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Abstract
Sometimes, in the Commedia dell’arte, Jewish characters who speak Judeo-Italian appear on the stage, revealing a strong intention on the part of non-Jewish authors to mimic the language spoken by contemporary Jews. Therefore, the study of these external sources is very useful to enrich our knowledge of the Judeo-Italian of the early modern period. In this article I will present the scena all’ebraica of the comedy Novantanove Disgrazie di Pulcinella (Rome 1769) by Gregorio Mancinelli. The text, published here in its entirety for the first time, will be preceded by an introduction and accompanied by an English translation and an analysis of the language and contents.
Abstract
Although few linguistic corpora are available in Yiddish, there are numerous sources of so-called “found data” that can be adapted for language research, pedagogy, and resource development. We describe the steps taken to create the first speech synthesis (text-to-speech) program in Yiddish. A state-of-the-art TTS model, FastSpeech 2, was trained on a hand-corrected data set consisting of literary texts paired with audio narrations by native speakers of the Polish and Lithuanian dialects. A quantitative evaluation by listeners found that the system produced speech that was both intelligible and natural-sounding. To demonstrate the system’s applications for language pedagogy, we offer a qualitative evaluation of Yiddish phonological features that are present or absent in a sample of synthesized recordings. We hope that the success of speech synthesis in Yiddish will inspire future projects to enable technological support for other minority languages in which transcribed recordings are available.