Inspiration Pad Pro is a free progam designed for tabletop rpg games, but it works perfectly good for languages (and has some language generators available for names). You can create or edit generators by right-clicking in the generators panel. Can even make generators to be referred to by other generators (although I haven’t done it, but the example ones do)
Pro/con: Complicated.
Pro: extremely flexible. Good help file. Available for Windows and Android. Can use multiple letters (or words) for anything. Can specify how many words to generate (1, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000)
Con: Has to be installed. Limited input with no IPA, but you can use HTML entity codes to get IPA. The IPA symbol HTML codes can be found here or by looking on each one’s wikipedia page which are linked from the IPA page.
I'm using my conlang Maanxmusht as an example. Please note, I’m very much a beginner at this and there are likely to be better ways than I use. Our rules and phonotactics for Maanxmuʃt are:
Code: Select all
Words take the form of (C)(C)CV(C)(C)(C), where the onset can be:
any consonant
ʃ(any non-voiced nasal, stop, or fricative)1(r or l)
a stop or fricative + r or l, but not dl or vl
1 = m, n, p, t, k, θ, x
Codas consist of:
any non-voiced consonants, but r and ʀ can’t follow diphthongs and m can’t follow long vowels or diphthongs
(r or l)x
x(ʃ or t)
n(coronal and dorsal stops and fricatives)2
2 = t d k ʃ θ x
Long vowels are rare in unstressed syllables and the stress is always on the first syllable. ɦ and ʀ only appear outside of consonant clusters. After a nasal x changes to d. And after a vowel h changes to x.
As I said in the first part, Inspiration Pad Pro was designed for RPGs, so it’s very flexible, but limited to keyboard characters (it’s possible to use the HTML entity equivalents, and I did that in the final form of the generator1). I hadn’t made this generator, so this will be more step by step. It should be possible to create generators for parts of speech with different endings, and possibly to derive words from an output (I haven’t done either of those tho.)
The IPA symbol HTML codes can be found here or by looking on each one’s wikipedia page which are linked from the IPA page.
Please note, I’m very much a beginner at this and there are likely to be better ways than I use. Our rules and phonotactics for Maanxmuʃt are:
Words take the form of (C)(C)CV(C)(C)(C), where the onset can be:
any consonant
ʃ(any non-voiced nasal, stop, or fricative)1(r or l)
a stop or fricative + r or l, but not dl or vl
1 = m, n, p, t, k, θ, x
Codas consist of:
any non-voiced consonants, but r and ʀ can’t follow diphthongs and m can’t follow long vowels or diphthongs
(r or l)x
x(ʃ or t)
n(coronal and dorsal stops and fricatives)2
2 = t d k ʃ θ x
Long vowels are rare in unstressed syllables and the stress is always on the first syllable. ɦ and ʀ only appear outside of consonant clusters. After a nasal x changes to d. And after a vowel h changes to x.
IPP generators break things down into tables, which things are picked (or rolled) from. Each table can refer to other tables and each entry on a table can have a frequency set.
So I’ll start by figuring out how I want to break down words. I know I’ll need tables for stressed and unstressed syllables because the differing frequencies in long vowels. First I’ll break down what my categories are (these will be different tables).
I can put the vowels, diphthongs, and long vowels together, and decide frequencies for each of the options (the manual refers to this as adding weight). I want the basic vowels to be the most common, with e and u being less common in those, so for now I’ll weight e and u at 2 and the others at 4 (this means e and u are half as likely to show up). My tables for the stressed and unstressed vowels end up looking like this:
Code: Select all
Table: StressVowels
4:i
2:e
4:a
2:u
4:o
ii
2:ee
aa
2:uu
2:oo
uo
ie
iu
ei
ou
Table: UnStressVowels
5:i
4:e
5:a
4:u
5:o
ii
ee
aa
uu
oo
2:uo
2:ie
2:iu
2:ei
2:ou
Code: Select all
Table: Maanxmust
2:[@Cons][@StressVowels]
[@Cons][@StressVowels][@Cons][@UnStressVowels]
rahi
ki
xaadi
rawuo
wiu
ke
ka
heeshee
po
tuudei
Not a bad start. Next will be getting more complicated