The following module was proposed for inclusion in the Module List:
modid: Lingua::FeatureSet
DSLIP: adpOp
description: define phonology-style features for emes
userid: KAHN (Jeremy Kahn)
chapterid: 11 (String_Lang_Text_Proc)
communities:
comp.lang.perl.modules
similar:
rationale:
I need a tool that constructs objects representing the featureset
of a phoneme. The standard linguistic notation for this is (for the
'ch', the 'eh', and the 's' sound in chess"):
CH [ +stop +fric -voice +palat +cons -vow ] EH [ +vow -cons -low
-high +front -tense ] S [ +cons +fric -stop +alv -voice ]
Furthermore, I may want to be able to refer to "feature classes",
that is, composite features like "affricate":
class AFF [ +stop +fric ]
(this example would match 'CH' but not 'S' or 'EH').
To complicate things further, the list of primitive features is
linguistically controversial, the set of relevant classes varies
from language to language, even if you agree on the theoretical
primitives, and the choice of symbol set to represent the phoneme
(IPA, Sampa, DARPA-bet, etc) is varied and political.
Thus, in the finest Perl sense, TMTOWTDI. The dimensions of
flexibility provided are:
You, the user, define what you want to be the featureset by
subclassing "Lingua::FeatureMatrix::Eme", distributed with this
module. An added side bonus is that you decide whether the base unit
is a "Phone" or a "Phoneme" (or, for that matter, a "SoundUnit" or a
"Letter" -- that subclass is *your* module, and the goal is to
"[put] the focus not so much onto the problem to be solved, but
rather onto the person trying to solve the problem." (see
http://kiev.wall.org/~larry/pm.html).
You, the user, define what the feature set is, and you define how
the phones distribute among those features, using the best of
*Impatience* -- use the existing linguistic typographic conventions,
and this module takes care of constructing your objects for you. No
translating among conventions for us.
But let's go one step further. Languages include redundancy, and
sometimes it's boring (and not *Lazy*) to have to specify yourself
that something that is "[+stop]" is also "[-vow +cons]", especially
if you have to specify this for every single "[+stop]" consonant.
So this module also introduces the concept of an *implicature* -- I
can say, also in simple linguistically-familiar format, that
( [+stop] => [-vow +cons] )
and this will apply for all phones in the current dataset (unless
I'm speaking Berber, where this isn't necessarily true...). It's
also *Lazy*, because the module also does the work of letting me
know whether I have forgotten to specify any of the features of a
given phone:
# probably missing a feature or six; would generate a # warning. T
[ +cons -vow ]
Along the way, we pick up some *Hubris*:
* Doesn't apply just to phones anymore -- we can use it for letters
and ligatures, if we want.
* It should be extensible to use these objects to connect to other
linguistics-style programs like "Lingua::SoundChange", not to
mention homebrew pronunciation algorithms like "Lingua::Soundex".
enteredby: KAHN (Jeremy Kahn)
enteredon: Mon Sep 2 18:38:29 2002 GMT
The resulting entry would be:
Lingua::
::FeatureSet adpOp define phonology-style features for emes KAHN
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