Re: Alternative sound change program ETYMO.EXE

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 00:03:43 -0500, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>
wrote:

> A spot of Googling turned up
> http://homepage.sunrise.ch/homepage/mschmuki/
> which looks to be another sound change maker. It's much more complicated,
> but looks like it might be much more clever.
Right. Review time.

Vowel harmony is completely simple to create due to wildcards and the fact
that each rule is repeatedly applied until it no longer affects the word.
See the following two rules, which handle it for Thagojian:

   V[+front]*V[+back] > V[+front]*V[+mid]
   V[+back]*V[+front] > V[+back]*V[+mid]


It's phonetic-featural rather than graphemic, and there is a single glyph<-
>feature map for both input and output languages. This is bad, since (for
example) "c" could mean entirely different things in the input and output
languages.

The symbol inventory is strictly single-character, as is the category
inventory.

Several SAMPA characters are reserved symbols within the rules definition
language, meaning you can't use them as symbols or categories.

My workaround to the "input symbol definition == output symbol definition"
was to have read rules, process rules and write rules, like PHONO, but that
failed.

It's DOS, so therefore relies on DOS codepages rather than Windows ANSI, so
accented characters get garbled.

I think that, despite the enormous raw power of ETYMO, I might have to go
back to PHONO, at least until I can port ETYMO to a Unicode-aware Windows
application for. As if that day will ever come *sigh*




Paul