Re: General Purpose Dictionary Generator

Hi!

Arthaey Angosii writes:
>...
> Another question came to mind: how would you implement multiple senses
> of a word? Or subentries? Presumably these would be in rows following
> the main entry, but how would the dictionary program know they were
> related?
>...
Another nice feature would be something that I implemented recently
for my online dictionary: references.  It should be possible to state
that (parts of) words are derived from other entries and/or from parts
of inflected forms.  E.g. in Þrjótrunn, I wanted to enter 'í lok' (<
*IN LOCO) as a phrasal preposition meaning 'instead' (cmp. 'in place
of').  For this I made a phrase consisting of two references: to the
preposition 'í' and to 'lokur' in accusative case (abl. has merged
with acc.).  I think this is especially nice for conlangs where, in
contrast to natlangs, lexicon entries may change (frequently even).
By the references, all the referring entries change and the manual
changes are kept local.

My implementation allows basic modifications to the referenced
entries, e.g. using only the first letter in uppercase (for entering
abbreviations) or chopping off the last 1, 2, or 3 characters when I
only need a stem in i-umlaut form, etc., etc.

Implementing this generically, however, would require quite a lot of
complexity to give the user the necessary configurability -- it is
likely to be a neverending story.  My own Perl script is not at all
generic in that respect -- it requires changes to the source code for
new features, simply because there are about as many things I can
think of as there are functions to invoke in the underlying
programming language...

Also, my dictionary implements regular inflections of Þrjótrunn, i.e.,
for a new noun or verb, I give it the class and gender and the
dictionary script fills in proposals for the inflected forms which can
then be edited.  This feature would also require quite some work to
make it generic, e.g. via plug-in modules that know the basic
inflection paradigms.

It also allows me to refer to another lexicon entry as an inflection
paradigm.  The inflection forms will then be derived from the stem and
the referenced entry's inflection forms.

Examples:
  http://www.kunstsprachen.de/lex.cgi?c-76=1;domain=s17;action=infl
  http://www.kunstsprachen.de/lex.cgi?domain=s17;c-347=1;action=infl

**Henrik

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