A TTS system for Early Modern English

Among the public at large, there is little understanding of the fact that languages change constantly, evolving every generation into a new language. In English, this is fueled by the fact that we can read English texts written 400 years ago without any difficulty - written English has remained more or less unchanged over the centuries, masking the vast changes in the spoken language over the same period, a situation which also explains the massive degree of irregularity in modern day English orthography.

The idea here is to build a simple, interactive text-to-speech system for Early Modern English, which will read out English input sentences as they would have been pronounced by a contemporary of Shakespeare. The system will be based, as far as possible, on simple letter-to-sound rules (i.e. with the lexicon kept as small as possible). This project could be seen as the first step in a programme to use language technology to develop awareness of the changes that have taken place in English since the Anglo-Saxon invasion, for example by building a machine translation system between Modern English and Old English (with Old English TTS for output).