Re: Yivrian Lexicon Online!

Sylvia Sotomayor sikyal:

> On Friday 09 August 2002 11:58, Jeff Jones wrote:
> [re Yivrian lexicon page]
> > I just tried the newer version.
> > fountain (E2Y) -- no matches
> > dog (your example) (E2Y) -- suk, soko
> > suk (Y2E) -- dog (same entry as before)
> > so far so good, but then I put in cat (E2Y) and rat (E2Y) and got
> > half a dozen irrelevent entries each.
>
> There's a perfectly good reason for that. When you enter "cat" or
> "rat", the script is searching for *cat* or *rat* not \<cat\> or
> \<rat\>. This is annoying with these short 3 letter sequences that
> often occur in longer words, but it is very useful for less common
> sequences. For example (and I haven't tried this in Yivrian or even
> in Kélen), *drink* should yield such words as "drink", "drinking",
> maybe "drinking glass" or "poison drink", etc. Very useful!
> -Sylvia
Which is exactly why I haven't followed Teoh's suggestion and put a
word-boundary marker in the pattern-matching expression. The annoyance
caused by getting a variety of useless words when searching for something
like "rat" is outweighed by the convenience of getting more matches for
common substrings, and finding related words and families of meanings.

As another corrolary, if you don't put anything in the search field and
hit "Submit," you'll get the entire dictionary back (sorted by length of
Yivrian word), which is fun.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton