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Comment by jryb | Hacker News Reader

When speaking Chinese, it says the tone number in English after each character. So "你好" is pronounced "ni three hao three". Am I using this wrong? I'm running `espeak-ng -v cmn "你好"`.

If this is just how it is, the "more than one hundred languages" claim is a bit suspect.

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After some brief research it seems the issue you're seeing may be a known bug in at least some versions/release of espeak-ng.

Here's some potentially related links if you'd like to dig deeper:

* "questions about mandarin data packet #1044": https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/issues/1044

* "ESpeak NJ-1.51’s Mandarin pronunciation is corrupted #12952": https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/12952

* "The pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese using ESpeak NJ in NVDA is not normal #1028": https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/issues/1028

* "When espeak-ng translates Chinese (cmn), IPA tone symbols are not output correctly #305": https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/issues/305

* "Please default ESpeak NG's voice role to 'Chinese (Mandarin, latin as Pinyin)' for Chinese to fix #12952 #13572": https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/13572

* "Cmn voice not correctly translated #1370": https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/issues/1370

I was curious, 300 minority languages are spoken in China, spread across 55 minority ethnic groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China

Beyond China, countries like Singapore and Malaysia have their own blend of Mandarin/Hokkien/Cantonese/English/Malay/etc. the particular blend may differ from family to family, even within the same village.

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