zompist bboard

Hi all,

I'm a software developer who would like to (in my spare time, of course) create a large-scale web application to support conlanging. Some ideas I've had for features, off the top of my head, include

* Public/Private languages
* Sound Inventory (for each language)
* Language Families
* A uniform sound change applier (for language families)
* Lexicon

However, while I find conlanging fascinating, I'm at best a rank amateur. So let me ask you, the professionals; what sort of functionality would you look for in conlanging software? What features would appeal to you?

Patrick

I'm an shiny new amateur as well, but I suppose language feature-filtering/sorting would be great to find examples of how others used/coped with certain features. As in, filtering by morphosyntactic alignment, word order, etc. Would be great for data mining as well, I'd think.

*Premade and custom checklists for things to add to your conlang
*A word generator that has more control and is better than Zompist's (in particular, one that easily allows digraphs and uses one formula for syllable structure, and has a better save function)
*An app to create native alphabet fonts

Those are just off the top of my head.

An inflection engine, which takes into account all rules of inflection and displays various inflected forms. This engine should be capable of handling inflection with affixes, clitics, independent particles, or discontinuous morphology (infixes, stress shifts, apophony, etc.). With the same technology, a conjugation engine for verbs. By extension, a sound change applier which applies changes to inflected/conjugated forms, and displays certain averages or trends (for example, "3rd person tends to be marked with /t/ in all forms").

Automatic substitution for borrowings (for example, phoneme X in language A is rendered as phoneme Y or Z in borrowings to language B, depending on surrounding phonemes).

IPA pronouncer please. Even if it's quite rough, just to get a feel for how a word/sentence sounds.

An automated conlang generator - what I'm envisioning here is something where you choose from various drop-down lists of features, possibly with preset examples to help out those who are a bit stuck for inspiration. Press the button, and it generates a sketch grammar, phonology and so on.

IPA pronouncers are pipedreams IMO. that being said maybe I'm wrong and let's hope so because one would be awesome.

Syllabifiers would be pretty cool too, you know, something in which you input phonemes and it spews out the phonetic pronunciation of a word.

Etymology trackers would be cool, you know, something you can create words with, apply some sound changes from one to the next lang, and then the new words tell you stuff like "new languese bapa, to kill > from old languese baba, to hurt"

Yng wrote:An automated conlang generator - what I'm envisioning here is something where you choose from various drop-down lists of features, possibly with preset examples to help out those who are a bit stuck for inspiration. Press the button, and it generates a sketch grammar, phonology and so on.

Something like that has been written, you could try to run that (download link is at the bottom of that post).

yeah I wasn't being serious jesus guys take all the fun out of conlanging why don't you

Adjective Recoil wrote:An inflection engine, which takes into account all rules of inflection and displays various inflected forms. This engine should be capable of handling inflection with affixes, clitics, independent particles, or discontinuous morphology (infixes, stress shifts, apophony, etc.). With the same technology, a conjugation engine for verbs. By extension, a sound change applier which applies changes to inflected/conjugated forms, and displays certain averages or trends (for example, "3rd person tends to be marked with /t/ in all forms").

Something like this would probably be my most-wanted piece of software other than those which currently exist. For my own personal use at present it would only have to be able to handle affixes and wouldn't have to be able to deal with discontinuous morphology particularly, but just to be able to put in a basic form of the word and define what form I want it in would make things a lot easier than searching through inflection tables, especially in languages with lots of morphophonology or that inflect for lots of different categories with a high deal of fusion - both things I tend to avoid on account of the fact that it makes translation a lot more difficult

Adjective Recoil wrote:An inflection engine, which takes into account all rules of inflection and displays various inflected forms. This engine should be capable of handling inflection with affixes, clitics, independent particles, or discontinuous morphology (infixes, stress shifts, apophony, etc.). With the same technology, a conjugation engine for verbs. By extension, a sound change applier which applies changes to inflected/conjugated forms, and displays certain averages or trends (for example, "3rd person tends to be marked with /t/ in all forms").

Automatic substitution for borrowings (for example, phoneme X in language A is rendered as phoneme Y or Z in borrowings to language B, depending on surrounding phonemes).

Would kill for that, many times over.

Mec has an inflection engine like that for Novegradian (for nouns I'm positive, not sure if he worked adjectives or verbs into it). Might ask him about it, maybe some effort can avoid being duplicated.

I really like the on-the-fly mouse-over translator that lernu uses for Esperanto in their forums. It's so helpful.

I wish there were a way of calculating functional load for phonemes in a corpus and a lexicon. I can wish right?

INFLECTER YAY

A reverse SCA. You have a naming language, and want to make a relative, but you have no ancestor worked out.

A checklist and a conjugator would be really useful too.

Something this very board could use is a plugin for PHPBB that produces nicely aligned interlinear glosses. Either by using tables or by using CSS float magic.

*Being able to associate IPA symbols to a certain set of characters, then having it generate the IPA pronunciation automatically. I know there are sometimes irregularities, but it would help to have some base to edit.

Jipí wrote:Something this very board could use is a plugin for PHPBB that produces nicely aligned interlinear glosses. Either by using tables or by using CSS float magic.

Yes.

Jipí wrote:Something this very board could use is a plugin for PHPBB that produces nicely aligned interlinear glosses. Either by using tables or by using CSS float magic.

make it happen, zomp

[razed and salted]

An app that applies regular stress markers to wordlists before running the list through sound change appliers.

Wqt wrote:*Being able to associate IPA symbols to a certain set of characters, then having it generate the IPA pronunciation automatically. I know there are sometimes irregularities, but it would help to have some base to edit.

UIM's X-Sampa input does this already. Unless you mean the vocalization, in which case your proposal makes no sense, so I discounted that possibility.

Mh, I think s/he rather means automatic transcription. However, that's not always so easy, and English is a good example here: graphemes may have different phonemic values depending on context, sometimes unpredictably so – e.g. 〈-ough〉 in through, rough, hiccough, lough; it's also why 〈ghoti〉 can't read /fɪʃ/. I suppose the problem either needs a large ruleset or true artificial intelligence to always deliver correct results, depending on the complexity of the orthography.

Jipí wrote:Something this very board could use is a plugin for PHPBB that produces nicely aligned interlinear glosses. Either by using tables or by using CSS float magic.

This would be awesome.

Jipí wrote:Mh, I think s/he rather means automatic transcription. However, that's not always so easy, and English is a good example here: graphemes may have different phonemic values depending on context, sometimes unpredictably so – e.g. 〈-ough〉 in through, rough, hiccough, lough; it's also why 〈ghoti〉 can't read /fɪʃ/. I suppose the problem either needs a large ruleset or true artificial intelligence to always deliver correct results, depending on the complexity of the orthography.

Probably not so hard if your conlang's graphs are phonemic. Then you could probably just use something like text crawler.