Re: Collaborative diachronic conlanging lite

On Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:07:44 +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:

>On 2009-01-11 Alex Fink wrote:
>> In outline I envision this:
>> the current grammar and lexicon &c of the (each) project
>> language is kept on
>> a wiki;
[...]
>
>Sounds good.  I'm even willing to set up a (Media)wiki for
>the purpose on conlang.se.
Thanks, and duly noted.  But the project could most likely run on the
Frathwiki just as well as anywhere...

On Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:51:39 -0500, Chris Wright <dhasenan@...> wrote:

>2009/1/11 Sai Emrys <saizai@...>:
>> How hard would it be to create a program such that one describes
>> sentences meta/interlinearly, and they understand a grammatical
>> description, so that a change to the grammar automatically is
>> reflected in all generated vocabulary/sentences?
>
>Difficult.
>
>Taking a typical interlinear form and a lexicon, you can produce a
>translation without much difficulty. But you're talking about
>transformations on that interlinear form. If you managed to do it, I'd
>say you could probably publish the results, but I'm not sure how many
>people would find it useful.
>
>For example, let's say you eliminate complex gerund expressions in
>some situations. These expressions would have to be replaced with
>relative clauses. It would take a programmer to describe that one
>transformation. And it's not necessarily obvious how to do that
>transformation.
>
>There are simple transformations that you can build in -- changing
>part of an inflection to a particle, for instance. That would be
>useful.
>
>On the other hand, what is the minimal useful thing that could be
>implemented? Automatically linking uses of grammatical features to the
>relevant grammar descriptions, and vice versa. Maybe automatically
>invalidating all usages when the original grammar changes, and
>allowing people to mark the examples valid later.
I wonder whether the formats of SIL's Toolbox, or the scripts Arthaey uses
to make Asha'ille glossed sentences, or anything, have enough provision for
internal linkage already that they'd make something like this any easier to
implement.

Alex

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