Text to speech in Cornish

The program espeak offers text to speech in a variety of languages, not yet Cornish, but I have made a bit of a hack that allows Cornish text to be spoken by it.

There is a Welsh language voice for it, and I have created a script that processes Cornish text doing a series of replaces to make it conform to Welsh spelling rules.

It would be possible to get espeak to speak Cornish directly by creating a Cornish voice for it, and I did start doing this a long time ago, but unfortunately lost this work along with my previous laptop.

The GUI launcher currently only works in Linux-compatible systems, because it launches espeak via the command-line via the Python os library. However espeak itself is also available for Windows and I will adapt the script to work on Windows dreckly.

The first quote as an mp3 file. The second is generated by pressing the "Gorhemmyn" button, and an appropriate greeting is chosen according to the system clock.

Skrifenn Ugens - Kernewek kewsys gans jynn-amontya! - Cornish spoken by computer

I recently managed to make my computer speak Cornish.

How did I manage this?

It turns out that espeak is available in Welsh.

First it is necessary to process the Cornish text to replace "dh" with "dd", "f" with "ff" etc. so that it conforms more closely to the Welsh orthography.

Then simply feed in the processed text to espeak with the Welsh voice.

Here's the python script to convert to Welsh orthography:

kernewek_to_welshorthography.py

import sys
import string

# takes first argument as input text, second as output

inputfile = sys.argv[1]
outputfile = sys.argv[2]

#print inputtext_words
inputtext = file(inputfile).readlines()

def towelsh(inputtext):
outputtext = ""
for w in inputtext:
w = w.lower()
w = w.replace("dh","dd")
w = w.replace("f","ff")
w = w.replace("y","i")
w = w.replace("ll","l")
w = w.replace("ch","tj")
w = w.replace("gh","ch")
outputtext += w + "\n"
return outputtext

outputtext = towelsh(inputtext)
outputtext = outputtext.replace(" .",".")
outputtext = outputtext.replace(" - ","-")
outputtext = outputtext.replace(" ' ","'")
#print towelsh
out = file(outputfile,"w")
out.write(outputtext)

And a shell script to launch espeak in Linux: (espeak is also available for Windows)
The input text file (original Cornish) and the output sound file are passed to the script as command line arguments.


#!/bin/bash
python kernewek_to_welshorthography.py $1 kows_workingfile.txt
espeak -vcy -w $2 -f kows_workingfile.txt

I can't say the output is perfect but it is generally passable

Bro Goth Agan Tasow (mp3)