DE4 - a male German voice

de4 is a male German voice, but it also provides English and French phones. 
English and French phones very often occur in foreign words in German texts, 
and some of them can't be replaced by similar German phones. Those were added 
to the phone set of de4. For a complete list of the additional foreign phones 
see below. 


Phone set
---------

Phones are from the SAMPA phone sets for German, English and French with the 
following exceptions: EI instead of SAMPA eI, E~ instead of SAMPA e~,
 L instead of SAMPA l for English variant. 

All German phones were covered, as well as those phones from English and French 
which do not have a similar counterpart in German. 


German phones 
-------------
(examples taken from http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/german.htm and modified):

Vowels:

        I               Sitz            zIts
        E               Gesetz          g@zEts
        a               Satz            zats
        O               Trotz           trOts
        U               Schutz          SUts
        Y               hübsch          hYpS
        9               plötzlich       pl9tslIC

        i:              Lied            li:t
        e:              Beet            be:t
        E:              spät            SpE:t
        a:              Tat             ta:t
        o:              rot             ro:t
        u:              Blut            blu:t
        y:              süß             zy:s
        2:              blöd            bl2:t

        aI              Eis             aIs
        aU              Haus            haUs
        OY              Kreuz           krOYts

unstressed "schwa" vowels:

        @               bitte           bIt@
        6               besser          bEs6

Glottal stop:

        ?               Verein                  fE6?aIn

Glottal stops occur in German at syllable-initial vowels (as in fE6?aIn ("Verein"), 
which is syllabified fE6 - ?aIn). We chose not to treat glottal stops as independent 
phones. Instead, all diphones of the form <anyPhone>-<vowel> were recorded twice, 
once across a syllable boundary and once within a syllable. We used the vowel symbols 
preceded by a ? for the cross-syllable boundary variants. Thus, the fE6?aIn example 
would involve a 6-?aI diphone.

Consonants:

        p               Pein                    paIn
        b               Bein                    baIn
        t               Teich                   taIC
        d               Deich                   daIC
        k               Kunst                   kUnst
        g               Gunst                   gUnst

        pf              Pfahl                   pfa:l
        ts              Zahl                    tsa:l
        tS              deutsch                 dOYtS

        f               fast                    fast
        v               was                     vas
        s               Tasse                   tas@
        z               Hase                    ha:z@
        S               waschen                 vaS=n
        Z               Genie                   Zeni:
        C               sicher                  zIC6
        j               Jahr                    ja:6
        x               Buch                    bu:x
        h               Hand                    hant

        m               mein                    maIn
        n               nein                    naIn
        N               Ding                    dIN
        l               Leim                    laIm
        R               Reim                    RaIm2:


additional English phones 
-------------------------
(examples taken from http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english-uni.htm and modified):

        EI              raise                   rEIz
        @U              nose                    n@Uz

        T               thin                    TIn
        D               this                    DIs

        r               wrong                   rQN
        L               long                    LQN
        w               wasp                    wQsp

The L phoneme corresponds to the English l phoneme. We use capital L to distinguish it 
from the German "light" l variant. 


additional French phones 
------------------------
(examples taken from http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/french.htm and modified)


        Z               gens                    Za~

        E~              vin                     vE~
        a~              vent                    va~
        o~              bon                     bo~


-------------------------------------------------

Diphones provided by:

Institute for Natural Language Processing
Experimental Phonetics
University of Stuttgart

contact: antje.schweitzer@ims.uni-stuttgart.de


