Conlang software ideas

Ed Heil wrote:
> I have a tweaked version of Chris Pound's _werd_ somewhere, which
> generates the words and then lets you assign them one by one to a list
> of meanings, and re-generate the word if you think it doesn't fit the
> meaning.
        If you happen to find it, could you throw it up on the web? That
reminds me, Geoff Black (who I think was once on this list) made a word
generator for Win3.1 or greater. It was nice, in that it had an easy GUI
and was freeware, but he did not provide the source--which was Object
Pascal (Delphi 1.0), so I guess it doesn't matter.

> So you'd get to make choices at each step of the way?  That'd be
> fascinating, especially if it applied typological universals for
> defaults...  e.g...
>
> "Does the language have a dual number?  YES"
> "Does the language have a plural number [default due to typological
> universals: YES]"
        Anybody wish to brush up on their Greenburg? (I have that list of
universals somewhere...) Of course, true to the conlang spirit, the
defaults could be easily over-riden. :)

Jeffrey Henning wrote:
> This message stood out from the 3,978 unread messages in my LangReading
> folder.  Ironically, I've been too busy programming to keep up with the
> list.  Peter, thanks for the kind words about LangMaker/Win.  It is open
> source, but is written in Visual Basic 3 and is dependent on an esoteric
> component (the Formula One spreadsheet engine).  At some point, I would
> love to create a JavaScript version -- JavaScript, since it is the most
> used language and could run within web pages.  Unfortunately,
> LangMaker/Win represents about 80 hours of work, and with four kids,
> three unfinished novels, a couple of web sites and my own software
> company, I don't have the time to re-implement it, as much as I would
> like to.
        I was not aware that LangMaker was OpenSource. Last time I checked
(granted, this was a long time ago!) it was crippled to 100 words--is this
still true? Guess I should check my bookmarks more often, huh? :)
        JavaScript is nice in that it uses a near-universal medium: the
web browser. Unfortunately, it can't write to disk, which means that all
those nice words would have to be cut/pasted.
        I understand the lack of time. Makes me wish I was back in
college, where I always had the time to do other things than homework and
assignments. :P Then I would have taken that C course that I always
thought about taking.

Herman Miller wrote:
> I've occasionally had the idea to write a conlang-friendly Unicode text
> editor (with support for Tengwar, Engsvanyali, and other conscripts that
> require special handling), but I can never find the spare time.
        That's what I forgot to mention! But not only Unicode, and not
only able to handle scripts like Tengwar (Enamyn also uses vowel
pointing), but also capable of printing text in any direction, and can
display texts in different directions on the same page. Enamyn has two
scripts, a horizontal script for everyday use, and a vertical script
reserved for scriptual or ornamental usage. In a book like the Bible, the
main text would be in the horizontal script, with selected or important
passages repeated in the vertical script. Something like this, where
">" is horizontal and "V" is vertical:
        ____________ ____________
        |           |           |
        | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
        | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
        | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
        | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
        | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
        | VV >>>>>> | >>>>>> VV |
        |           |           |
        ------------ ------------

        Need to find out if my WordPerfect 8 can do this. Anyone have
StarOffice and can tell me if it has such a feature?
        :Peter