phonetic_rules

Creating new words with phonetic rules

In addition to creating word based on etymological rules and word relationships, Kirum can also generate words from base phonetic rulesets, without any pre-existing etymology.

To generate phonetic rules, a Kirum project must have one or more JSON rule files under phonetics/ in the root project directory. These files are formatted as such:

{
  "groups": {
    "V": [
      "e",
      "a"
    ],
    "S": [
      "VC",
      "CCV",
      "VyV"
    ],
    "C": [
      "x",
      "m",
      "p",
      "l"
    ]
  },
  "lexis_types": {
    "word_rule": [
      "SSS",
      "SCSS"
    ]
  }
}

This phonetic file is divided into two maps:

• groups: breaks down possible groups of letters and consonants. The key of a group can be any uppercase unicode character, the values of an individual group can be any unicode value, or any uppercase group key. In the above example, V are the language's possible vowels, S are the possible syllables, and C are the possible consonants.
• lexis_rules: are the possible words that are derived from the specified group rules.

To generate a word from a set of specified phonetic rules, simply add the given lexis_types value to the lexis's generate field:

    "latin_verb": {
      "type": "word",
      "generate": "word_rule",
      "language": "Latin",
      "definition": "To buy, remove",
      "part_of_speech": "verb",
      "archaic": true
    }

Note that the generator will not apply a new word if the lexis has both a generate and word field.