Category Archives: machine assisted conlanging

Draft for tp++ as toki pona superset for a toki pona cross compiler

Posted on January 2, 2016 by matthewdeanmartin

Please read the article on what a cross compiler is in the context of conlangs before reading this. The recommended way to use this, should I (or someone!) complete it and write a compiler is that certain advanced toki pona … Continue reading →

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What is an erasing cross-compiler? Is it conlang related?

Posted on January 2, 2016 by matthewdeanmartin

Imagine you had a script that took every English sentence and replaced “ain’t” with “isn’t”. That would be a one rule cross compiler. I think this idea is very powerful and applicable to evolving a conlang without actually teaching people … Continue reading →

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Enumerating all sentences

Posted on August 29, 2015 by matthewdeanmartin

So I had an idea based on a few other ideas. What sort of mantra is worth reciting? The number pi has nonrepeating digits. If you looked long enough, then eventually you wound find the digits that encode your name … Continue reading →

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C++ for Conlanging

Posted on April 19, 2015 by matthewdeanmartin

I just wrote a C# parser for toki pona. It was an ad hoc grammar, meaning I didn’t write a PEG or YACC or other formal description of the grammar and then process it into a parser. (I didn’t use … Continue reading →

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Dictionaries for toki pona

Posted on December 14, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

I read about the dictionary making for Algonquin, a highly synthetic language with few unbound morphemes. Everything of interest is a bound morpheme. Full words necessarily drag along with them a lot of other cruft, as if a dictionary had … Continue reading →

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Paragraphs and machine assisted conlang work

Posted on December 5, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

When you are teaching a machine to do something with a language, you get a surprising set of challenges that are not mentioned much in your traditional reference grammar. On the internet, people post texts and line breaks are unreliable … Continue reading →

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Inferences from toki pona utterances

Posted on December 3, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

So I’m noodling again the idea of knowledge representation with toki pona. If I say: jan li laso. And then ask: seme li laso? Then it should be easy enough to look up jan. (That is to bind seme to … Continue reading →

Posted in machine assisted conlanging, toki pona | 1 Comment

Math and logic subsystems in languages

Posted on November 25, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

So I can open a novel, and as part of being a human raised in an English speaking community, I pretty much understand everything. I can open a textbook on Calculus on Logic and while I can read the whole … Continue reading →

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Observations While Editing Toki Pona

Posted on November 20, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

1) People create incorrect proper modifiers constantly. 2) People give up trying to use proper modifiers and just use their native language for all proper modifiers. 3) li get dropped for 3rd person subjects. 4) People essentially invent new constructions … Continue reading →

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Object Oriented Conlanging

Posted on November 14, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

If you don’t write code, you may feel like the wrong audience. So recently I’ve been on a kick of learning about object oriented library writing, especially for the most basic types. I notice that MSDN’s advice for writing basic … Continue reading →

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Puctuating toki pona- Community Proposal

Posted on October 15, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

toki pona has a few constraints, without which the game of toki pona is rendered silly. Foremost is that there are only about 125 or so morphemes (fairly non-bound). This isn’t as much of a problem and I think tp … Continue reading →

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Robot Languages

Posted on October 5, 2014 by matthewdeanmartin

By the way, it looks like Dothraki has a published spec. Now on to other topics. As someone with the facial expressions of a robot, I’ve always been partial to robots and some of my earliest attempts at programming were … Continue reading →

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An unimplemented idea for conlang phonotactics

Posted on July 17, 2013 by matthewdeanmartin

Phonotactics- the recipes for building new words. So someone created a fake language. But they died, or got a real job or otherwise abandoned it. How to move it forward if they didn’t document the phonotactics? There are many word … Continue reading →

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Sound change applications uses for those who don’t care about diachronics.

Posted on September 12, 2011 by matthewdeanmartin

I generally am not interested in conlangs that come with diachronic versions–i.e. hypothetical versions where plausible or otherwise changes mutate the words from one pronunciation to another. A crude version of what plausible is, is a rule like “The sounds … Continue reading →

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Review of DICT for conlang projects

Posted on June 17, 2011 by matthewdeanmartin

Pros- It is a free standard. There are free servers and clients. The project has amassed an impressive list of dictionaries that appear to be available to whoever wants to use them (some sort of GNU license on the dictionary … Continue reading →

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