fetch a gloss on mouseover

[Dama Diwan]

Hi everyone,
before posting this I searched the whole forum, there were no matches.
It is, I think, since 3 years ago that I ask about this. Does anyone here know how to make a tool analogous to http://www.unilang.org/jara.php ?
I want something like that in order to facilitate people to learn Dama Diwan: the learner would mouse over a word of a text and instantly get a gloss of the root and the suffix; with a more advanced feature, it would recognize even variants of the morphemes, and even informal and highly formal variants.
Variants mean forms made with allophones (many allophones apply for Dama phonemes), i.e. the machine would recognize I, E, as the same (can be written with the digit 1), K, G as the same (minimally written as "9"), and so on.
In other words, this is like looking up in a spreadsheet list of words or a list of the 258 roots, but done quickly with a mouseover. Or with a click on the word; but if it is done by clicking, why not also by mouseover?
And, it is not needed to be done online; it is probably easier if the tool can be downloaded to a user's computer, and then when the user clicks on a Dama word s/he will have a gloss (still better onmouseover).
And better that fetching glosses by words, if it can fetch a sketch or a set of icons from a grid.
Can somebody guide me for having such a tool done?

[Vijay]

Shouldn't this also be in C&C Quickies? (Just asking).

[Dama Diwan]

For me it does not look like a quicky: for years I cannot find a solution to something that seems simple; all those that I asked could not answer, and it is an important matter from the aspect of computing and from the aspect of languages as well. I think it is interesting to all people interested in computing or languages, especially constructed ones. Some of those I have asked said "i want that too, but could not find a way to it".

[alynnidalar]

The UniLang one you link to appears to process the text on the serverside (using PHP), then inserts the popups into the page after each character or group of characters, and makes the popups visible when you mouse over each character. I don't know of any pre-built solutions out there that you could use immediately, but the above shouldn't be that difficult if you're familiar with any server-side scripting languages (e.g. PHP, ASP.NET...) + JavaScript.

The hard part is parsing the text that has been glossed; displaying it on mouseover is trivial with some JavaScript and the onmouseover event.

[Dama Diwan]

shouldn't be that difficult if you're familiar with any server-side scripting languages (e.g. PHP, ASP.NET...) + JavaScript

The hard part is parsing the text that has been glossed; displaying it on mouseover is trivial with some JavaScript and the onmouseover event.

This gives me a direction. If I knew some scripting languages... (sigh), well, maybe within the next 10 years, if I m healthy enough and find the time...
Parsing the text of Dama should not be a problem; all declinable words are of the type (CV)C+A/E/O(+optional -N), indeclinables are only A, I, O, AN, IN, UN. C=consonant, V=vowel, /=or. Exceptions are only on the informal and highly formal levels, which are very rarely used, and those mean only repeating a vowel to show it prolonged, or adding another vowel before or after the root vowel. Allophones are many, but in writing only 16 Latin letters are employed except for proper names or words inserted from other languages, which are immediately distinguished (written with only the first letter capital).

What about a simple software to download (so, not on the server side, but working on one's own computer)?, like the http://wordweb.info/free/ (that is very good for English, I would recommend it for learners). That will work offline, even better than the server-side.

[alynnidalar]

I'm a web dev, so I can't really speak to the best way to go about doing that in a standalone application. Certainly, it would be possible. How you go about doing it would depend on what programming language/libraries/frameworks you're using, though. At any rate, I believe the difficulty would still lie in parsing the input and getting the right definitions/translations/etc. to display. Actually displaying the data is likely going to be the easiest part of the problem. (although getting it to display the way you want it to may be more difficult...)

[finlay]

Do it on the web, not a standalone app. Those tend to be buggy and only support windows, but on the web you can support everyone with a browser.

Anyway, it's not clear what you are going to use it for – is it any possible text, or just the ones you put up? In the second case you could hand-gloss each example. Takes time of course but it's the only way it'll be possible without learning some scripting.

Also, I came up with two problems with the japanese parser – for words with many senses, the pop-up goes off the bottom of my screen, so I can't actually read it – I can't scroll down because it disappears when I take my mouse of the word. Clicking to let it stay there would be better. The other is it is sometimes wrong – I tried the word 歩こう (arukou, let's walk) and it parsed it as 歩行 (hokou, a walk). Japanese is a bit ridiculous for this sort of thing, but I'm sure you get the drift.

[Dama Diwan]

finlay, I know that http://www.unilang.org/jara.php tool is not good at all, I tried it for Japanese and it is 100 times worse than Google translation.
However, for such a simple language like Dama it should work all right. To be sincere, I would prefer the stand-alone tool, if it is very simple, it may work on different platforms.
Perhaps you know the http://lingojam.com/tolearnDamaDiwanwords place, it is promising much but I find it full of bugs which when I try to fix get worse for me. Maybe, if I learn java some time... Or maybe, can somebody give an advice, how to make it recognize e.g. D, TS, T as one and the same letter?
I mean, if I input "jato", it fetches a gloss; but can we make it fetch the same gloss for "jado" or "jadu"? (being the same with allophones).