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Steg, You've quoted the below from 'The Romulan Way'. I love Diane Duane's 'Rihannsu' books!!! I heard she has a computer programme to come up with words in 'Rihannsu'. Apparently all you need to do is punch in a phonological profile and the programme will spit out words and words of the alien language. Such a programme would be wonderful for developing a conlang that is not based on an existing language. I've found when constructing a language from scratch, you tend to repeat a lot of sound combinations. A programme would do the phonological complexity of one's own original idea justice and confront you big time with what you've actually conjured up by constructing a con-phonology.
I wrote a program to invent Trentish words for me, awhile back.It produces an original root at random, according to preset frequencies, e.g. most common onsets are [t n s r], less common are [k m N sr ? h p], least common are [pr tr c cr kr J ?r]...
After that, it runs it through two sets of sound changes. I *cannot* make a priori words look natural without running them through sound changes... I think they impose some kind of systemy, or regularity, or something.
Then I select one. Words dont always sound like what they mean, but sometimes they will... what I do is generate three roots at once, then select the word that "sounds most like" it should mean what I'm looking for.
Then it generates an HTML setup with pretentious etymology, version, etc., suitable to type a definition into and paste into the lexicon file. (it is <http://frath.net/language/trentish-lexicon.shtml>) [I also put the roots I didn't select in, for the sake of related languages to use; this way I also build up the protolanguage.]
A screenshot of what it looks like is at http://frath.net/stuff/trentroots.png
I've been meaning to make both a typable field to enter a form to apply changes to and customizable, so I could use it for other langs [trentish frequencies and sound changes are hardcoded in] but 1) I'm lazy and 2) Trentish changes are simple (search and replace works easily) and full functionality is not easy (most fundamentally, my other langs do weird things with stress and accent, which dont duplicate well even in existing sound change programs--all my other langs have sound changes done by hand).
I could probably use PHONO but it's a *pain* to configure; and it being dos, characters are quite limited... were I to make one, it'd do Unicode *and* it would already have standard IPA symbols set up [tho separate sounds would still be makeable] etc.
*Muke! -- http://frath.net/ E jer savne zarjￜ mas ne http://kohath.livejournal.com/ Se imnￜ koone'f metha http://kohath.deviantart.com/ Brissve mￜ kolￜ adￜ.