Synthesis By Rule as a Tool for Phonological Research
The phonologist, having analysed a corpus of phonetic data and proposed tentative phonological rules, must test these rules by generating novel utterances for acceptance or rejection by an informant. There are certain methodological problems in such testing which could be avoided by the use of speech synthesized by rule. Synthesis by rule is now a practical technique, and a synthesis-by-rule system at Haskins Laboratories has been used to formulate rules for General American English.
Minimal Rules for Synthesizing Speech
In attempting to synthesize speech by rule, one must take account of the fact that the perceptually discrete phonemes are typically encoded at the acoustic level into segments of approximately syllabic length. It is, therefore, not possible to synthesize speech by stringing together prefabricated phonemes. By taking advantage of knowledge about the acoustic cues for speech perception, however, one can write rules for synthesis in terms of the constituent phonemes plus a few rules of combination. Thus, the number of rules can approximate the number of phonemes rather than the number of syllables. Indeed, one can reduce the number of rules still further by writing them in terms of subphonemic dimensions, viz., place and manner of articulation and voicing. Several complicating factors make it impossible to achieve an ideal minimum. First, rules must be added to take care of certain prosodic and positional variations. Failure to do so not only affects naturalness, but also impairs intelligibility, even at the...
The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust
Introduction 1. Reading Post-Holocaust Theology from a Feminist Perspective 2. The Hiding of God's Face in Auschwitz 3. Feminist Intimations of the Holy in Auschwitz 4. Face to Face (with God) in Auschwitz 5. A Mother/God in Auschwitz 6. The Redemption of God in Auschwitz 7. The Princess and the City of Death: A Feminist Maaseh, after Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Notes. Select Glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish Terms