But the guidelines do only exist because it would be impossible to cut and edit thousands and thousands of recordings in post production.

However, almost everyone who has a computer, phone or tablet is perfectly able to record one ‚pre-cooked‘ sentence without having to use Shtooka or without needing a pre-formatted list supplied by CK in order to match the input format for Shtooka lists.

And as I said already, I would volunteer to cut, edit and format these 359 contributions for Tatoeba. So it would take literally only a few seconds for somebody to record this phrase.

> Among other things this runs contrary to FOSS and free-content philosophy.

Sorry, don‘t know what you mean by that!

> Native speakers

I think it doesn’t need much imagination to accept that there is a handful of ‚constructed’ and ‚dead’ languages out there that will have samples spoken by a living creature applied, even non-native ;-)

What are we talking about, five languages, or ten...?

And a pool of 359 samples of one generic poster sentence could easily be maintained if e.g. a rare language is spoken by a non-native and later on replaced by another sample if someone finds the contribution inappropriate.

And anyways, these are guidelines and as far as I can tell not written in stone yet.

I am just convinced that this would be a beautiful opportunity for Tatoeba to attract newcomers even more to get on the train - be it text or audio...

Well by that standard you‘d have to get rid of 80% of the german sentences (which are spoken by Austrians)! And even the german contributors have sometimes strong regional or dialectal influences which makes them ‚unusable’ for contributing samples in Standard German which btw. doesn’t exist anyways, at least not in one variant across Austria, Switzerland and Germany, although we all uniformly agree that all our slightly different sounding variants are pure GERMAN anyways.

There are IIRC thousands of sentences in the argentine Version of Spanish, and don‘t get me even started on the english contributions of our fellow Australiens, and even CK‘s AE intonation compared to other AE contributors and British English!

So why bother at all about Audio on Tatoeba, unless it meets the very strong requirements of some restriction catalog - a platform where ‚diversity‘ is the most used word when talking about its ‚Credo‘...

These two things, IMHO, don‘t go very well together. Of course, the subtlety of the spoken word is always more fragile than the bluntness of the written word that can be twisted and interpreted much easier to anyone’s liking. But that should not prevent us from trying to create a beautiful Audio implementation into the Tatoeba corpus, despite difficulties that may arise on the way...

Just my two cents ;-)

Well, the more people know about this little quest the bigger chances are to get as close to 359 audio samples possible ;-)

Just for the sake of simplicity for managing and maintaining the contributions I was thinking of using one single phrase only for all languages. The content doesn’t necessarily have to reflect some specific cultural etc. features or characteristics of the language.

Just to see the language list with contributed audio samples having the same length than the list of languages for contributed sentences should be inspiring to people of every language. To see that every contribution counts even if the quantitative supremacy of languages like English, Spanish, Russian etc. is overwhelming.

And maybe by just speaking one example sentence for this little project people could end up being encouraged to contribute more in the long run.

Just a little show-off to bring back into people’s mind that language is all about speaking and the written word is just a by-product. Granted a very useful one but nevertheless second to the spoken word. In my opinion there shouldn‘t even exist a single sentence on Tatoeba without an audio sample attached.

Ideally it should be all audio with the text attached as a little convenience ;-)))

I think by now you should get my point ;-)