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Saturday, October 01, 2005

Weird tangents

I've recently found myself building a system to simplify and partially automate the generation and cataloguing of artificial languages.

Yes, there was a (fairly) good reason. Had a sudden need to come up with a few such languages, in a little more detail than it's often done in literature. And when you're trying to come up with something that sounds halfway convincing, with various bits and pieces of the grammar that decline in various odd and sorta believable ways, it does get to be a bit of a pain to keep track of it all in a word processor or spreadsheet. And while cataloguing programs (like Shoebox) do exist, they all kinda assume the language is already there.

I wanted something I could tell: okay, do we have this word yet? Yes? Good. What is it? No? Okay, I need this word. Gimme some possiblilities. That one, thanks. Okay, that part of speech declines in a coupla different ways in this language. Here's one way how... remember that for next time, too. Now do it to this root, gimme the results, and I'll edit them for actual usability/realistic irregularity, and then you can catalogue it all for when I ask you next...

We now have that. Just possibly the most esoteric piece of software I've ever come up with.

It's also quite possible I'm insane.