I experienced the most remarkable serendipity recently. A few weeks ago I was working on a Word document for work when I accidentally activated the “Read Aloud” feature, which I’ve never done—and I have used this program nearly daily for over 30 years.
I was a little surprised to have triggered the function but even more surprised by the natural-sounding voice that emerged. The voice perfectly read out a very technical section of a document that had several unusual place names, names that regularly trip up natives. In retrospect, given how quickly AI technologies have emerged it shouldn’t have been such a surprise that these readers would have gotten so sneaky good.
I put the experience out of mind but a few days later I spied a discussion thread—I think on Reddit—recommending using the Read Aloud feature to help proof draft texts. I often try to read my own writing aloud when I’m editing myself and find the technique can help catch many errors or awkward phrasing that would get missed on the page. But I still miss many things—my reading brain will still sometimes skip or smooth over problematic bits. But to hear someone else read my text gives me a little more distance to appraise my own work. The advice seemed sound and I resolved to give it a go soon.
A few days after that I was working on a passage from Clans of the Aslan that I kept reworking and reworking but I still wasn’t quite sure about. On a lark I decided to run the passage through Word’s Read Aloud and the results were amazing. Hearing the passage aloud helped me hone in on one particularly knotty sentence, but even more helpful was to hear the program pronounce Aslan names.
I’ll be the first to admit that the Trokh conlang can produce many words that look interesting on the page but can be the very devil to read aloud. Personally, it’s all the vowels that tend to trip me up: I lose track of where the stress should fall. And really, like any other language, the trick is to keep pushing through because once you hesitate you’re lost. A computer program, though, never worries and just goes for it.
In general, I found the program did a pretty good job of tackling Trokh words and phrases. I assume it’s applying English pronunciation rules for Aslan, which is probably why the pronunciations generally sound right to my ear. Oddly, the one word that the program really seemed to botch was “Hierate.”
I have sometimes thought that the intimidating appearance of the Aslan language has kept many referees and players from running Aslan scenarios or characters. Maybe using this one simple hack can help anyone master Trokh with just a few simple keystrokes. Try it out! It’s the next best thing to DuoLingo for Hisol’i.
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