I's been coding ALL the things.

[kaigou]

Per yet another dinner discussion combined with the need to produce some displayable code for upcoming interviews, I decided it was time for yet another insightful and elegant solution to yet another non-existent problem.

Lo, I have created a conlang word generator. Except it doesn't simply spew randomized letters at you, because that wouldn't be elegant at all, would it. No, as befitting my status as a nerd of the first order and a geek of the second, this word generator requires that you enter actual rules for your language.

(As in, whether a word can start with a vowel or a consonant, and the phonetic patterns of syllables, and what vowels can be doubled and whether a word can end with a single vowel or a doubled one, or maybe doubled vowels only occur in the middle of a word and doubled consonants only ever occur in the last syllable.)

Go forth and have fun, if you're easily linguistically amused. Do let me know if you run into problems, though, since I've only tested a little, and not nearly as obsessively as I hear you're supposed to. Or something.

Enjoy!

Comments

[nagasvoice]

fun idea, looks marvelous.
I think I gave it a hiccup by knocking out some consonants early on and then not being consistent later on.

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two syllables

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three syllables

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four syllables

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[kaigou]

Oh, I think I know what happened. Try going back to the second page and adding syllable rules -- they're the first three boxes along the top, under the paragraph. I think I need to give them more attention, since they're not expanded. Hrm, or maybe expand them by default & let you knock things off? I'll try that...

ETA: no idea why it won't let me pre-select everything in the first syllable rule-box, but the others behave nicely. So I added a "select all" button just to make it a little clearer, and the rest are pre-selected. I'll fiddle with that later, but at least it makes it harder to miss. Try again, now & let me know if it behaves?

[nagasvoice]

Sigh, I'm still making its tum hurt.
short sample:

one syllable

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /homepages/34/d225989664/htdocs/scimitar/words/results.php on line 114
two syllables

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three syllables

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four syllables

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[kaigou]

If you don't mind, could you go through and tell me what you've completed for each page? Or maybe take a screenshot of each page (just before you click the button to go to the next) so I know what's happening sooner? Just one line of error was enough to tell me what's missing, but I can't duplicate it without seeing what you're doing on the 2nd page. Email me at kaigou@dreamwidth.org if you can do screenshots. Thanks!

sorry about this, I'm sure I can fix it once I figure out where things are whacked on the second page!

[nagasvoice]

I've tried a few more changes and it's generating words just fine. (I suspect mostly swearwords in the language I was considering for the questions, but hey... we need good swearwords too!)

What a cool idea!

[sharibet]

And coming on the heels of the previous discussion regarding use of a real language versus made-up languages in fantasy novels, very timely.

I'm currently engaged in rewrites on a fantasy novel, myself, and currently wrestling with the language issue, myself.

Am looking forward to playing with your program in the next couple of days.

[kaigou]

That's much of the reason I figured I should give it a try (that, and making for another example of coding). Doing faux-languages when your story just has one non-English language, that's one thing, and relatively simple. But if a story is multi-cultural, and there's two, three, four languages, they end up looking the same (to me), unless there are specific rules and patterns that can set them apart. And since I'm geeky like that, it seemed like there should be an app for that!

[soukup]

Oh my God. What a marvelous idea! I can't wait to try it out. *bounces*

[kaigou]

Aha! Makes sense, you're as linguistically voracious as I am! Have fun with it!

[khana]

That is an extremely cool idea!
I'd love an edit function to really 'tweak' the words. I discovered after I hit send that some of the combinations within syllables were simply unpronouncable. And it would be easier to just edit those rules rather than go through the whole process again, after I've already forgotten which specific consonant-combinations I allowed and which I didn't...
It is a marvelous idea, though, and does work really great already!

[kaigou]

The easiest way to do that is probably to make it so it remembers what you entered, when you go back. I had started to do that (sheer habit) then decided to first make sure the damn thing worked properly!

If I get a chance this evening, I'll go through and add that, so at the very least if you return to a page, it should show most of your selections. Since it's an awful lot to put on one page already, going back and editing and then returning to the results might be easier than trying to find a way to tweak from the results page.

[khana]

sure, that should work. :)