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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 6951333" data-attributes="member: 6777454">You know-- it is worth noting that language is not simply "words". That a ton of what people say is carried in the tone and the stress on words tends to be different depending on where the word is being used in a sentence and the intention it is conveying. Even the most basic sentence.The cat caught the mouse. - There is only one cat!The cat caught the mouse. - It was the cat that did it, not the dog!The cat caught the mouse. - The mouse has been caught, stop worrying.The cat caught the mouse. -  There was only one mouse, no more.The cat caught the mouse. -  It was a mouse that the cat caught, not a bird.Probably not the best example, but pretty much the same is true of all sentences. And then you have to deal with when words are contracted in sentences and when the are not."There's no book on the room.""Yes, there is. There's a red book on the shelf."You could forgo contractions all together if you are trying to avoid them, but if you are mimicking what people say exactly then it isn't you who is choosing.And then there are words that blend all together. Instead of saying "Would you" as clear separate words, often you will hear "Woo'ja"Again, I am using examples off the top of my head here, so there are likely far better examples. But it is certainly not a case where if you heard someone say something that would be expressed as individual words if written out, you could necessarily rearrange those words into new sentences that would sound convincingly like that person was speaking.I am sure we have all heard cases where someone recorded someone speaking for a while and then tried to rearrange those words into something completely different. The volume, tone and tempo of the rearranged sentences tends to be way off.Similarly, there are many text-to-voice programs out there where forget just words, they have broken all words down into their composite parts (after all, if one is just memorizing the sounds that others make in order to convey an idea, 'words' are not the most fundamental segments you can use) and you will always find that if you try plugging whole sentences into them, they come out sounding outright bizarre. And the longer the piece you have it recite is, the more and more odd and wrong it will sound. And that is what happens if you have the absolutely ideal situation where you sat someone down and tried your absolute best to record enough of them so that you would have the ideal set of sounds to work with.The hurdle one would need to overcome in this case is considerably larger than I think anyone realizes.Although, it should be understood that this could only ever be a hurdle regarding what the Kenku should be able to say in another creature's voice. A good part of the issue in regards to parrots or computers mimicing human voice is not just the limited set of sounds it has to work with to arrange into something sensible, but that neither truly comprehends what is being conveyed by these sounds in the first place. If the creature has perfect comprehension of the language and has the ability to mimic all the sounds necessary to construct the sentence it knows is used to convey what it wishes to communicate in the tone it recognizes as the correct tone and cadence to express it in, then there is no reason at all it should not be able to utilize human language in its own 'voice' (even if we were to allow that its voice is the compiled sounds of hundreds of encountered individuals over the course of its life since the method it uses to make the sound is going to have to be considerably different than the method a human uses to make the sound as the shape and composition of its mouth is considerably different from that of a human-- though it is far from the only humanoid facing that issue and this has never been brought up as an issue in any other case) as fully and comprehensively as any other intelligent, communicative individual.</blockquote>

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