Re: Quick sound change plot

Jan van Steenbergen wrote:

> --- Christopher B Wright wrote:
>
>
>
>>Anyway, does anyone know of a program that could plot possible outcomes
>>of a given word using pre-assigned rules about sound changes? I'm not
>>talking about something that will give the same changes to a bunch of
>>words, but one that would give many changes to the same word.
>>
>>For instance, "for" would become por, vor, fol, vol, pur, etc.
>>
>>
>
>I'm not sure whether such a thing exists, but it would be extremely easy to
>write such a program: just an input box where the user can enter a word, an
>output box for the answers, and the list of all possible letter/sound changes.
>It could be written even in BASIC. The only problem is, that if you enter a
>"longish" word, you might easily receive a couple of million possible answers.
>Just curious, but what do you need such a program for?
>
>
>
If you're going through all the posibilities and each sound can be
mapped to only one other sound then:

n = length of word

possible combinations of sound changes
=nCn + nC(n - 1) + nC(n -2) ..... + nC1
=1 + nC(n -1) + nC(n - 2) .... + n

For a three letter word it would be 1 + 3 + 3 = 7
For a ten letter word it would be 1023

I've just thought of something obvious... the easiest way to work it out
is 2^n - 1. So the number will get big very quickly... The numbers in
the series are as follows:

1,3,7,15,31,63,127,255,511,1023,2047,4095......

Now I've made a fool of myself I think I'll just stop talking lol. But
Jan is right that the program should be reasonably trivial to write...
Any volunteers? Out of interest, are any of the sounds in the language
represented by digraphs? Is your language strictly CVCVC.. etc or are
there any consonant clusters? Consonant clusters combined with digraphs
might make it slightly more difficult... not much though.
I'm wondering the same thing as everyone else though.. why would you
want a program to do it?