This is a tool for generating words in invented languages. You can set up your basic phonology (int the phonemes tab), your phonotactics (in the syllables tab), and romanization/orthography issues (in the orthography tab).
The 'seed' value, at the top, is the mathematical value used for all of the other random generation. Change it to get new words, or leave it alone to tinker with the settings and see how they change the words you get.
In the phonemes tab you should pick out the phonemes for your language. Because of how the syllables work, you should sort them into classes. Each line, you write something like V=aeiou
, where V is the class and a, e, i, o, and u are the phones that are members of the class. (In this case the class letter V was selected to represent the vowels). The class name can only be one character long, but it can be any character. Take care not to make it a character that occurs within your phones; this may lead to strange results!
In the syllables tab, you define which syllables are possible for your language, using the phoneme classes defined earlier. Each line defines one syllable type. For instance, if we have a C and V class, then CVC
would be a traditional CVC syllable. If you use letters in your syllable definitions which are not phoneme classes, they will simply be output as part of that syllable type verbatim.
In the orthography tab, you define rewrite rules for text. Each rule looks like [pattern]=[replacement]. Anything that matches the pattern will be replaced with replacement. The special sequence (%x), where x is one of your phoneme classes, will match any one of the phones in that class. The special sequence %1 will then be replaced in the replacement with whichever phone matched the (%x) pattern. This can be useful to avoid writing a distinct rule for each element in the class.
Phonemes and syllables each have an additional parameter called 'decay' which is essentially the distribution of the probabilities. Uniform means that each element has an equal probability of being selected. Quadratic means that earlier elements have a higher probability of being selected than later elements, making the sequencing important.
Finally, min/max syllables is simply the minimum/maximum number of syllables to generate per word, and '# to generate' is the number of words to generate.
Have fun!!!