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Re: General Purpose Dictionary Generator

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Sunday, October 29, 2006, 11:42
Hi!

Gary Shannon writes:
> I have a preliminary design page up for the dictionary generator. > > Please feel free to make comments, suggestions and feature requests. Once I get > the whole thing running as a mock-up web application I can start coding the > real program. > > Here's what I have so far: http://fiziwig.com/dictionary/dictionary1.html
Although this is preliminary, of course, it looks quite generic without special focus on conlang lexicons. Currently it seems like implementing an interface for editing a standard column and row based data base, plus have some template based mechanism to formatting this in HTML or XML or whatever. The example of a bibliography undermines the genericity. With the presence of an SQL backend, this would not be too much work then, so the positve side would be that it is likely to be usable quickly. This is especially nice for people who don't want to or cannot program all this themselves. It would be great to demonstrate how you will handle the special needs for lexicons. Many people have given their ideas about sub-entries, searching, etc.etc. I am quite generally concerned that the given mechanism only seems to work for regular isolating or agglutinative languages. If you wanted to have a lexicon for an inflecting or irregular language, you'd probably need too many columns to store the forms -- e.g. Þrjótrunn verbs need ~100 morphological forms stored. And of course, nouns require a different set of forms stored, so it might even be infeasible to store the information in the same table as the main entry -- you probably would not want 100 columns for verbs and another 12 or so for nouns in the same table. I think that a conlang lexicon should store all information to automatically generate any given form for each entry, so all the irregularities and morphological forms must be stored in a computer readable way. Will you support inflected or irregular languages in a way that makes this possible? Or do you think this will be outside the scope of your application? **Henrik

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Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>