Beyond the SCA: strategies for improving conlanger productivity

[xxx]

It doesn't require much hardware to get a synthesizer to speak. In the 1980s, the Commodore 64 home computer had a simple built-in synthesizer, and there was a program called SAM/Reciter for it which made this synthesizer speak, with an unnatural-sounding but intelligible voice.

here https://discordier.github.io/sam/

[WeepingElf]

It doesn't require much hardware to get a synthesizer to speak. In the 1980s, the Commodore 64 home computer had a simple built-in synthesizer, and there was a program called SAM/Reciter for it which made this synthesizer speak, with an unnatural-sounding but intelligible voice.

here https://discordier.github.io/sam/

That one appears to be a port of the original program. In the 1980s, JavaScript of course wasn't a thing yet.

[alice]

It doesn't require much hardware to get a synthesizer to speak. In the 1980s, the Commodore 64 home computer had a simple built-in synthesizer, and there was a program called SAM/Reciter for it which made this synthesizer speak, with an unnatural-sounding but intelligible voice.

here https://discordier.github.io/sam/

That one appears to be a port of the original program. In the 1980s, JavaScript of course wasn't a thing yet.

Actually, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls was written in what turned out to be a local dialect of Javascript.

[WeepingElf]

here https://discordier.github.io/sam/

That one appears to be a port of the original program. In the 1980s, JavaScript of course wasn't a thing yet.

Actually, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls was written in what turned out to be a local dialect of Javascript.

No, you confused Javascript and Jawa script. Jawas have of course been common in the area around the Dead Sea for thousands of years.

[alice]

That one appears to be a port of the original program. In the 1980s, JavaScript of course wasn't a thing yet.

Actually, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls was written in what turned out to be a local dialect of Javascript.

No, you confused Javascript and Jawa script. Jawas have of course been common in the area around the Dead Sea for thousands of years.

Damn it, and I was sure there was a research grant in there somewhere Are you sure you're not being misled by the standard German pronunciation of <w>?

[WeepingElf]

Actually, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls was written in what turned out to be a local dialect of Javascript.

No, you confused Javascript and Jawa script. Jawas have of course been common in the area around the Dead Sea for thousands of years.

Damn it, and I was sure there was a research grant in there somewhere Are you sure you're not being misled by the standard German pronunciation of <w>?

They are written with <w>, at least according to Wookiepedia.

[Neonnaut]

Besides the tools I've made available, I heavily use another one: a Javascript program to convert text to html. This allows me to create html documentation very quickly from my Word documents. Earlier I wrote an RTF-to-html converter, but Word's RTF is pretty horrible and produces a lot of nonsense. Rather than keeping the converter up to date, I wrote the Javascript converter to handle tables, bullet points, and sample sentences.

I've only heard of text to HTML converters being referred to of as a "Dingus" -- the supposedly perfect Dingus being Dillinger.io, but this does not have a way to generate a table of contents, or format gloss. Which brings me to the program all the cool kids are using: Obsidian. Obsidian has plugins for formatting glosses and some other conlang related plugins, creating a table of contents and converting to HTML.

AWKWORDOID: I would definitely need something for phonotactics similar to Awkwords. It would be great if the program could suggest licit roots/words so that I can just assign meanings. In a perfect world, this would not just be random words that follow my established phontactics but also follow some sensible and editable probability distribution for segments and different syllable types/root types.

This describes my word generator Vocabug well, if you haven't checked it out yet.

DERIVATIONALIZER: I would love a module that suggests combinations of roots and derivational affixes (or roots and roots in the case of compounds) based on roots and derivational affixes that I enter. It could also suggest polysemy patterns based on public online databases. In conjunction with the AWKWORDOID this could help me build my conlang's vocabulary. Of course, there would need to be a way to store the vocabulary in a dictionary-like format that could be converted into a nice pdf-file.

That sounds like The Derivizer by Cedh.

SYNTACXG: I would definitely need a way to store syntactic constructions and how they can be combined. This would help me to (a) see gaps and come up with new constructions and (b) do translations correctly. This might mean that you need to save snippets of example [sentences/phrases/clauses/...] related to these constructions.

I still can't guarantee that I would use such a tool because I am slow to adapt to new technology in general. Some of these already exist or might exist even if I never had a look at them.

This last one feels like it would be just documentation, but on the other hand, perhaps a tool that has example sentences with gloss saved in a database, with each example tagged with some kinds of syntactic types etc. Then the tool finds where there should be an overlap of these tags or where there are no tags at all and alerts you.