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[Lord Dullard]

Side Project: Language Generation

Now that I'm starting on the framework of civilizations, it's time to start taking language a little more seriously. I have no intentions of developing functioning languages for each civ, but it would be incredibly handy to have the names generated for each civilization be at least somewhat unique to the civ and also sound phonetically similar enough to let the player suspend disbelief about the plausibility of the names within a real lingual context.

I think I'm going to take a bit of a detour and try my hand at designing an language name generator - I'm not sure exactly what else to call it. Essentially, I want the generator to decide which consonants and combinations of consonants and vowels will be common to a language and generate a large list of appropriate name prefixes and suffixes based on those imaginary lingual preferences. The end result should be the ability of the generator to create a very large variety of naming schemes that sound at least somewhat believable but are actually created on the fly. This will also get me out of typing in huge naming-scheme lists which, while guaranteed to work, would also get really boring after a while and would offer only a very limited variety of naming schemes for different civs/different worlds.

Wish me luck!

[Outcast Orange]

Sounds all very nice and fancy.
I am becoming more and more excited about this project.

[Mephansteras]

In my sig is a link to the perl script I wrote to generate language files for DF. It's kind of a hack, but you may find it useful. Inspiration if nothing else.

[Lord Dullard]

Interesting! I'll definitely take a look at that - I'll most likely be posting the generator I end up making as a separate download entirely so that anyone who might find it useful can take a look at the source code.

[Outcast Orange]

You really need an avatar.
I have trouble distinguishing between posters without it.
Sort of like how you recognize people by their face before their name.

I've always wanted to take a crack at a phonetics creator.
I'd like to also make a symbol generator to go along with a language, based on the sounds.
So a really guttural language would have jagged characters.

Then you could actually have intelligence be a useful stat,
 since the subtitles for words you were familiar with would show up,
 but the others would be empty.
So you could only get the gist of the writing on the plaque,
 but not the full message or a badly translated version,
 where some words with multiple meanings show up incorrectly.

Some day...

[george]

coincidentally the developer of UR just announced a name generator he developed for libtcod -- could be educational.

http://umbrarumregnum.110mb.com/?q=node/206

[Jotaf]

Yes, and it will be a "standard" module in the next release of libtcod. It seems to be highly configurable, but to go as far as "different proceduraly generated languages" you'd have to inspect the SVN repo to see if the potential is there, or ask Mingos (as I'm sure this is a desireable feature).

Good luck, I'm following this with enthusiasm

[Lord Dullard]

coincidentally the developer of UR just announced a name generator he developed for libtcod -- could be educational.

Interesting stuff - I doubt he and I have the same eventual goals, though (although it is pretty amusing that we both happened to start on the same type of project in more or less the same general time period). I'd like this particular generator to be as flexible as possible, up to and including eventually creating pseudo-languages.

I said I'd make the language name scheme generator open source, and although I won't be updating this topic much more, here is the early blueprint for anyone who's interested:

http://fallout-mux.wdfiles.com/local--files/files/langnames.py

What exactly does it do so far? Well, here are a couple of screenshots of usage:
 
Names from a random language:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And another:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And a third:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

These were generated randomly one after another.

The second language probably scored very high on the 'dissimilar to English' variable, which makes it favor unusual consonant combinations that are rarely/never found in English (as a result, some languages will end up sounding Lovecraftian).

==========

Edit: I toned down the crazy-arsed-ness a bit. Code testers should now find that language schemes tend to sound more congruous but still just as unique and (at least relatively) identifiable.

Some languages will not use consonant/vowel clusters at all, or only use them in certain places. From toying around I've managed to get very asiatic-sounding naming schemes.

A sample, two languages (that sound semi-Scandinavian and semi-African, respectively):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

==========

This is a VERY early version of the code. Eventually it will probably contain more advanced features that will allow users to prune out undesirable sound combinations, etc. It's also possible I'll add English-to-<Language> dictionary generation in the style of DF to allow for some meaning behind various naming combinations. For now, it'll serve its purpose while I move on with Cult.

Sooner or later I'll be posting a link to a development forum from here. Until then, thank you all for your interest and enthusiasm.

[Dwarf]

Bump?

[Outcast Orange]

Lord Dullard?

What gives?

[Servant Corps]

It's werid to have people declare a project dead after a few days of no updates.

Then I remember that flying island mmorpg project a while back. What happened to it?

[Outcast Orange]

There are multiple "flying island" projects around here?

[Jack_Bread]

Everyone.
This.

[Outcast Orange]

Wow.

I don't have much to say to that.

...


:' (

[Servant Corps]

And for anyone who's been keeping up with 'Cult', I'll post a link in that topic once development is a bit further and I'm comfortable setting up a site with a forum for continuing development.

For your answer to when we'll expect a reply about "Cult".