Conlang Random Thread

[AwfullyAmateur]

I am also boosting my confidence via that linguistic classic English As She Is Spoke because at the very least my Sodemeresh-English dictionary isn't as bad as THAT.

[AwfullyAmateur]

100th SC word! "Zhunatul" (Neut.) which means "market" or "marketplace".

[Richard W]

I am once again asking for help with wiki code regarding templates, mostly to do with assimilation rules and root-weakness rules (I can get one or the other but not both and it's pissing me off)

Why is Lua not an option? One can do Sanskrit inflection by rule in Lua, but Wiktioneers balked at doing it by templates. Lua is at least an order of magnitude easier, and template code has a nasty tendency to be write-only code even nicely laid out.

[Travis B.]

Lua really is a quite nice, small language that is easy to work with IMO. (Its only hitch, which is more for long-time programmers than beginners, is that it indexes from 1 rather than 0 by default, like Fortran, Julia, and Matlab.)

[AwfullyAmateur]

One day, I will have 100,000 words.

[Ahzoh]

I am once again asking for help with wiki code regarding templates, mostly to do with assimilation rules and root-weakness rules (I can get one or the other but not both and it's pissing me off)

Why is Lua not an option? One can do Sanskrit inflection by rule in Lua, but Wiktioneers balked at doing it by templates. Lua is at least an order of magnitude easier, and template code has a nasty tendency to be write-only code even nicely laid out.

I looked at Lua code and it has too much of a learning curve for me to bother. Especially when it's use would be limited and specific.

Nonetheless, I managed to solve the issue a week or so ago without the need for Lua shenanigans.

[jal]

One day, I will have 100,000 words.

Probably not :D.

I looked at Lua code and it has too much of a learning curve for me to bother.

As far as scripting languages go, Lua is pretty run-of-the-mill, but if you're not a programmer, I can imagine it looks daunting (as any programming language would).


JAL

[Richard W]

I looked at Lua code and it has too much of a learning curve for me to bother. Especially when its use would …

It’s your trade-off. One can happily ignore metatables and the details of iteration. The one gotcha is its treatment of undeclared variables, which are treated as globals. Wiktionary’s Indic transliteration functions are good examples to study with the aid of the Scribunto reference manual.

[Travis B.]

I looked at Lua code and it has too much of a learning curve for me to bother. Especially when its use would …

It’s your trade-off. One can happily ignore metatables and the details of iteration. The one gotcha is its treatment of undeclared variables, which are treated as globals. Wiktionary’s Indic transliteration functions are good examples to study with the aid of the Scribunto reference manual.

I agree that Lua metatables and the iteration details can be safely ignored. About undeclared variables, that is probably a historical artifact of that it grew out of essentially a configuration language (it was originally meant to replace a configuration language named SOL -- its name is a pun on SOL, as sol is Portuguese for sun and lua is Portuguese for moon), with more advanced programming features (e.g. lexical closures) having gotten added to it over time.

[AwfullyAmateur]

One day, I will have 100,000 words.

Probably not .

We will see. I don't think I'll surpass Khemehekis, god no, but 100,000 is not a changing goalpost. May we see who is right.

[AwfullyAmateur]

I am now wondering whether it's too late to turn my prepositions into postpositions (e.g. 'Glory daughter of Miriam' -> 'Glory daughter Miriam of'). I mean, I do already have a respectable number of particles...

[bradrn]

I am now wondering whether it's too late to turn my prepositions into postpositions (e.g. 'Glory daughter of Miriam' -> 'Glory daughter Miriam of'). I mean, I do already have a respectable number of particles...

It’s never too late to change a conlang.

[Richard W]

It’s never too late to change a conlang.

But it gets harder as one amasses place names and poetry.

[Richard W]

It’s never too late to change a conlang.

But it gets harder as one amasses place names and poetry.

[xxx]

In this case, the changes must be seen as linguistic evolutions,
much more so than those simulated by computer,
especially if the evolution is logical,
the old elements can even be preserved as old usages...

[jal]

We will see. I don't think I'll surpass Khemehekis, god no, but 100,000 is not a changing goalpost. May we see who is right.

Most natlangs don't even have 100,000 words, so...


JAL

[WeepingElf]

We will see. I don't think I'll surpass Khemehekis, god no, but 100,000 is not a changing goalpost. May we see who is right.

Most natlangs don't even have 100,000 words, so...

Or rather, no individual speaker has that many. Major modern languages such as English may have six-digit word counts because there are so many terms for specialized concepts - but only specialists know and use them. And as nobody is a specialist in everything, nobody uses all of them.

[xxx]

the breadth of the lexicon comes from usage,
a conlang by nature has very little...

unless you make it into a 1/1 scale model language,
or want to take the place of English by claiming to be auxiliary....

it's more logical to provide an operating mode
to enable the creation of any useful words on demand...

[AwfullyAmateur]

I may not know certain English words, but that does not negate their existence. If lexicon were what words each person knew, we would have no real estimate (of the size of the English lexicon)...

[Darren]

it's more logical to provide an operating mode
to enable the creation of any useful words on demand...

If we wanted to be logical I don't think we'd be making conlangs.