Re: Access/Excel, etc. (was: Has anyone made a real conlang? )

il Wednesday 23 April 2003 12:14 pm, il temenne ke Iain Davis ien:
> Jan van Steenbergen wrote:
>
> > Oh, that's quite possible. Many people can survive without
> > it. It's just that I like Access, and I really can't work with Excel.
>
> :). Interesting.  I do nearly everything in Excel.  Any time I have a "list"
> (like vocabulary, videotape collection, etc.) I do it in Excel.  Of course,
> we use Excel often at work as well, so I've gotten skilled with it.  There
> have been days where I lived in Excel, pretty much. :)
>
> > > Do you have an actual relational structure, or just a set of
> > > un-related tables?
> >
> > At this moment I work with unrelated tables. To be honest, I
> > think a relational database is overkill for a simple
> > vocabulary file. Besides, until a year ago I did everything
>
> I did wonder...I was trying to imagine what the necessary relationships
> would be. Everything I came up with seemed like needless obsfucation. :)
>
I keep the Kéleñi dictionary in an Access database with three tables:
Dictionary, Grammar, and Roots. Grammar is simply a lookup table with parts
of speech. Roots has simply a key field and a root field. The Dictionary
table has its own key, the root key for the appropriate root, the grammar key
from the lookup table, then the word form and a definition. A single root can
be linked to various words in the dictionary under various grammatical terms
- singular noun, stative noun, collective noun, etc. This makes it possible
for me to look things up by word, definition, root, & grammatical category. A
word cannot reference a root that is not in the Roots table.

Then my friend the database programmer adapted a VBscript to do lookups for
me, and we put it up on the web at:
http://www.qistech.com/KOP

My 2 cents,
-Sylvia

--
Sylvia Sotomayor
sylvia1@ix.netcom.com

The Kélen language can be found at:
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/kelen.html

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