Re: Lexicon management

Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> kjaehaefif:

> I wrote:
> > Jim Henry wrote:
> >> The original poster asked about automatically converting
> >> a conlang-to-natlang dictionary to a natlang-to-conlang dictionary.
> >> I don't think it's possible.  But given a tractable format, you might
> >> could use
> >> an appropriate script to generate a rough draft which you would then have
> >> to extensively edit.
> > I once made a perl script for just that.  Will see if I can find it!
> I found it!  (I removed some things peculiar to the original
> application.)
OK, that looks cool.  But it requires the definitions to be simple
comma-separated lists of one-word English glosses.  If
you have some more complex definitions that
have commas in, like these lines from my gjax-zym-byn lexicon:

hxy-zqy	d	example; something shown, pointed out	?	2002-10	
cqun-ga	d	distraction, a thing that distracts one	zxiq-zym	2002-03	
kax-dox	d	distraction, inattention (esp. if somewhat deliberate)	zxiq-zym	2002-03	
keq'pax-baw	d	stop consonant (k, kx, g, t, d, ...)	zxiq-gjax		
jxy-byn	d	problem; situation needing thought, research, a creative solution	jax-purj	2000-06	
jxy-vy	d	needing will, courage, moral effort	jax-purj	2000-06	

then the output will, as I said above, require extensive hand-editing.  In fact,
when I wrote a script similar to yours and ran it on my lexicon, I
found the output was so messy that I threw it away and started from scratch.
(This was also partly because the glosses are in several different languages, mostly
English, Esperanto and gjax-zym-byn, but occasionally others, and I didn't have
any language code to keep the glosses in different languages separate.  Will
eventually fix that but it's a big project.)


- Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/tokipona/tokipona.htm