I have a great idea for an app, especially with the mac app store out now.
I am a semi-amiture linguist (I minored in it), and I love to create languages, but the hardest part is coming up with the lexicon (list of words and suffixes), but that would be a great job for a computer. Basically the first thing you do when creating a language is come up with the phoneme inventory (the list of sounds that your language will have) and the phonetactic constraints (where each sound can and cannot go in a syllable or word, what other sounds can come before and after it, and how the sound changes in different contexts.)
i'd love to make a program where you input the phonemes and phonetactics, and the program gives you a list of words (really morphemes) based on the information you gave it.
So, as a very simple example, I could say that my language consists of the following sounds (phonemes)
consonants: [p] [t] [k] [n]
vowels: [a]
(a real language has more sounds, of course)
and the following phonetactic constraints
(C)V
This means that a syllable must consist of a vowel, but can have a consonant at the beginning or an [n] at the end. The computer would then return the following list, assuming i restrict the list to only single syllables:
a
u
an
un
pa
pu
pan
pun
ta
tu
tan
tun
ka
ku
kan
kun
na
nu
nan
nun
Additionally, the program could match the words to a list of english glosses (an = me, nun = dog etc) saving even more time. A feature that allows you to apply historical sound changes to your word list to create new languages descended from the first language could also be added.
So, how do I go about making that kind of program? I took computer science (where we learned Java) and webmastering (HTML, javascrpt, etc) in High school, but that is the extent of my programming knowledge. What about Cocoa? I looked up some materials, and all of them say I need to know something called objective C before learning Cocoa, and I would also benefit from a non-threatening "for dummies"-style introduction to programming in general.
Help or advice would be great, and please don't say GFGI, if I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have posted this.
I am a semi-amiture linguist (I minored in it), and I love to create languages, but the hardest part is coming up with the lexicon (list of words and suffixes), but that would be a great job for a computer. Basically the first thing you do when creating a language is come up with the phoneme inventory (the list of sounds that your language will have) and the phonetactic constraints (where each sound can and cannot go in a syllable or word, what other sounds can come before and after it, and how the sound changes in different contexts.)
i'd love to make a program where you input the phonemes and phonetactics, and the program gives you a list of words (really morphemes) based on the information you gave it.
So, as a very simple example, I could say that my language consists of the following sounds (phonemes)
consonants: [p] [t] [k] [n]
vowels: [a]
(a real language has more sounds, of course)
and the following phonetactic constraints
(C)V
This means that a syllable must consist of a vowel, but can have a consonant at the beginning or an [n] at the end. The computer would then return the following list, assuming i restrict the list to only single syllables:
a
u
an
un
pa
pu
pan
pun
ta
tu
tan
tun
ka
ku
kan
kun
na
nu
nan
nun
Additionally, the program could match the words to a list of english glosses (an = me, nun = dog etc) saving even more time. A feature that allows you to apply historical sound changes to your word list to create new languages descended from the first language could also be added.
So, how do I go about making that kind of program? I took computer science (where we learned Java) and webmastering (HTML, javascrpt, etc) in High school, but that is the extent of my programming knowledge. What about Cocoa? I looked up some materials, and all of them say I need to know something called objective C before learning Cocoa, and I would also benefit from a non-threatening "for dummies"-style introduction to programming in general.
Help or advice would be great, and please don't say GFGI, if I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have posted this.