The fifteen problems · 12 of 15 · speech
Singing and gemination
Amharic gemination is phonemic but unwritten in the script, yet it takes more musical time, so text-setting cannot be derived from orthography alone. Singing synthesis for Amharic is rare, and verifying sung output by speech recognition is unreliable.
In the text-to-speech lane: Amharic gemination (consonant lengthening) is phonemic but unwritten in the script, yet it takes more musical time, so text-setting for song cannot be derived from orthography alone. Singing synthesis for Amharic is rare, and verifying sung output by speech recognition is unreliable because singing distorts the formants ASR depends on. Stress is weak and not lexically contrastive, which helps.
× What it broke
Any plan to check synthesized Amharic song by running it back through ASR. The check would fail on good output as readily as bad.
✓ What it established
A property of the script worth knowing before any speech work: the written form under-specifies the spoken form in a way that matters for timing, and a native reader supplies what the orthography leaves out.
build report §4.12 · retrieved 2026-08-21
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