orthography into Latin/Romanized text, using the Talk spec. TalkText can be used to render Tone, which is a unique and modern rune-like writing system for pronunciations.

Caveat: It's not always possible to do transform traditional orthography into pronunciation text across every language, especially on a language like English, where it is impossible to generate pronunciation based on written words. You must memorize individual cases in English, and in some other languages. However, some languages do have the ability to get pretty close to correct pronunciation based purely on the native spelling, which is pretty cool. Taking advantage of that fact here!

Goals

  • Script detection.
  • Romanization transliterations of scripts/languages in various forms.
  • Structured script data, such as what are the vowels, etc..
  • Keyboard layout data for various languages.

Installation

npm install @termsurf/text

Examples

Here are some API examples.

Detect Script

import detect from '@termsurf/text/detect'

detect([...'美丽的']) //=> { form: 'chinese', rank: 1 }

Transform Text

For these languages you can currently call make:

language status
akkadian
arabic
chinese
coptic
devanagari
finnish
french
geez
georgian
gothic
gujarati
gurmukhi
hebrew 🔧
irish 🔧
italian 🔧
japanese 🔧
kannada 🔧
korean 🔧
latin 🔧
malayalam 🔧
navajo 🔧
old-norse 🔧
old-persian 🔧
oriya 🔧
pali 🔧
runic 🔧
swahili 🔧
tamil 🔧
telugu 🔧
thai 🔧
tibetan 🔧
turkish 🔧
ugaritic 🔧
vietnamese 🔧
welsh 🔧

Arabic

import make, {
  symbols,
  vowels,
  boundVowels,
  consonants,
} from '@termsurf/text/arabic'

make('جَمِيل') //=> "djami_l"

vowels.forEach(console.log)

Chinese

import make from '@termsurf/text/chinese'

make('měi lì de') //=> "me\\/i li\\ tO"

Tibetan

import toWylie from '@termsurf/text/tibetan/wylie/to'
import fromWylie from '@termsurf/text/tibetan/wylie/from'

toWylie('རིག་པ་') //=> "rig pa"
fromWylie('rig pa') //=> "རིག་པ"

Integrations

Talk

Take the generated TalkText (the ASCII output from the base make calls), and convert it into a more compact, human readable, "simplified" form.

import talk from '@termsurf/talk'

talk('rIg ph~a') //=> "ṙịg pɦa"

Tone

Take the generated TalkText and convert it into a format compatible with ToneText fonts.

import talk from '@termsurf/text/chinese'
import tone from '@termsurf/tone'

tone(talk('měi lì de')) //=> "me8i li6 tO"

...which is rendered as:

Derivable Pronunciations

Here is a table explaining which languages we've looked at so far which can and can't have pronunciations automatically done.

language automatic note
Chinese (Mandarin) yes but not perfect Pinyin can be used to auto generate pronunciations, but it doesn't always accurately reflect how people actually say each word, so it would be better to manually write each pronunciation if possible.
Korean yes but not perfect
Sanskrit yes With Devanagari, each sound has an exact pronunciation in Sanskrit, so we can get pretty close to exact pronunciations automatically done.
Finnish yes
Navajo yes Since it was fairly recently transcribed intoa Latin alphabet, it is phonetic for the most part.
Akkadian yes Because it is no longer spoken, we have at least a standard way f representing things.
Spanish yes Because it is no longer spoken, we have at least a standard way f representing things.
Hebrew partially yes, but only for consonants unless diacritics given
Arabic partially yes, but only for consonants unless diacritics given
English no Too many words need to have pronunciation memorized.
Tibetan no Modern Tibetan has evolved to where the script no longer is phonetic.
Vietnamese no

License

MIT

TermSurf

This is being developed by the folks at TermSurf, a California-based project for helping humanity master information and computation. Find us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Check out our other GitHub projects as well!

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