Re: Webpage

On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, JS Bangs wrote:

> Wow, this is really fascinating.
Thanks.

> I could see
> using this as the starting point for a future conlang.
That is actually why it was written in the first place. Not for me, of
course.

There is a small amount of coursework at UCLA that involves the invention
of artificial languages. There is one course for "Honors Students" who
aren't linguists to get them thinking about language. One of the class
projects involves the creation of an artificial language according to
typological tendencies. This webpage was conceived specifically for that
class. (They used to use the "Wheel of Phonemes".) Also, a friend of mine
taught a course on Artificial Languages: who, what, when, why, etc.

> What language is this written in? I'd be interested to look at your
> algorithm to see how you're generating all of this.
The program is written in Javascript, since that is the only programming
language I know that is usable on the web. (Well, I've done Cold Fusion
scripting, but I don't have a server for that.) The consonant and vowel
parts are separate programs, and can be found at:

http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~smithma/Random/consonants.js
http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~smithma/Random/vowels.js

There is little to no commenting to help you make sense of it though.

The consonants are straight statistical number crunching: 35% of all
languages have phoneme X, so add the phoneme X 35% of the time. (More
sophisticated than that, of course.)

The vowel algorithm is based on so-called Genetic Algorithms. Each vowel
is a "gene", the F1,F2 coordinates are the "alleles", and it is trying to
maximize the average distance between vowels in terms of frequency.

Marcus