LaPasserelle.nc: a gateway to the pronunciation of the Kanak languages of New Caledonia
Résumé
The workshop will start with a demo of the New Caledonia multilingual phonetizer. We will show its features and how these were handled.
The main objective of this phonetizer is to provide an idea of how to pronounce a word written in Oceanian languages, especially Kanak languages. The user writes a text in the input box. This input is processed by using a grapheme – phoneme correspondence and the result is the international phonetic alphabetic (IPA) transcription of the input text. However, this is not very common to understand IPA. That is why the application also provide and English (or French) spelling output with pedagogical tips.
The user is “taken by the hand” thanks to a clear association between input and output. Each word is visually connected to its pronunciation. When a phoneme is not used in the output language, a pedagogical tip explains how to use mouth and tong to properly pronounce what is written. For instance, “x” grapheme is pronounced /x/ in Drehu language that does not exist in English or French and is “hard to properly pronounce” for an English or French speaker. However, we expect that providing pictures and sounds, especially for these “non-common” phonemes is an asset.
In addition, general explanations about the accepted input languages (and their cultural backgrounds?) are accessible in a dedicated page: alphabet, graphemes, phonemes, sounds and other specific tips.
The web application is currently in development for Drehu language and we plan to extend it to other languages spoken in New Caledonia: Paicî, Nengone, Xârâcùù, … and why not some Polynesian languages…
Finally, we would like to discuss about potential applications of the “semantic web” or “web of data” technologies and concepts on the research field of phonetization. Indeed, these kinds of concepts may be used to capitalize on the obvious semantic links between phonetization and graphemization according to languages.