Grapheme-to-phoneme conversions in Xhosa

Abstract

Grapheme-to-phoneme conversions underlie, inter alia, computer-assisted investigations into the nature of the phonotactic structures and into the occurrence and distribution of phonetic and phonemic elements of a specific language. Prior to any such investigation, large text corpora need to be transcribed phonetically and/or phonemically. In this article a computer-assisted system developed to transcribe Xhosa texts phonetically is described. Prerequisites for setting up such a system are described, specific transcription rules for Xhosa are presented, and the effectiveness of the system is discussed.