Generating naming languages

47 points by mewo2 9 years ago | 4 comments

This seems to disproportionately generate languages where all syllables start and end in a consonant.

Example: lium / les / seap / lim / mus / mis / sus / nus / suis / san / sois / taum / puos / sais / mip / soup / lis / neuk / soes / nal / sis / sit / piom / puot / saos / luk

This is rather unnatural, even in consonant heavy languages like the Slavic languages. See: http://www.personal.ceu.hu/students/97/Roman_Zakharii/polski...

Don't read this as disappointment though. This is really cool! Just wanted to point out this quirk.

mewo2 9 years ago | |

Yeah, that's sort of deliberate. Because the consonant system is so much more developed than the vowels, it's easier for them to do more of the heavy lifting, even if that is a bit unusual in natural language terms. I could probably stand to tweak the probabilities a bit though.

gliese1337 9 years ago | | |

There are quite a lot of existing word generators that allow you to describe words in different ways (declaratively according to phonotactic rules vs. procedurally and so forth), and at different levels of detail depending on the user's level of linguistic knowledge.

A fairly popular one which recently had a major update is Lexifer by William Annis (http://lingweenie.org/conlang/lexifer.html), which allows specifying some fairly sophisticated statistical distributions.

My own entry into the space is Logopoeist (https://github.com/conlang-software-dev/Logopoeist). I did a comparative review of every known word generator at the time last November, but unfortunately I haven't gotten around to publishing it yet.

ptrkrlsrd 9 years ago |

Think I'll use this generator for generating endpoints for my new open API