Dear Venerables; Hi Group;

Dear Steven;

Just a few thoughts. I'm delighted to hear of your project!

a) Sound files

I've also been working on this (on and off) for the last couple of years.
For instance, Venerable Mettavihari at Metta Net in Sri Lanka provided me
the 597 "single word" sound files that are available in the Files section of
this group. (All I did was rename them, convert them to mp3 format, and make
them available on the web). I also know that the folks at Watthai Net in
Australia have solid experience with sound files. I would suggest that you
contact both of them.

My free "fancy flashcard" learning software "Input Easy" (also in the Files
section of this group) can use mp3 sound files. Input Easy supports easy
entry of Pali characters, automatic flash, and so on. In version 1.4 I
improved the support for sound files, hoping that someone would start a
project to create useful sound files that could be used with (or without!)
Input Easy.

You can imagine how glad I was to hear that you might take this up. I see
great benefit in it, and it would also help me in my Pali studies :-)

I would like to suggest the following idea.

It would be great if the Pali questions/exercises to common Pali grammar
books were recorded as single sentences. A person could listen to them with
their "media player", or use them with Input Easy for very simple "drill and
practice" type learning.

How do you feel about this idea?

b) Palitrans 2.0

Have you looked at Palitrans 2.0 in the Files section of this group?

I'm also a programmer. Palitrans 2.0 doesn't support Unicode because I have
an old Win/ME computer and an old version of Visual C++ 6.0. I have made the
program as "Unicode aware" as possible (including, as comments, all the
Unicode codes for the Pali characters).

If my assessment is correct, it shouldn't take a Unicode experienced
programmer more than a few hours to create a full Unicode version of
Palitrans. (I've received requests for this from all over the world for the
last couple of years!)

Any chance you could take a quick look at it? I can email you the source
code.

peace from

Andy

-----Original Message-----
From: McClain, Steven [mailto:steven.mcclain@...]
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2002 9:35 AM
To: Pali@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Pali] A Pali Plea


I am interested in learning some basic Pali and it has occurred to me that
it
would be very helpful to me, and probably countless others who have no
access
to a local source, if there was an internet audio source available to guide
beginners in the proper pronunciation of the language. I have found written
documents on the internet suggesting how to pronounce the different sounds
and letter combinations but these are no match for actually 'hearing' the
language spoken by someone familiar with the language.

If this idea is something that the Pali Community might like to support,
then
I would be happy to offer my time, equipment and talents to seeing this idea
to completion and producing .WAV and/or .MP3 files and an accompany .PDF
file
of the spoken text. What I would require of the other person(s) is the
written text of the words/sounds that are being pronounced and a tape
recording, of reasonable quality, of the spoken words/sounds.

My only other requirement, which I am certain would be supported by anyone
choosing to participate, would be that the resultant computer files that are
produced are free of copyright and are offered free of charge to any
internet
site wishing to host the files at no charge to the internet community - a
kind of dhamma gift.

If it is of any help to you in arriving at a decision, I am a computer
programmer with additional proficiencies in PC audio engineering and
internet
site design sufficient to see this project through to final realization.

May all beings be free from suffering,
Steve



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




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