dmort27 / epitran

A tool for transcribing orthographic text as IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)
MIT License
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Adding support for Afrikaans (Latin alphabet) to Epitran #176

Closed Charis-Graham closed 1 month ago

Charis-Graham commented 4 months ago

My primary sources for my mapping and processors were Omniglot, Wikipedia on Afrikaans, Wikipedia on Afrikaans phonology, Wikibooks on Afrikaans Pronunciation and A Grammar of Afrikaans by Bruce C. Donaldson.

I tried to create support for the main phonological changes that occur, but there seemed to be some degree of disagreement even between sources, so I tried to find the middle ground between them. The three most supported changes are word-final obstruent devoicing, sonorant merging, and (within the mapping) elongation of vowels. I am, however, not a native speaker and not very familiar with the language before this project so there was some difficulty. One of the variances that is not supported is phonological changes that correspond to syllabic structure as there seemed no straightforward method to apply changes without knowing the syllabic breakdown of the words as well as disagreement between sources on exact changes.