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The sixteenth-century Marathi poet-saint Eknāth is better known for his devotional songs (abhaṅg) and allegorical drama-poems (bhārūḍ) than his "philosophical" writings. These writings include commentaries on and distillations of Sanskrit texts that feature a highly localized form of Advaita, or non-dualist Vedānta. Rather than consider them vernacular translations of the classical traditions of Advaita, I propose to read Eknāth's philosophical works as embedded in a local context of non-dualist thought that filtered into the elite world of Sanskrit knowledge-systems. I provide examples from his Marathi commentary on the Sanskrit Hastāmalaka Stotra, a brief versified teaching on Advaita Vedānta. I also look at the para-textual material bracketing the content and some of the accompanying manuscript record, in order to understand the context for circulation and transmission of this material among Eknāth's various readers over generations. My general attempt is to understand how ideas and practices belonging to local, vernacular networks filter into elite Sanskrit systems of knowledge—that is, not just into flexible genres like purāṇa but into disciplines, like Vedānta, that are generally viewed as impervious to the world around them. From my perspective, all knowledge is local, even that articulated in such cosmopolitan languages as Sanskrit. In Eknāth's vernacular Advaita, we find evidence for a much wider scope for the movement of ideas, one that moves not from top-down but bottom-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hidden Markov Model and Deep Neural Networks based Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis systems, gain a significant attention from researchers because of their flexibility in generating speech waveforms in diverse voice qualities as well as in styles. This paper describes HMM-based speech synthesis system (SPSS) for the Marathi language. In proposed synthesis method, speech parameter trajectories used for synthesis are generated from the trained hidden Markov models (HMM). We have recorded our database of 5300 phonetically balanced Marathi sentences to train the context-dependent HMM with five, seven and nine hidden states. The subjective quality measures (MOS and PWP) shows that the HMMs with seven hidden states are capable of giving an adequate quality of synthesized speech as compared to five state and with less time complexity than seven state HMMs. The contextual features used for experimentation are inclusive of a position of an observed phoneme in a respective syllable, word, and sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing a text to speech (TTS) system, commonly referred as TTS, that sounds similar to human natural speech is being attempted over the years, but still not achieved by even the best of presently available TTS algorithms. Most of these still sound robotic, unless human speech itself is present in them. However, such human speech necessitates creation of a large database of each and every word of that language which is quite an onerous task. This research article illustrates a new approach and methodology that helps to reduce database size by using 'syllabic based concatenative speech synthesis'. In this method, new words are 'created' using existing words and syllables from the database. The naturalness of these 'created' words in speech are further improved by 'position based syllabification 'and 'objective spectral noise reduction'. A combination of neural and classification network and non-neural methods are used for syllabification. After new words are 'created', the spectral distortion present at joints is reduced with objective spectral estimation and reduction methods in time and frequency domains. These approaches result in improved naturalness for proposed Marathi-TTS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the ritual memorialization of Marathi language religious book Kirtan by the Tamil Smarta Brahmin community in Tamil Nadu, India. It is said that the memorialization embeds it within the powerful forces of Brahmin cultural production in modern Tamil Nadu. Tamil Brahmins emerge as the custodians of pan-Indian bhakti Hinduism.

Wordnets, which are repositories of lexical semantic knowledge containing semantically linked synsets and lexically linked words, are indispensable for work on computational linguistics and natural language processing. While building wordnets for Hindi and Marathi, two major Indo-European languages, we observed that the verb hierarchy in the Princeton Wordnet was rather shallow. We set to constructing a verb knowledge base for Hindi, which arranges the Hindi verbs in a hierarchy of is-a (hypernymy) relation. We realized that there are unique Indian language phenomena that bear upon the lexicalization vs. syntactically derived choice. One such example is the occurrence of conjunct and compound verbs (called Complex Predicates) which are found in all Indian languages. This paper presents our experience in the construction of lexical knowledge bases for Indian languages with special attention to Hindi. The question of storing versus deriving complex predicates has been dealt with linguistically and computationally. We have constructed empirical tests to decide if a combination of two words, the second of which is a verb, is a complex predicate or not. Such tests provide a principled way of deciding the status of complex predicates in Indian language wordnets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]