[1194] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: House languages
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Jul 5 16:42:03 1993
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Mark Reed <mark@cad.gatech.edu>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Mon, 5 Jul 1993 14:45:26 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <9307050647.AA01494@cs.ust.hk> from "scott@cs.ust.hk" at Jul 5, 93
02:47:39 pm
\- We could make something up. I suppose I could start with something
\ else as a grammatical base, plug in some phonetics, write a program
\ with some Bayesian heuristics to generate a core vocabulary...
\ Hmmm. Has anybody written a language generator program?
Not a language generator per se. I have invented a couple of languages -
gone as far as determining the basic grammatical structure and core vocabulary,
but that's about it. At the time, I was doing my recreational computing at
home on a Commodore 128, and I wrote a BASIC program to generate vocabulary.
A year or two ago I translated it into C on Unix. It's a very basic
syllable-generator. It knows all the consonants and vowels that occur
in English (lacking an IPA font, it uses digraphs), and you can parameterize
it to select all of them or a subset designed to give a harsher or softer
sound. It doesn't know about any sounds that don't appear in English.
You can tell it whether allowed syllables are CVC, CV, VC, or any
combination, and you can tell it how many syllables you want for a given
word or let it pick for you. This was built in to a dictionary program -
I typed in an English word and it looked it up; if a translation was already
defined, it returned that, otherwise it generated new words until it found
one I liked. No heuristics to look for related or root words or anything
like that; I had to keep track of that sort of thing myself.
I unfortunately never generated enough vocabulary to use it as a house
language. One of my languages, though, is probably unique in having a
basic word (not built up from other words) that translates as "yogurt-head";
this was the result of a friend of mine coming in and playing with my system
when I wasn't looking. So next time you want to insult someone in an
obscure manner, call him/her a "yagwa".
This brings up a point about tlhIngan Hol, a question that I keep meaning to
ask Okrand when I see him but have as yet forgotten to. I wonder if he
used such a program to help him generate the vocabulary, or if he did each
word by hand?
-Mark
