Re: Math/Phonological formulae

David Peterson wrote:

(On writing feature matrices all on one line)
> For my own personal purposes, I've always found one line to
> be sufficient--especially if you condense stuff.
(snip much helpful/encouraging info, for which Thanks)

  > Anyway, I guess this is kind of the idea behind XML, where you
> just come up with your own tags for simplicity and keep a file
> somewhere for how they should be translated.  I've found that,
> as long as I actually do write down what everything means (cause
> I'm bound to forget),
That's one of the problems I've encountered-- between last Aug. (when I
stopped working on Gwr sound changes) and Now (taking it up again), I've
forgotten much of the sequencing. In some cases, I don't even know what my
old rules were doing. AARGH. Also, I think I'm allowing for too many
irregularities (Standard Gwr is the result of centuries of incorporating
forms from often closely related dialects)-- it may be I should focus only
on the _regular_ developments (since the irreg. forms imply different
rule-ordering in the dialect(s)). Oh well, as we like to say, it keeps me
off the streets....

The matter of rules with curly braces remains-- but as J.McCawley often said
(in effect)-- if you have to use curly braces in a rule, something is wrong.
:-)))

Once I (or, If I ever) finish and produce the pdf of Gwr sound changes,
everyone can attack it for lack of clarity, inconsistency, wrong ordering,
and who knows what other sins :-))

Although it'll be redundant, I'm planning to show rules in two ways-- one in
readily understandable words and symbols ("Leniting vd.stops > fricatives
between vowels, *bdg > **BDG/V__V"-- though many changes aren't that simple
:-( ), the other in (hopefully) correct feature notation.