Sunday 14 August 2016

Transliteration from Kernewek Kemmyn to Standard Written Form

The script treuslytherenna.py and its GUI frontend treuslytherennaGUI.py converts text from Kernewek Kemmyn to Standard Written Form (Main Form).

See also the brief writeup on my website, and earlier on this blog.

A couple of example sentences I use to illustrate some of its features are:

  • Yth esa gwydhenn y'n goeswik
  • Yth esa gwydhennow y'n goeswik

 There was a tree in the forest is the translation of the first sentance, and gwydhennow is the plural of the singlative gwydhenn which derives from the collective noun gwydh (trees). Gwydh would be use for a general mass of trees, gwydhenn a single tree, and gwydhennow a countable collection of individual trees.



In the left hand panel, gwydhenn becomes gwedhen showing two changes, firstly the doubled consonant -nn becomes single -n. The program will make this change for unstressed syllables, exluding those that are prefixes that have secondary stress like penn- in pennseythun and some others.
The other change is the y becoming an e as part of vocalic alternation. This occurs for y vowels that are 'half-long' in Kernewek Kemmyn, which is detected via the syllable segmentation program.
The function converty(inputsyl) in treuslytherenna.py applies this change as long as the word isn't in a list of exceptions given in datageryow.py and the syllable ends in a consonant. If the syllable ends in a vowel (e.g. ay, ey, oy diphthongs, and -ya endings where the y (which is really a semi-vowel y) has been erroneously assigned to the previous syllable) the change is not made.

If backwards segmentation is chosen, this change won't happen since gwydhenn will be segmented into ['gwy', 'dhenn'] and the y will not be changed since it is now in a syllable ending in a vowel.

The word goeswik (mutation of koeswik) becomes goswik, as the Kernewek Kemmyn oe becomes o where it is a short or half-long vowel, and oo in a syllable with a Kernewek Kemmyn long vowel.

In the right hand panel, the word gwydhennow is unchanged, because the y vowel in the first syllable is now short rather than half-long, and the -nn is in a stressed syllable so retained as a double consonant.


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