Monument

The main purpose of the Shavian wiki is to build a lexicon. But when I started the site, it also allowed you to upload documents in the Latin alphabet, and it would transliterate them on the fly. It got to be quite clever, allowing you to add unknown words to the lexicon inline, and disambiguate homonyms.

However, the transliteration was done with a MediaWiki extension (called George), and therefore was written in PHP. It needed to build a fairly large cache of transliterations in memory, and because PHP runs in-process in the webserver, this resulted in the process taking up far too much memory. So I turned the transliteration off.

The sources of these documents used wiki markup. About the same time, I started building a set of typesetting tools which used DocBook markup. This was much more flexible. But then there were two sets of incompatible source documents, and the tools which were available to the wiki documents were not available to the DocBook documents.

It occurred to me a while ago that an equivalent CGI script would be just as good as the MediaWiki extension, and would return the memory once it was done. It occurred to me today that I should take this opportunity to stop using wiki markup and use DocBook for everything. I could easily write a translator for the documents which already exist. And writing the word-adding and disambiguating tools as CGIs would mean a lot more flexibility.

I really like this idea. (I won't be doing it just yet, because I'm busy, but it's certainly something worth thinking about.)

The Christian Science Monitor just linked to shavian.org rather prominently in article text.  (For those outside the US, despite its name, the CS Monitor is a largely secular national paper which mostly publishes online these days, although it still puts out a weekly print edition.)

Today it occurred to me that there is also a fifth option to my pondering of the other day: keep it on the command line, and write it in Perl.  I already have a Shavian transliterator in CPAN which could do with an overhaul.  Most of the file formats it would need to read also have code to read them (although .po support is kind of iffy).  And command-line tools built in Perl can be easily distributed over CPAN, as ack has shown.

The problem of updating the wiki is then easily fixed because we can use CPAN's support for the MediaWiki API, and upload a list of the missing words to a user's userspace on the wiki.

One thing I'd like to get right in my head before I start is where the database would go.  Currently, the CPAN Shavian transliterator keeps it with other Perl data in /usr.  But it would be really useful to be able to check for updates from shavian.org.uk and download them, without constant updates of the CPAN package.  So maybe the data should go in ~/.cache/shavian ?

Someone is apparently already using the name "Sparkle" for a free software project, so maybe I'll rename this to "makeshaw" or something.

I have a number of versions of the Shavian transliterator around (a program that can be used to make Shavian-alphabet versions of programs). The most general of them is a tool called Sparkle. It does .po files, and in theory files in Mozilla's formats and .srt subtitles files.

I was thinking of packaging up Sparkle in case anyone else wants to use it, since it's pretty useful to me.

However, there's the question of what happens to words found during translation which aren't in the dictionary. At the moment, it spits out an HTML page with links to the dictionary pages so you can fill them in. That requires you to load the page in your browser and follow each link, which isn't very helpful. I was also thinking of making it able to output a simple XML file, where you could fill in transliterations; then it would have a switch to read the file back and update the wiki using the MediaWiki API. That's kind of clunky, though.

There is another solution: I could just add an HTML front end and make Sparkle into a web tool instead. You'd be able to upload translatable files, press a few buttons, and download them again in Shavian (or another altscript, at your choice); you'd also be given a list of words to fill in which weren't found in the dictionary, and they would be added to the wiki automatically.

I'm not sure who else would use such a tool, though, in either of its possible incarnations. Let me know if it would be interesting to you.

Then again, it might show people how to do this sort of thing.

Some people have shown interest in the Shavian-subtitled Sita.

I'm not going to do any work on it in the next few weeks, because I'm quite busy at the moment, but I foresee a fairly major stumbling-block being the transcription of names, and in particular how to represent the vowels.  Obviously there won't be a one-to-one mapping with English-language vowels anyway, but I want to do the best I can.

I am thinking that

• Sita = ·𐑕𐑰𐑑𐑨, that is, the vowels in tree and cat, not the vowel in ago
• Rama = ·𐑮𐑭𐑥𐑨, that is, the vowels in mast (in the RP pronunciation) and cat
• Hanuman = ·𐑣𐑨𐑯𐑵𐑥𐑨𐑯, that is, the vowels in hand, soup, and man.  Or is the final vowel more like the a in mast?

Wikipedia isn't helping much, since it doesn't give IPA.

I haven't posted for a while. Here are four things:

1. Collabora have been supporting the CSS-on-window-borders project recently by letting me work on it during work hours. Here is a status update.


2. Recent updates to shavian.org.uk include a gentle Shavian tutorial and translations of all the recent XKCDs into Shavian.


3. Many years ago, I wrote a sonnet for use on a server's custom 404 page:
   

   So many years have passed since first you sought
   the lands beyond the edges of the sky,
   so many moons reflected in your eye,
   (familiar newness, fear of leaving port),
   since first you sought, and failed, and learned to fall,
   (first hope, then cynicism, silent dread,
   the countless stars, still counting overhead
   the seconds to your final voyage of all…)
   and last, in glory gold and red around
   your greatest search, your final quest to know!
   yet… ashes drift, the embers cease to glow,
   and darkened life in frozen death is drowned;
   and ashes on the swell are seen no more.
   The silence surges. Error 404.

   
   It's been spreading itself around, mostly without my permission, so I'm releasing it under a Creative Commons licence. Fly free, little sonnet! Please feel free to copy it onto your own sites, and if you would, let me know you've done so.


4. I need to write more of the Maemo tutorials. They will be coming soon. Sorry; things have been busy.

The first CC picture Flickr gave me for "cook" was the King of Jordan making dinner.

You can see all the "learn" pictures at once: quite a feast of randomness. What I would like to do is make an automated quiz at the end of each lesson, a bit like the one Rosetta Stone has, where you get given a word you've learned and have to click on the one out of four pictures which represents it.

There is a partial samizdat of Shaw Script.

I also made a game of hangman last night, but I think the player needs more chances than normal because there are more letters in the alphabet. Also, a letter frequency chart would be really useful.

1. I wonder whether it should still be called "the Shavian wiki" when it can be used to show lots of other alphabets too.  Maybe "the phonemic wiki" or "the spelling reform wiki" or something.  On the other hand, it's still primarily in and about Shavian.
2. Maybe it could do with a visual redesign; I've just been using the Cologne Blue theme from the standard MediaWiki distribution.
3. Maybe it should move from shavian.marnanel.org and have its own .org.

Your thoughts are, as ever, appreciated.