If anyone liked this tool but it was tricky to use, I've been expanding functionality and making it much shinier. Feel free to lay into it and let me know what you think.
http://screamingnorth.com/wordgen.html
Hey guys! Let me tell you a story. There was an old program that I ADORED called LangGen. It basically let you generate a lot of random words to pad out the vocabularies of made-up languages. But the sounds weren't random--you could input alphabets and how words are structured! Sadly it doesn't work on modern operating systems, and I've been itching for a replacement. Simple enough task... so here we have the starting sprouts of GenLang, my knockoff of LangGen.
If you want to try it, do so here: http://screamingnorth.webs.com/genlang.html
Keep in mind it is extremely rudimentary right now. There is SOME error checking, but not much... only what's needed for it to semi-reliably spit out words at you. Here's how to use it:
First, choose how many morpheme types you want. These are sound categories like consonant, vowel, etc. You might want to include ones for special word endings, or things like that!
Then, describe those morpheme types! Give them IDs and descriptions. The ID should just be ONE character, the description can be anything (it isn't really useful now). Then, for the list of sounds, put down all the sounds separated by spaces. So for vowels, you might put down "a e i o u" without the quotation marks.
Once you've filled all that out, you can actually write down your word forms, separated by spaces! If you had C for consonant and V for vowel, you might put this down for your word forms: "CV VC V CVC CVCVCV CVCCVC" without the quotations marks. Then just put down how many words you want to generate and click the button! It'll randomly make you some words according to the rules. There's an option to generate more.
http://screamingnorth.com/wordgen.html
Hey guys! Let me tell you a story. There was an old program that I ADORED called LangGen. It basically let you generate a lot of random words to pad out the vocabularies of made-up languages. But the sounds weren't random--you could input alphabets and how words are structured! Sadly it doesn't work on modern operating systems, and I've been itching for a replacement. Simple enough task... so here we have the starting sprouts of GenLang, my knockoff of LangGen.
If you want to try it, do so here: http://screamingnorth.webs.com/genlang.html
Keep in mind it is extremely rudimentary right now. There is SOME error checking, but not much... only what's needed for it to semi-reliably spit out words at you. Here's how to use it:
First, choose how many morpheme types you want. These are sound categories like consonant, vowel, etc. You might want to include ones for special word endings, or things like that!
Then, describe those morpheme types! Give them IDs and descriptions. The ID should just be ONE character, the description can be anything (it isn't really useful now). Then, for the list of sounds, put down all the sounds separated by spaces. So for vowels, you might put down "a e i o u" without the quotation marks.
Once you've filled all that out, you can actually write down your word forms, separated by spaces! If you had C for consonant and V for vowel, you might put this down for your word forms: "CV VC V CVC CVCVCV CVCCVC" without the quotations marks. Then just put down how many words you want to generate and click the button! It'll randomly make you some words according to the rules. There's an option to generate more.
Wow, what a fascinating project.
It took me a little while to figure out what went into all the fields, but once I did, I could see how powerful this could be.
It took me a little while to figure out what went into all the fields, but once I did, I could see how powerful this could be.
Yeah, I definitely need to add sane documentation to each page so it's more clear. (It wasn't until I was done that I realized, "Hey, other people can use this besides me!") And it is hellish looking... needs pretty CSS and whatnot. I think the most important thing to do now is to let you backtrack and make adjustments (and dynamically add/subtract morpheme types), and after that, some kind of "Save" ability. For now maybe it could just generate a string of the rules that you can copy into a certain textarea and it'll remember all your stuff. After that, I want to include a little dictionary of common words, and when you run the thing it can map out like "black = gnarfle, blue = fleebar" stuff like that. And then the ability for the user to have different sets of word forms... so nouns are set up one way, verbs are set up another, etc (but whatever categories the user chooses).
I'm really excited about the little guy!
What else do you think it needs? I really want to avoid grammar generation for now, though... that is a sticky wicket. So it's not so much a LANGUAGE generator as it is a vocabulary/name generator.
(It wasn't until I was done that I realized, "Hey, other people can use this besides me!") And it is hellish looking... needs pretty CSS and whatnot. I think the most important thing to do now is to let you backtrack and make adjustments (and dynamically add/subtract morpheme types), and after that, some kind of "Save" ability. For now maybe it could just generate a string of the rules that you can copy into a certain textarea and it'll remember all your stuff. After that, I want to include a little dictionary of common words, and when you run the thing it can map out like "black = gnarfle, blue = fleebar" stuff like that. And then the ability for the user to have different sets of word forms... so nouns are set up one way, verbs are set up another, etc (but whatever categories the user chooses).I'm really excited about the little guy!
What else do you think it needs? I really want to avoid grammar generation for now, though... that is a sticky wicket. So it's not so much a LANGUAGE generator as it is a vocabulary/name generator.
Wow, this is -amazing- and just the sort of thing that could be helpful for me! Thank you so much for sharing Heimdall 
The thing that I would love to see from it is suggestions, so I could ask it to suggest a morpheme and see what it's supposed to look like... And also so I could speed through and get to the meat in a hurry, if my language hadn't blossomed very far. But maybe just some great helpfiles (when you're done!) would contain a few demo sets that I could copy/paste to see the range of language flavors it could do.
This could prove insanely useful for my D&D settings. YOU'RE THE BEST HEIMDERP!
Kim, I definitely plan on having some different easily-loadable templates that have different morphemes and wordforms! And I'm glad you guys are getting some use out of it even in its rudimentary state.
Did you take this down? The link isn't working anymore 
I think Webs was down for a while earlier! I just checked and I think it's up again.
Hey guys! Just letting you all know there is a shinier, more robust version of this tool online here: http://screamingnorth.com/wordgen/index.html
New stuff include the ability to save and load your templates, and to start from preloaded templates (currently "reari" and orcish--feel free to suggest more). It's also a lot more flexible, and allows you to dynamically add/remove/alter morphemes and wordforms, so you can tweak your rulesets with ease.
Not sure what I wanna add next, honestly. It's basically doing what I set out to have it do... the only other thing I can think of is to add cookie support, so you can save whatever template you used most recently in your actual browser. But that sounds like a lot of work and I kinda don't want to deal with it. :B I could also do user-defined different parts of speech (verbs, nouns, first names, etc.) but again, I dunno if that would be worth it. Same with the dictionary mapping (black="arglefraster" blue="muppetlord"). I will, however, probably add toggleable "tips" that would just expand all the directions to be more verbose.
New stuff include the ability to save and load your templates, and to start from preloaded templates (currently "reari" and orcish--feel free to suggest more). It's also a lot more flexible, and allows you to dynamically add/remove/alter morphemes and wordforms, so you can tweak your rulesets with ease.
Not sure what I wanna add next, honestly. It's basically doing what I set out to have it do... the only other thing I can think of is to add cookie support, so you can save whatever template you used most recently in your actual browser. But that sounds like a lot of work and I kinda don't want to deal with it. :B I could also do user-defined different parts of speech (verbs, nouns, first names, etc.) but again, I dunno if that would be worth it. Same with the dictionary mapping (black="arglefraster" blue="muppetlord"). I will, however, probably add toggleable "tips" that would just expand all the directions to be more verbose.
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