Re: General Purpose Dictionary Generator

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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