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Re: Reversible sound change applier

From:Alex Fink <a4pq1injbok_0@...>
Date:Thursday, May 11, 2006, 2:55
On Thu, 11 May 2006 00:33:24 +0200, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:

>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...
I know what you mean...
>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...
Faster? Perhaps; I haven't devoted any effort to optimization either, though, and use the C++ STL too much for it to be really as efficient as it might. I'm tempted to go and add dates and persistent rules and dialects to rsca right now; none of them seem like a big addition. [...]
>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).
Regular expressions, no. rsca has basic regular expression support (none of these crazy backreferences or x{2,5} things or...); and Geoff's applier http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/lang/sc.html inherits them from Python. The thorough treatment of syllables, OTOH, is one of my favorite features of schcompile. Alex