Re: Conlang Software

Ed Heil wrote:

> I would suggest "Just Plain Perl."  I wrote several programs that did
> simple sound changes which were less than five lines each.  Each
> operated on an input file of words and produced an output file of
> sound-changed words.
>
> Learning the subset of Perl which would allow you to do this would
> probably be as easy as learning how to use any program that did it for
> you.
Exactly. The best part the is "regular expressions", that can do so,
to accomplish whatever (orthographic) sound changes desired:

while ($it = <>) { # read next line of input
        $it =~ s/\s+/g    # crush multiple spaces/tabs
        $it =~ s/\s+$//g; # drop leading/trailing space
        $it =~ s/^\s+//g;
        $it = lc $it;     # change to all lower case
        $old = $it;       # save it ...

        $it =~ s/c([ie])/s$1/g;    # change any C before soft vowels to S
        $it =~ s/c([aou])/k$1/g;   # change C before other vowels into K
        $it =~ s/^([aeiou])/h$1/g; # add H before vowel-initial words
        ... add more changes here ...

        print "$old ---> $it \n";
}

There is a Perl available for the slaves of Bill Gates, BTW.
Perl is much like BASIC or C++, only more so, yet easier.
(Uh, I didn't test the above, but it probably mostly works ...)