Re: Reversible sound change applier

Hi!

Aidan Grey writes:
> Actually, check out IPAZounds, by Jamie Norrish. Not only does it do
> reverse application, but it also uses IPA or XSAMPA, can group rules
> (you write the rule for nasalization once, and then simply refer to
> Nasalization whenever you need it again), can associate dates to
> rules (these rules all happen before date 4, which = Middle Bobbic
> era), can associate dialects too, and will shortly be able to do
> reverse by date and dialect as well.
Seems like everyone is privately reinventing the wheel to make it
exactly the way they need it. :-) Me included, of course. :-)

My Perl approach was mainly because I wanted Perl, not C (especially
for easy Web integration) and I wanted a nice syntax.  Now I see that
the other applications' syntaxes are very similar.  Well, by my
nature, I tend to start programming before using Google...

Dialects, dates, and persistent rules are available in schcompile,
too, (dialects can be implemented in several ways, one of them (global
options) very similar to IPAZounds), but rule reference and reverse
application are not.

OTOH, RSCA can do reverse application and I particularly like its
group-based multi-value mapping, which schcompile currently lacks
(i.e., 'convert a [plosive] into a [fricative]').  And I'm sure that a
C implementation with finite state transducers is a bit faster(tm)
than my totally unoptimised Perl modules...

> Just google for IPAZounds.
Although a bit fascist about enforcing UTF-8 input (I use ISO-8859-1
in my editor because it types more easily) it is quite elaborate,
especially wrt. its GUI.  (OTOH, my application is a bit anarchical in
not properly reading UTF-8 files yet, but instead not treating 8-bit
chars specially at all...)  The feature based approach is nice.  But
it seems a bit tedious to write in phonetics instead of being able to
define phonemes.  But maybe I missed something.

Does it support user-defined syllable structure and/or syllable
constraints?  Regular expression syntax?  Global and local boolean
flags?  If not, these might be unique to schcompile (some directly
inherited from Perl).

Of course, I love my own program because it suites exactly my
needs. :-P

Has anyone directly compared these sound change tools?

**Henrik