Re: General Purpose Dictionary Generator

Emaelivpeith Alex Fink <a4pq1injbok_0@...>:
> On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:17:52 -0700, Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...> wrote:
> I'd forgotten about Shoebox; it might be a good idea for this program to
> accept Shoebox input in some form, perhaps by first running it through a
> converter like (or identical to?) yours.
I'd be happy to generalize my lex2xml program. If other people could
email me their Shoebox files for me to test my program, I'll get on
that.

> My own preference would be to
> make the longer definition primary and the gloss/metalanguage search key
> secondary
In my schema file, it's the lexeme that's primary. Whether you prefer
the gloss to the definition is between you and your
XML-to-presentation converter. :)

> - why are etymologies cross-references?  If ancestral words have their own
> entries at all, wouldn't they be in a completely different file?
Many of my conlang's words have etymologies from existing "modern"
words. For example, _aedirev_ "snatch" comes from _aejiv_ "fight" and
_direv_ "take," both of which are in use at the same time as
_aedirev_. But a more properly constructed, diachronically built
conlang would have ancestral words, yes.

In either case, the schema doesn't care whether the cross-referenced
word is actually defined in the lexicon. The xrefType exists so that
you can define the *kind* of relationship it has to the head word:
synonym, antoynm, and so on.

> - is there provision for differentiating word class from, um, word subclass,
> from morphological information?  Like "noun, masculine, /nd/-stem", or
> "verb, subject is patientive, third conjugation"?
My schema does not take a stand on what values you can put into the
word class; I figured this would be too variable between language and
personal preference. As far as hierarchical support for subelements of
the word class, there currently isn't any.

> >Please also note that it's my first schema, and as such I may have
> >done things in less-than-optimal ways just to get it to validate. :P
>
> You could've fooled me!  I hadn't actually seen an XML Schema before this one.
Thanks. :)

> Looking through your tech page it looks like you've actually got a number of
> components of what Gary's planning to write.  Are they very
> Asha'ille-specific and specific to your formatting, or could they
> generalise?  We might have starting points for a number of aspects of the
> project at hand, in the latter case.
Some are more specific than others, but I think they could all be
generalized if I had other people's sample data to work from.

I'll try to get those programs' tech pages up over the weekend. I'd
sorta assumed no one was looking at them, so I never finished the
section. :P


--
AA
http://conlang.arthaey.com