[Noisebridge-discuss] An experiment in linguistic fluidity / conversion algorithm needed

Jonathan Foote jtfoote at ieee.org
Sat Apr 28 16:36:50 UTC 2012


The Natural Language Toolkit might be a good place to start:
http://www.nltk.org/

In particular, it has the CMU English pronunciation dictionary baked in.
https://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/howto/corpus.html#word-lists-and-lexicons

If your mapping is 1:1 phonemes to codes your problem is pretty much
solved with a Python dict lookup supplemented with some rules for
non-dictionary entries (e.g.
http://rhdunn.github.com/cainteoir/rules.html)

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 2:19 AM,  <glamortramp at riseup.net> wrote:
> I've invented a new code language called ZLang and I want to be able to
> convert English into ZLang with the click of a button.
>
> Can someone help or point me to some links, or possibly provide the sort
> of algorithm (or logarithm? I'm over my head) I would need to make that
> conversion possible?
>
> It's complicated, I suppose, by the fact that it's not always an easy,
> letter-for-letter conversion; some English sounds (notably th, sh, ch) are
> represented by a single letter in ZLang, and vice versa. Here's the
> decryption key link if anyone's interested.
>
> http://zine.noisebridge.net/zlang
>
> It's already gone through a great deal of permutation and will probably go
> through more. There's a fluidity to it: most of the time, there is more
> than one letter or sound in ZLang that can be used to answer the English
> sound. That leaves a certain amount of room for bending the rules or
> choosing between different alternatives according to one's own aesthetic
> sense of how a word should look, or what's necessary in order to allow
> smooth pronunciation. I arrived at that after early version of ZLang that
> were too rigid & resulted in unpronounceable or aesthetically deficient
> words & sentences.
>
> You could say it's an experiment in linguistic fluidity, or a less
> "autocratic" form of language. I'm not sure I would say that.....but you
> could.
>
>
> Tony/Glam
>
> _______________________________________
>
> Glam......or tramp?
>
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