SOUND CHANGE APPLIER.

John Cowan sent me a link to the Sound Change Applier at zompist.com (which, I see, has a snazzy new front page since last time I visited; if you’re not familiar with Mark Rosenfelder’s multifarious site, you should spend some time there—scroll down for the amazing variety of pages on languages, science, comics, and goodness knows what all). I’m swamped with work and don’t have time to play with it right now, but as John says, it’s “really clever: type in some definitions of character classes, some context-sensitive rules, and a lexicon, and see what happens to the lexicon when the rules are applied.” (If you click the Apply button without changing the sound change rules, it changes the Latin words to Portuguese.)

Comments

  1. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    All those particular words are indeed changed into very authentic-looking Portuguese, but none of the others that I tried (quattour, decem, lacrimans …) were. However, I didn’t play with it long enough to figure out exactly what the rules meant.
    But you’re right, one can spend hours on that site and barely scratch the surface of it.

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