Re: Babel Text in Ayeri (With sound file!)

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 11:16:29 -0500, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:


>I think you do a great job, Carsten.  It has a natural feel to it, you fire
>off your words rapidly with only a few stumbles, and I notice a pleasing
>ultimate stress.  I like it when your sense of the words' pronunciation
>differs from mine; I very much admire languages that put a "spin," so to
>speak, on their vowels and consonants.
Thank you very much ;) Well, I think it took me 3 hours or so until the
recording was ready. 3 hours for nearly 2 minutes! You may have noticed that
the recording is made like a puzzle. I recorded parts that I managed to read
without stumbling to much after some reading practice and then pasted them
together into one big file.

>Some words remain stubbornly opaque to me, as though meaning hasn't seeped
>into them.  Others acquire their meaning right away.  It's the same with
>Teonaht.  Memorizing a word requires me to merge "meaning" and "sound."
It feels good to be not the only one.

>I think you do it a disservice!  "Crappy"?  Also I don't think it's all THAT
>nice sounding in the conventional sense of "nice."
I'm one of the guys for which it's difficult to like one's own stuff. I
suffer of perfectionism, I guess.

>It's full of nasals, I
>noticed: "m" and "ng."
Oh yes. The inspiration of the phonology was someone talking in an
(S)E-Asian language. I guess it was Malayalam or so. It sounded very
pleasant to me.

> What's annoying about these soundbytes is that you
>have to act fast to get the text and the sound on your screen at the same
>time.
Heh, yes. I guess I've been a bit excited when speaking into the microphone.
After all, I wanted to read the text out fluently -- well, it seems it came
out a little too fluent, but anyway. It's still a good example and I won't
do all the work again and record the *whole* thing again.

> What program do you use?
I used Audacity for this one. Someone on the ZBB recommended it recently. I
was used to Goldwave of which I had the cracked demo of an very outdated
version. Audacity OTOH is free and has the advantage of being able to record
 single tracks in one "project file" so that you can merge these bits into a
wav, mp3 or ogg file at the end. Re-recording is not very much a tedious
matter that way. With Goldwave, it was.

Carsten