Read text aloud

[Alistair]

I remember Accordance used to be able to read texts aloud, now I cannot find how to do it in Acc. 11. Have I missed the obvious or was that feature removed?

 

Thanks

[Alistair]

OK I figured it out, had to edit the toolbar. A bit non-intuitive though? I was searching for it in the menus.

[Helen Brown]

It is in the Amplify menu and the right-click menu, but hard to find under Language and Lookup.

[Peter Brylov Christensen]

The voices still sound quite silly, though. Particularly when they "read" Hebrew with/without vowels and Syriac! The English is mostly fine. The Greek, surprisingly, is almost passable if you ignore what sort of sounds like a thick American pronunciation of the words. κύριος, for instance is read "koo-ree-us". On that note I find it strange that if I choose the voices Nikos and Melina over Alex and press "speech", I get the message "The current voice resource cannot speak Greek or Hebrew text" - but they are Greek voices! Is this due to the fact that Modern Greek voices normally aren't able to handle the diacritics other than the acute?

 

If the texts are to be read aloud by computer voices, I guess I'd like Nikos and Melina to handle the Greek and a Modern Hebrew computer voice for the Hebrew. But ideally speaking, it would be very cool if, somehow, the Hebrew Bible texts in Accordance were linked to the voice files from the web page mechon-mamre.org, and the Greek texts were linked to voice files from a similar web site (I wouldn't know which one to go for, though. Daniel Semler provided some interesting links in this thread: http://www.accordancebible.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=13731 ) In my opinion it would make the Biblical texts come to life in a whole new way.

 

But no-one truly knows the exact phonology of any dead language, so it doesn't matter much, I guess. In that regard it all comes down to your personal taste. For instance I'd pronounce "κύριος" with my native letter "y" (identical to German ü and French u), so that it sounds like "ky/kü-ree-os" which supposedly is closer to the "historical" Attic and Biblical Greek pronunciation, but we'll never know for sure. Even if it were the case, a Modern Greek speaker would still correct me immediately and pronounce ypsilon with a sharp "e" instead, so it sounds like "kee-ree-os". I once had a discussion with one of my friends about Biblical Hebrew phonology as well: He, for instance, insists on pronouncing שׁבת as "Shabbos", sticking with the Ashkenaz dialect, whereas I prefer the "historical" pronunciation and say Shabbat, even though the historical pronunciation, like the Greek one, is an approximation.

Edited November 8, 2014 by Pchris

[Zene Gabriel]

It would be nice to have this feature also for the Windows Version