Heather/Ryan and single quotes

[Bunger Henry]

There seems to be a problem with the single quote when using Heather and Ryan.

Text: Go get 'em.
Output: Go get single quote U M.

Text: During the '80's I went to high school.
Output: During the single quote eighties I went to high school.

But in other cases, it works fine.

Text: How 'bout it?
Output: How bout it?

Also, this could be related...

Text: That is somebody's home.
Output: That is somebody home.

[Jim Bretti]

You can handle this problem in the pronunciation editor, using something that substitures for a quote preceded by a space.

Since we currently trim leading and trailing spaces in the pronunciation edtior, you'll problaby need to set it up as a regular expression. Here is something that should work:

Word:
{{re=( ')}}

Pronunciation:
<s>

This expression should replace these single quotes with a space.

This doesn't hande the problem with the last case you mentioned (this is somebody's home).

That one is really strange. If you want to try and fix that as well, you might want to use something that just completely eliminates single quotes.

This would do it:
Word
{{re=(.)'(.)}}

Pronunciation
$1$2

Its possible the second expression might have some other unwanted effects that I can't think of, you'd need to try and see what happens.

[Bunger Henry]

I was wondering if someone could come up with an edit that basically ignores single quotes whenever they appear at the beginning or end of a word, but recognizes them if they appear in the middle of a word.

For example, I want the single quotes ignored in the following sentence (as it is, the word "us" sounds like "use"):

John said, "Did you approach the man and say, 'You need to hear us'?"

But I want the single quotes recognized if they are in the middle of a word as in this example:

I didn't hear you. I shouldn't have been talking.

[Jim Bretti]

Something like this should recognize a single quote in the middle of a word:

{{re=\w'\w}}

That expression is looking for a quote between two alphnumerics. You look for alphas only with the expression [a-z] instead of \w.

To get the beginning / end of a word, I think you'll need two expressions. Give these a try:

{{re=[^\w]'\w}}

and

{{re=\w'[^\w]}}

Notice here that you can't use the normal word separator \b in the above expressions, since ' itself is a word terminator. I'm using [^\w] in its place, which means 'any character that is not an alphanumeric'.

Let me know how that works.

[D.Leikin]

Hello Jim,

I figure that one can also fix the apostrophes' issues by using the following simple substitutions in PE:

Word: '&
Pron: <s>

Word: &'em
Pron: them

Word: &'s
Pron: s

I’ve tested these with TA2193 and they seem to correctly handle the phrases in the initial post, namely:

How 'bout it?
That is somebody's home.
Go get 'em.
During the '80's I went to high school.

Similar corrections work for other apostrophes’ issues, for example, the substitution

Word: &’re
Pron: <s>are

makes Heather, Daniel, and other voices correctly read abbreviations with ‘re.

However, sometimes upon being copied into TextAloud, apostrophes can get different ansi codes, e.g. 27, 60, 91, 92, so that one might have to create corresponding entries in PE to individually fix issues with each of these codes. Maybe it looks kind of awkward solution but I figure it’s conditioned by the apostrophes’ ambiguity that still exists. On the other hand, these workarounds seem to preserve grammatical structure of a sentence and thus seem unlikely to cause side effects.

Dmitry