Still (breathlessly) following along. I’m having a great time!
I’m creating an awfully long-winded thread.
Eh, my way o’ singing TiddlyWiki’s praises via a long and incremental/iterative process of building a somewhat substantial TW instance with nothing but TW goodness and sprinkles of HTML + CSS.
Rock’n roll.
I’ve been struggling with how to show words with proper spelling and making them easy to find phonetically.
Say you hear a French-Acadian pronunciation of a word, and you then want to look up that word based on what you heard. That can be a challenge, because the spelling of a word and the sound of a word, not necessarily and intuitive match.
Since the French-Acadian language is a spoken language, I’ve decided to focus on “phonetic spelling” instead of “written/proper spelling”.
I am no fan of “international phonetic alphabet” symbols for describing sounds of words, so I’m going to devise my own alphabet (each sound represented by one or more normal alphabetic characters.)
For example, all of the “eau” sounds (“eau”, “au”, “aut”, “o”, etc.) will all be represented by the letter “o”.
So a word like “aboiteau” will be phonetically spelled as “abwêto”. The details of “abwêto” will explain that it is the pronunciation of the word “aboiteau”.
Just like the international phonetic alphabet has a description of each sound, I’ll have to create some reference for each sound. So, using the example, something that explains the sounds “a”, “b”, “w”, “ê”, “t”, and “o” in detail.
Something like that. Gotta chew on it some more.
Another example: Canada.
That last “a” sounds like the “u” in “thud” (“chug”, “rug”).
I’m thinking that, phonetically, it would make sense to write the word as Canaduh.
Not crazy putting a “duh” in there, But then, that is the sound of the last “a”, and “uh” is pretty easy to understand without having to lookup some funky symbol.
That sounds fine. I believe French has a small enough list of sounds to make that feasible. But… a suggestion: while you might not want the final wiki to use one of those alphabets, it might still be good to look at one to see if it includes Acadian pronunciations you hadn’t yet considered. This is one of those places where getting it right up front pays off. (I’m usually more of a build-it-as-you-go-and-refactor-when-necessary guy, but I got burned by doing something much like this once before, and piling on so much content atop my bad decision that it was too much work to change. It made the system much less usable than it should have been.)
To my southern New England ears, it seems more likely to be “Canuhduh”. Somehow this also deemphasizes the visual “duh” for me.
In standard French, all of the “a” occurrences sound like the “a” in “do ré mi fa”.
However, the French-Acadian I know, much like the French spoken in Québec: kanaduh. The first two occurences of “a” sound like “fa”, but that last one is just like the u in bug and rug. Kind of like “ah”, but very very dull.
Interesting. Around my parts (Connecticut, as well as neighboring Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York), the first “a” sounds like the one in “hand”, and the second two are shwahs, well represented by “uh”, although the final one is much more drawn out than the second one.
Vive la différence!
In Canada (well, all English-Canadians I know): the first “a” is like for the word “can” (“fan”, “clan”, or the first a in “Santa”), and the other two are like the second “a” in “Santa”.
“Canada” pronounced in the Acadian French is just like it is pronounced by most francophones in Québec, as this lady demonstrates:
Any “a” that is the last sound in any word is pronounced “uh”.
Like “chat” (the “t” makes no sound.)
However, in the feminine form of the word, the “a” in “chatte” sounds like the first two “a” occurrences in “Canada”.
A start at a phonetic alphabet: Le P'tit Aurèle — - Version: 2024-12-10 12:41am - un lexique du français acadiena lexicon of Acadian French
And rejigging the dictionary to use phonetic spelling: Le P'tit Aurèle — - Version: 2024-12-10 12:41am - un lexique du français acadiena lexicon of Acadian French
1 Like
One focus tonight: start laying the groundwork for making printing of a word possible.
The user interface for this TW will eventually be an overlay on top of TiddlyWiki that will be somewhat like the interface I’ve setup for the BASIC Anywhere Machine
Programming Reference and User Guide.
To view the details of any word, those details will be displayed in an oversized modal (taking most of the visual space available.)
That kind of interface, though, will not make for pretty/easy printing.
So I’ve setup that modal with a button to open the Word Details in a New Window. That allows sizing the window however and makes for better printing right out of the box, with maybe a future addition of CSS specifically for printing.
2 screenshots and a PDF link…
Showing the “open in new window” button (right next to the “Éditer / Edit” button) :
The result of pressing the “open in new window” button:
The results of printing that window (saving as PDF):
1 Like
I made a wee improvement to that “open in new window” feature.
The setup last night only allowed one open window because I was opening the “Word Details” tiddler (with a parameter indicating what word to show.)
Now, the button instead opens the word tiddler using “Word Details” tiddler as a template.
So we can have side-by-side windows for however many words:
So, to me more important than easy/pretty printing, we can have one or more distinct windows open for various words along with whatever we want displayed in the main window. Me like.
For the purpose of visualizing pronunciation, I am no fan of using symbols (as one would find for the international phonetic alphabet.)
Seeing as I don’t plan on displaying “code” in my TW, I think I’m going to repurpose that for the job of formatting combinations of normal alphabetic characters that together indicate a sound.
So for the word “bâdrer”, the related tiddler title is a phonetic representation using tick marks to highlight the “aw” in the phonetic spelling of the word: bawdré, with “aw” defined in the following table:
The word’s tiddler title looks like this:
The word in the listing of words looks like this:
And the word details dialog/window looks like this:
Adding tick marks in my tiddler titles to highlight pronunciation did require a little bit of extra smarts to the sorting operator. While at it, I figured out the approach to handling sort of accented characters, starting with accented “e” characters (others to add later).
Snippet of sorting code:
e="[éèê]"
baseSortHow="[search-replace:g[`],[]search-replace:g:regexp<e>,[e]]"
baseSort="+[sortsub<baseSortHow>]"
With the sampling of words I have in the dictionary for testing purposes, the list looks like this with my phonetic alphabet applied:
Fundamental architectural components setup for custom UI.
When you first open the TiddlyWiki, you get the following UI :
If you want the TW interface, just click the “X” button on the right-hand side of the combo box.
When in the TW interface, go back to the simple UI by clicking the “Open the UI” button in the sidebar (just above the search text box):
1 Like
Modified the “Phonetic Alphabet” audio links.
Now, an audio link opens the audio player in a New Window.
And, I’ve set it up so that multiple audio windows can be simultaneously opened, making it easier to compare sounds:
The code for the audio button:
\define ogg(a s)
<$button class="tc-btn-invisible">
<$action-createtiddler $basetitle="$:/temp/Audio Player" $template={{Audio Player!!title}}>
<$action-sendmessage
$message="tm-open-window"
$param=<<createTiddler-title>>
windowTitle="$a$: Prononciation / Pronunciation"
width="640"
height="480"
src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/$s$" />
</$action-createtiddler>
🔊</$button>
\end
\define snd(alpha df de ogg)
<tr><td style="vertical-align:middle;">
''$alpha$''
</td>
<td>
<$list variable="c" filter="[[$ogg$]!is[blank]]">
<<ogg $alpha$ $ogg$>>
</$list>
</td>
<td class="left">
$df$
</td><td class="left">
$de$
</td></tr>
\end
<<snd "a" """
* do ré mi f''a'' """ """
* do ré mi f''a'' """ "6/65/Open_front_unrounded_vowel.ogg" >>
When the simple UI is active, all add/edit buttons are now hidden.
Okay, Phonetic Alphabet tentatively done.
I must put that aside, hit the pillow, and proof read later.
This is looking great. I also am very happy to see a working wiki! Screenshots only do so much for me.
Hey, thanks.
The new Wiki has been “working” all along. All of those screenshots (showing progress) are of the new wiki hosted at TiddlyHost from the beginning of the reboot.
Yes, and it was in your very first post, but I never went back there to look, following along just via the screenshots. Shame on me, I guess, but it is a long thread! In any case, I’ve very much enjoyed following along in any manner. Maybe now I’ll look more carefully. Or not; there’s always so much to see!
Ah, good. I was worried there was some kind of problem with my links.
Yeah, I didn’t want to put the link in every post for fear of screwing any one of them up.