gender voice variants
Doug Ewell
doug at ewellic.org
Wed Dec 19 20:12:33 CET 2012
In the simplest cases, such as English, the exact same text might be
spoken by a male or female. A use case has been stated to identify
different multimedia resources for this. (Karen is right: BCP 47 isn't
just for Web pages and screen readers.) This simple concept is uniform
across languages, and limited to non-written text, and if coded, would
definitely call for generic variants.
There are more complicated cases where the text may change by simple
inflections. Michael mentioned "obrigado" in Portuguese (in the context
of saying "don't tag this") and Karen mentioned "hotový" in Czech. I
don't know if this concept, if coded, is uniform enough across languages
to permit generic variants; obviously the exact changes differ from one
language to the next, but that is also true for "zh-Latn-pinyin" versus
"bo-Latn-pinyin".
The Japanese or Yanyuwa "women's speech" cases are more complicated yet,
and I think these cases, if coded, should be language-specific variants.
None of these variant subtags would likely be mainstream, but that is
true for variant subtags in general.
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell
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