Welcome to Yuhalu Hmong text to speech for Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA).

Language

Hmong is a tonal language with classifiers, class nouns, adverbs, reciprocal verbs, phrasal verbs and others. Besides, Hmong words consists of monosyllable, disyallable and polysyllable.
When listening to songs, a person has to know Hmong well enough to understand because tones change, and these words or lyrics mean different things.

In Hmong RPA script, there are 6,076 syllables (exclude tone marker "d") for both blue Hmong and white Hmong dialects, and some excluded sounds such as prwv, toib, waw, wos, and wov.
In these 6,076 syllables, there is a pair out of the 420 pairs sounds the same for the 28 vowels ending with tone markers "g" and "s" and 30 aspirated consonants ending with "h", examples: "txhaig" sounds the same as "txhais"; "tshig" sounds as "tshis". So actually there are 5,656 sounds plus the other five, for a total of 5,661.
This software is written for this script, and it uses the syllable concatenation method. For simplicity, 6,081 sound files are recorded instead of 5,661, and the audio format is WAV, 44,100 hertz or samples per second in monaural.
In addition, there are some more sounds to read English alphabet from "a" to "z", from number "0" to "9", punctuations and other characters.

Requirements

This Yuhalu software is written in Java programming language to run on all platforms such as Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix and others.
As of now, it runs on Windows 7 and 10 while other operating systems have not been checked out yet.

The following are required to use this software:
  1. Oracle Java JRE (Java Runtime Environment) software is needed to download and install as required by each OS. Refer to its download instructions online, including setting up variable path.
  2. A computer with at least 1GB RAM, 5GB of hard drive, speaker, mouse, and keyboard
  3. A monitor with resolution at least 1,204 X 768 pixel, higher resolution is better.
  4. As option, a projector and/or speakers can be connected to a computer to be used at school, at church, and at any social gatherings.


Update: 11-25-2019