Phonetic description of Malayalam consonants

The orthography (system for writing a language) of Malayalam is considered phonemic in nature. It means the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. But the correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is not precisely one-to-one. The pronunciation of graphemes can depend on its position in a word (word beginning, middle or end) and its proximity to other graphemes. It was two years back, I started to work on a grapheme to phoneme conversion tool for Malayalam. [Read More]

Malayalam Phonetic Analyser: Version 1.0.0

Edit (September 20,2022): A detailed report on this is now available as a journal article In the previous post, I had shared the work in progress version of a finite state transducer based Malaylam phonetic analyser. A phonetic analyser analyses the written form of the text to give the phonetic characteristics of the grapheme sequence. Understanding the phonetic characteristics of a word is helpful in many computational linguistic problems. For instance, translating a word into its phonetic representation is needed in the synthesis of a text to speech (TTS) system. [Read More]

FST based Malayalam Phonetic Analyser

Edit (September 20,2022): A detailed report on this is now available as a journal article What is a Phonetic analyser? ‘Phoneme’ is the fundamental unit in the the speech system of the language. ‘Grapheme’ is the fundamental unit in the writing system. From one or more graphemes a phoneme can be synthesized. A phonetic analyser analyses the written form of the text to give the phonetic characteristics of the grapheme sequence. [Read More]