In the phoneme list, I found 3 unusual sounds: q, tw, and dw. I once heard that q was once the glottal stop, but… what are the tw and dw phonemes? I can’t find anything about tw and dw on the Internet!
these are in the official SV list appendix in UUM at the bottom but they are greyed out - so not in use (held for future maybe - perhaps we will get our missing short “oh” as in “pot” and maybe a plosive “t” rather than estuarial english “uh” eg Butter vs Buh er
Warning - incoming guano expected
All three are unimplemented placeholders. That is to say, the symbols exist in the software but aren’t assigned any actual data, so resynthesis either produces noise or silence.
The only exception I’m aware of is q for Eleanor Forte lite (the original Standard one, not the AI lite version) which is a glottal stop, however cl is the primary glottal stop symbol used everywhere else so q ended up being redundant.
Similarly, tw and dw were likely originally considered to be distinct phonemes, but I expect in early development one of two things happend:
- Perhaps they found dedicated
twanddwdidn’t sound different enough fromt wandd w, and therefore were redundant, or the difference was so subtle that including them wouldn’t justify increasing development costs - Alternatively, maybe those phonemes do exist “in the background” but they’re used implicitly as transitional sounds when there are combinations of
tandwordandw, meaning that there’s no need to expose a user-facing symbol for it
That’s speculation of course, but considering the software generally doesn’t have issues with words like “twin” or “dwell” it’s probably at least something along those lines.
indeed they work ok *****
I wonder if it will ever be possible to alter phoneme fundamental elements to produce varied accents. I dont really understand how these are produced - its probably rocket science way above my pay grade