18 June 2008

ULD 2.7 update

Within a few days I'm going to add two data fields to the XML file.

The level field will give a rough estimate of how 'basic' or 'essential' the concept is. This will be a number from 1 to 5. In the future, if you're using a computer program to auto-generate a vocabulary, this number will govern the length of most morphemes. High-frequency conjunctions will be tagged 1 for example, so they will tend to be shorter than a word for 'electricity' which would be tagged 4 or 5.

The link field will indicate how the concept is related to others. There will be tags such as noppo (meaning 'is the negative opposite of'), kindo (meaning 'is a kind of'), and parto (meaning 'is typically a part or component of'). This field might be handy for auto-creation of philosophical langs, or for those who want to have Esperanto-style opposites like granda, malgranda.

I realize the idea of having a computer whip a vocabulary for a constructed lang is distasteful to some observers, but for people who want to get up and running in a hurry, or those who want to focus all of their attention on syntax or morphology, it's a prefectly reasonable course of action.

No comments: