WordGenerator 1.5 review

WordGenerator project generates hypothetical words from specifications of their syllable structure. You specify the maximum length

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 56K Developer: Bill Poser

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WordGenerator project generates hypothetical words from specifications of their syllable structure.

You specify the maximum length of the words in syllables, the abstract structure of syllables in the language (in terms of such units as consonants and vowels or onsets and rhymes), and the actual sounds that comprise each abstract class (e.g. the list of vowels in the language) and WordGenerator then generates the words that conform to this specification.

Such lists are useful to field linguists exploring the vocabulary of a language and to designers of artificial languages. Random samples of such lists may also be of use to historical linguists wishing to simulate chance resemblances.

The counts of the various syllable types and words of various lengths are automatically updated whenever relevant parameters are changed. This may be useful in teaching students about the combinatorics of languages.

All input and output is in UTF-8 Unicode. A number of tools are provided for entering non-ASCII characters, including clickable IPA charts and custom character entry widgets.

WordGenerator should run anywhere that Tcl/Tk is available, including GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and other Unix variants, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. It has been successfully tested on GNU/Linux.

What's New in This Release:
This release fixes a bug that triggered an error when saving the configuration or saving the list of words generated with headers enabled.
A bug that prevented font choices from affecting the character insertion tools was fixed.
The accented letter entry widget has been improved.
A number of characters have been added, and upper-case counterparts are now available by right-clicking.