Building Synthetic Voices
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UK phoneset

This phoneset developed at CSTR a number of years ago is for Southern UK English (RP, "received pronunciation"). Its definition is in festival/lib/mrpa_phones.scm.

uh: cUp, dOne
e: bEt, chEck
a: cAt, mAtch
o: cOttage, hOt
i: bIt, shIp
u: pUll, fOOt, bOOk
ii: bEAt, shEEp
uu: pOOl, bOOt
oo: AUthor, cOURt
aa: ARt, hEARt
@@: sEARch, bURn
ai: bIte, mIght, lIke
ei: Ate, mAIl
oi: tOY, OYster
au: sOUth, hOW
ou: hOle, cOAt
e@: AIR, bARE, chAIR
i@: EAR, bEER
u@: sUre, jUry
@: About, arlAs, equipmEnt
p: Pat, camPer
t: Tap, baT
k: Camera, jaCK, Kill
b: Book, aBrupt
d: Done, baD
g: Good, biGGer
s: Sit, maSS
z: Zero, quiZ, boyS
sh: SHip, claSH
zh: viSion, caSual
f: Fat, lauGH
v: Various, haVe
th: THeatre, baTH
dh: THat, faTHer
ch: CHart, larCH
jh: diGit, Jack
h: Hello, loopHole
m: Man, gaMe
n: maN, New
ng: baNG, sittiNG
l: Late, bLack
y: Yellow, Yacht
r: Reason, caReer,
w: Water, cobWeb
#: short silence

In addition to the phone sthemselves the nonsense word generated by the diphone schema also have some other notations to denote different type of phone.

The use of - (hyphen) in the nonsense word itself is used to denot an explicit syllable boundary. Thus pau t aa n - k aa pau is used to state that the word should be pronounced as tan ka rather than tank ah. Where no explicit syllable boundary is given the pronunciation should be pronounce naturally without any boundary (which is probably too underspecified in some cases).

The use of _ (underscore) in phone names is used to denote consonant clusters. That is t_-_r is the /tr/ as found in trip not that in cat run.