And the Answer is...

[kerravonsen]

Obsessive, that's what it is. Just have to keep on tweaking things, don't you? Then again, the ability to focus on one task is one of the things that makes a good programmer. Not that I think good programmers are necessarily that great to live with, unless you're another programmer.

I did end up writing a perl script to stitch morphemes into words, with random output (rather than exhaustive output). And I did manage to grab a bunch of these and plonk them as a line of dialogue into a story. Doesn't matter that I don't know what it meant, neither did the person who heard it. That, indeed, was the point.

But the thing is very jury-rigged, I don't really like it.

Comments

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

You know, if anybody understands obsession, I do. Especially when it comes to tweaking programs, as I'm a complete bit-twiddler (not that I've done any lately). But this whole thing with the morphemes has been just boggling me. If all you want is a line of alien dialogue, writing (and rewriting, and rewriting) a whole program to generate it seems remarkably like self-flagellation. Especially if it doesn't have to mean anything. Wouldn't it be easier just to write the line of dialogue the old-fashioned way?

I guess you climbed the mountain because it was there.

And, hey. Two programmers living together? Endless geek party!! My favorite! Though it's better if you have a separate residence to crash in when you get tired of fun.

Because it was there?

[kerravonsen]

Wouldn't it be easier just to write the line of dialogue the old-fashioned way?

Well, it would be easier to write English-sounding dialogue that way, naturally, since we speak English, and we follow the English rules for word-formation, even our nonsense words are likely to be English-like. The other likely outcome from "the old fashioned way" of creating a line of alien/foriegn dialogue is that you get something that doesn't sound like a real language at all.

There is a vast difference between "not knowing what it meant" and something being nonsense. Or to put it another way, the line may not have to mean anything, but it has to sound as if it might mean something.

I'm assuming here that you never studied linguistics. I don't know if you ever studied another language, but you've probably had enough exposure to some languages to know that, even if you don't know what either one means, that German sounds different to French, and Spanish sounds different to Russian. Have you ever been in a situation where someone was speaking a foriegn language, and even though you couldn't understand a word of what they were saying, you could make a guess that they were speaking, say, Spanish? (or German, or French, or Chinese or whatever...) This is because different languages have a different sound-pattern, or way they put sounds together (and indeed have different sounds that they choose to use, such as the kh/ch sound in the German "achtung" which is not in English). It is this sound-pattern I am attempting to define and generate words in the form of.

Or do you think that thupskezh skaikits koogayts nith pith sounds like it comes from the same language as yiid dal siishol vahzar zudhal?

(rueful smile) I suspect the outstanding feature of both phrases is that they both sound like utter nonsense. But at least I can be certain that they are both different breeds of nonsense. (And what's more, that they are pronouncable nonsense, rather than things that were never meant to be attempted by human mouth and tongue). And if I could plug my morpheme-generator into pc-kimmo, then I could even start being confident that I was generating grammatical nonsense.

Re: Because it was there?

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

Actually, yes to the linguistics, plus German, Spanish, and a bit of Latin, not that I still use them enough to remember them. Oh, and I can still say "this is my brother" in Russian, which is remarkably useful, having no brothers as I do. [g]

My linguistics prof was often heard to say, "The Kama Sutra is a bare-skin raga."

But, back to the point - your language will sound real or not-real based on the rule set, and you have to make that up before you plug it into your computer program. For me personally, having once made the rules, I'd rather skip the computer and work out how the words group into families and derive from earlier forms, rather than going with random generation. But I'm not objecting to you doing it your way, just interested that we would find different methods more straightforward.

Re: Because it was there?

[kerravonsen]

For me personally, having once made the rules, I'd rather skip the computer and work out how the words group into families and derive from earlier forms, rather than going with random generation.

I smile at this, because that seems a lot more work to me, because it's doing it all by hand! The purpose of my random generator is to give me something I can quickly plug in, without having to go to all the trouble of doing all those derivations and making a proper language.