Coming Attraction: Sound Changes
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? Rhetorica Your Writing System Sucks
posts: 1292
, Kelatetía message
Wow. What year is it? Okay. Yikes. Been a while.

As may have been clear from recent bugs, I'm finally getting back into spending a lot of time on web development stuff. This in particular means lavishing Annie with long-deserved attention—maybe not the kind that will finally make the forums run smoothly, but definitely at least some of the stuff I was talking about doing way back in the olden days and never got around to executing on.

The first of these is every conlanger's favourite topic, sound changes! This encompasses two related enhancements for how dictionaries currently work: (a) an automatic conjugator, which is already done and soon to be deployed, and (b) a word-borrowing system.

The automatic conjugator
This is a regex wrapper that generates tables. Take a look at this example word in Lilitika, and try clicking on each of the 'noun' headings to see how the word declines in the Zeyetaní, Sarasí, and Iomanazinení dialects. The verb conjugator won't show anything, since the word doesn't match its requirements.

You can view an example of the conjugator's rules here; this is the template for the Iomanazinení noun. Standard regular expression unfortunately lacks one of the most popular features of sound-change appliers—pairwise remapping from one class to another—so for the time being these rules have to be written out one a time.

A more complicated example of an inflection scheme is the Sarasí noun, which uses temporary symbols (#, 1, 2, 3) to handle more complex interactions between multiple inflected features, specificallly gender, number and case.

Barring feedback, this system will be rolled out on Anthologica more-or-less as it is now.

Word-borrowing
The word borrowing system will link parent word A in dictionary α to descendant word B in dictionary β, using a translation template attached to dictionary β. These translation templates will use a format similar to the conjugator as their diachronic schema, but only output one word rather than a whole table.

Creating borrowed words: Each word will have a button marked "create new descendant" which will allow you to select a dictionary and a diachronic scheme. It will be trivially possible to create multiple descendants, even in the original dictionary. There will also be a button to import an entire dictionary, intended for descendant languages.

Editing descendants: Blank fields on the descendant word will show values from the ancestor word. Words will list their ancestor (along with diachronic scheme) and descendants in an "etymological relations" section. If you change the headword of an ancestor, the descendants will be updated; if you change the headword of a descendant the diachronic scheme will be removed from the link, breaking that part of the relationship. If you edit a diachronic scheme, words using it will be updated to reflect the change.

This system hasn't been implemented yet and a fresh round of feedback would probably be a good idea.

After that
A long time ago there was some discussion about an interleaved site format that would (among other things) allow promoting forum posts into wiki articles. This is probably where development will be headed next. Then... maybe the calendar stuff.
? Hallow XIII Primordial Crab
posts: 539
, 蘇黎世之侯
message
The mind boggles. A welcome development.

As you may have noticed in the past six years, I have my fingers in too many pies to be consistently useful but on the bright side I know the Cadre version 151218 codebase basically by heart now, so if you have a source code repository anywhere...