Re: General Purpose Dictionary Generator

On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 06:10:37PM +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
[...]
> I hope it would not be too specialized to allow search by regular
> expressions in the standard version. I often find myself wanting to
> search for words based on criteria like "t between vowels", "stops
> after nasals" "velars followed by front vowels" and whatnot, which I
> can't do in my current db application, and I wouldn't know how to
> alter the source code...
[...]

The current Perl script that I use to manage Tatari Faran's lexicon, I
have an extended version of regular expressions that lets me type V to
mean any vowel, and C to mean any consonant. Hence, I can search for
"VtV" and it will return all entries with /t/ between vowels.

<shameless plug>
In fact, you can do this from the TF lexicon search page too, at:

	http://conlang.eusebeia.dyndns.org/fara/lexsearch.html

Set "using" to "regular expressions" and "in" to "Tatari Faran", then
you can specify a regular expression, possibly including 'C' or 'V' for
consonant or vowel.
</shameless plug>

In terms of implementation, this is just a simple matter of substituting
'C' with a character class containing all vowels, and similarly with
'V', and then compiling the resulting regex.

IMNSHO, I consider regex search to be an indispensible feature in a
conlang lexicon tool. Conlang lexicons just vary too widely to be
usefully covered by "traditional" search methods.


T

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