Mac – How to get text to speech to pronounce git and github correctly

mactext to speech

I'm using the OS X text to speech feature for some eLearning stuff. Some of the voices, in particular Lee and Tessa seems to be better quality. However, they mispronounce the words 'git' and 'GitHub'. The American voices pronounce 'git' correctly.

There's already a question regarding pronunciation of 'git' in case you're wondering. It is pronounced with a hard G followed by a short i.

I'm aware that I can modify the pronunciation in the speech settings. However, I have no idea how to set the pronunciation such that it is consistent across all the voices, in particular the non US english voices. Those languages always mispronounce the 'g' of 'git' or 'github'.

I'm running OS X 10.10.2.

Best Answer

I found through trial and error that using 2 'g's will make it pronounce the 'g' as a hard 'g'. Example:

    say -v Daniel 'And as for the Cat — what an unbelievable ggit.'

The one that really confuses me though is this:

    say -v Daniel "gitt"

I have no idea why this is pronounced as "grit". All I can say is, "Think different."

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