Lexicons and addenda

The basic assumption in Festival is that you will have a large lexicon, tens of thousands of entries, that is a used as a standard part of an implementation of a voice. Letter-to-sound rules are used as back up when a word is not explicitly listed. This view is based on how English is best dealt with. However this is a very flexible view, An explicit lexicon isn't necessary in Festival and it may be possible to do much of the work in letter-to-sound rules. This is how we have implemented Spanish. However even when there is strong relationship between the letters in a word and their pronunciation we still find the a lexicon useful. For Spanish we still use the lexicon for symbols such as "$", "%", individual letters, as well as irregular pronunciations.

In addition to a large lexicon Festival also supports a smaller list called an addenda this is primarily provided to allow specific applications and users to add entries that aren't in the existing lexicon.