Re: Utterance generator online (beta version)

On Tue, Sep 03, 2002 at 10:31:51AM -0400, Amanda Babcock wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 03, 2002 at 09:44:58AM -0400, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 05:31:44PM -0400, Amanda Babcock wrote:
> > >
> > > http://mercury.quandary.org/~langs/cgi-bin/compose.cgi
> >
> > Fascinating. Now I'm wishing that Ebisedian was regular enough that I
> > could do something like this. :-)
>
> I'm having to write quite complicated regular expressions in Perl for
> this, but they are, I suppose, still regular :)  Is Ebisedian truly
> irregular, or just fiendishly complex?
Well, it's something in between, I suppose. There are rough derivation
rules but there are a lot of exceptions, etc.. E.g. nouns undergo vowel
shifts when inflecting for case; and there is a general trend in how these
vowel shifts happen, but there are a lot of exceptions (mainly due to
euphonic reasons). Plus, affixes generally don't shift vowels in case
inflections, although sometimes they do. So it's just very complicated to
deal with.

Or perhaps Ebisedian needs a Great Phonological Overhaul. :-)

> There are currently bits of two real conlangs represented there -
> the new one the Utterance Generator was written for, Korahamla (the
> one with all the hopefully-impenetrable mutations, and the in-progress
> Perl regular expressions of ever-increasing complexity, some of which
> actually work) and Toma Heylm (just the verbs at the moment - few
> derivational affixes so not very interesting; it just becomes fully
> conjugated and stops), as well as one prototype proof-of-concept dataset
> named "foobar" which will probably be going away :)
What you currently have is very interesting, though. I wonder if it's
possible to automate the construction of an entire sentence or passage.
:-)

> Have finally figured out how to look at the Ebisedian Tutorial, BTW.
> My Acrobat 3.0 can't handle the extra letters, but Ghostview can (just
> barely legibly) display the .ps file.  Yay.
Try GSView instead, I use it, and it seems better on Windows. Or if you're
on Linux, try GV, which is much better than ghostview. I routinely use
GSView, GV and dvips for editing these documents, so if you get the latest
version, it should be perfect. On GSView, you might find things a lot more
legible if you select the "fit width" option for the page.


T

--
Nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that
leads to himself. -- Herman Hesse

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