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Re: [Latejami] conlanging programmer

Morning Geoff:

True random word generators can string together phonemes based on predefined rules. This is easy enough that I have managed to write a little VB to do it.

1) A bigger problem is assigning meaning to all those legal and well formed morphemes options. One needs to track what meanings have already been given words, what meanings should be given their own words and what meanings should be expressed by modifying words and/or combining words.

How much should one tolerate words with multiple meanings and meanings with multiple words? That must also be monitored if it is to be controlled.

2) Another nice thing software can do is pronounce things. I can guess at how the lexicon will sound, but my skill at distinguishing non-english sounds and combinations of sounds is limited. A machine might not flawlessly reproduce human speech, but it can consistently make fine distinctions that I cannot rely on myself to make in natural language, much less a conlang I am working on.

3) I am impressed with the idea of a machine translator incorporating the rules of a language sufficiently to parse the correct meaning from any grammatical utterance in the language. I think this is an excellent guide for a conlanger who is trying to design a highly accurate and transparent means of conveying meaning. 

4) Along the path of putting a conlang into use, one will want to autogenerate a dictionary and thesaurus exploiting all the well designed rules of the conlang.

5) A lofty goal, yes, but how wonderful to have the software that can take a phrase in conlang A, parse it correctly and then convey that meaning in natlang A in a way that is reasonably grammatical and semantically equivalent to the original phrase in the conlang. I'd call that a step toward a universal translator.

Yes I talk too much. Yes I watch all things science fiction Star Trek being no exception.

FaqSphinx



-----Original Message-----
From: Geoff Hacker <geoff.hacker@hidden.email>
To: Latejami@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 8:13 pm
Subject: Re: [Latejami] conlanging programmer

Fair enough. But it seems to me that there are a number of random word generators on the internet for conlangers that will accept various ways of programming them with phonemes and morphological rules--I've played around with some in my time. That's what I'd look into before bothering to write one of my own.

Geoff


2008/10/30 faqsphinx <FaqSphinx@aol.com>
So geoff.hacker is a programmer. I think every conlanger on the move should either be a programmer or be very nice to a programmer.
 
Conlang design would benefit wonderfully from the use of a database application.
 
Think of a natural language like English. When we define an English word we define it using other English words.
 
Yet when we define a conlang word we do not define it using the words of that conlang. The conlang lacks rules and vocabulary sufficient to define the words of the conlang.
 
This is because the designer becomes fatigued before getting the conlang to that point.
 
A normal English dictionary has some 10,000 words defined.
 
This means 10,000 morphemes. Never mind defining them. How do you select them, just the phonological shape of each morpheme that will be matched with meanings. That is the simplest task of conlang design if you ask me. It is just painfully time consuming.
 
Now a programmer, given the phonological inventory and the phonotactic rules of the conlang could generate a million legal morphemes in a day.
 
As you can guess I am struggling to learn enough programming so that I can database my conlang concepts into a fully developed child.
 
FaqSphinx