On Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:41:56 -0400, Tom B (kaladorn) wrote:

>I looked at the original way of generating words from the early CT Alien
>Modules, but I found too many words came off entirely not pronounceable.

I wrote a word-gen program in a language called Euphoria many years ago; it
started from the concept of implementing the Classic word-generation tables
in code, and it worked reasonably well. A few of the original language
tables had rules for substituting "reasonable" sequences for "unreasonable"
ones, such as in Zhodani, which had both consonantal and vocalic "R" - if
you somehow ended up with "RRR", just change it to "R".

I wrote that into my code by adding a section in the language definition
file called "Assimilation". Properly set up, you could render
'unpronounceable' words pronouncible. You could also use it for the
phenomenon in languages like Arabic where even though the written form
doesn't change, the way it's pronounced might - as an example, you might
translate and transliterate "the club" in Arabic as "alnadi", but you would
pronounce it as though it were transcribed "annadi". This could be defined
in the "Assimilation" section of the definition file as "aln=ann".

Euphoria is an 'esoteric' language - it never really took off, though it
was well designed - but it's still available, and so's my code
(https://www.freelancetraveller.com/infocenter/software/wordgen.zip) and
you can feel free to port it to a more common language or hack on it any
way you please.  If you _do_ hack on it usefully, I'd be interested in
seeing what you do with it; ditto any translations into more common
languages. The language is quite readable, so hacking on it or porting it
to another language shouldn't require extended study time of the source.

I don't speak python yet, but an effort on my part to port it into
PowerShell isn't out of the question.

If you do decide to look at and/or hack on that code, and have any
questions, email me off-list and I'll be happy to answer/discuss...

>Also, I suppose one should have a sense as to some of grammar - is the word
>going to be a verb, adjective, noun, etc. and if there are any rules in the
>language about those items.

In a case like that, I treated the output of my program as a 'stem' or
'root', and applied the rules to it - for example, if I wanted a noun, and
in the language I was defining, I had a rule "all nouns end in -(a)q", I'd
take whatever the program gave me, perhaps "tulash", and manually change it
to the correct form for the language, either "tulaq" or "tulashaq"
depending on my mood. Basically, the program is a _word_ generator, not a
_language_ generator; taking its output and making a usable language from
it is well beyond the scope of either the program or the concept that was
written into the procedure it was based on.

>Of course, I'll get start that some year when every other thing in life has
>finally stopped mauling me like a good T-bone....

a.k.a. one of my favorite lines - "I have too much hands on my time." Been
there, done that, still haven't had the opportunity to burn the damn
T-shirt...

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