readme.md

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.