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

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.