Re: Lojban program and conlang software ideas

On Sat, May 06, 2000 at 12:01:44AM +0400, Peter Clark wrote:
>
> o Random word generator - I have found several on the web, but aside from
> LangMake, these are primitive at best. Of course, I do my word generation
> the old fashion way (just today I decided that the number for 24 should be
> "cits" /kits/. Enamyn is base-8, in case you are wondering why 24 gets its
> own name.) Still, it would be nice (should I ever need a quick-and-dirty
> list of words) to feed in phonemes and syllable structure and frequency
> tables and get a reasonable list back. Jeffrey Henning's LangMake program
> comes to mind as the closest to reach an ideal so far (I love the
> transformation feature), but why not take a good thing and make it better?
I have a tweaked version of Chris Pound's _werd_ somewhere, which
generates the words and then lets you assign them one by one to a list
of meanings, and re-generate the word if you think it doesn't fit the
meaning.

> o Grammar generator - This would be incredibly cool if someone could
> actually manage to pull it off. The program would run through a list of
> different grammar options (nominative/ergative/active/mixed; SVO, SOV,
> VSO, etc.; isolating/agglutinating/fusional/polysynthetic; and so on) and
> spit out a grammar. Of course, listing all the millions of different
> variables would be a nightmare...
So you'd get to make choices at each step of the way?  That'd be
fascinating, especially if it applied typological universals for
defaults...  e.g...

"Does the language have a dual number?  YES"
"Does the language have a plural number [default due to typological
universals: YES]"

Ed