Phonemes & Groups
Phonemes are the raw sound inventory of a language — the atoms everything else (syllable structures, rules, generated words) is built from. Groups are named, reusable sets of phonemes you build by hand, used as shorthand wherever a rule or syllable shape wants to say "any vowel" instead of listing every vowel.
Phonemes
Can do
- Each phoneme has a symbol, an optional IPA label, and a weight (0–2). The symbol can be more than one character (a "multigraph" like ts or dz) — the app is built to handle that correctly wherever symbols are matched.
- Symbol is the only field with any functional effect: it's the literal text spliced into generated words and matched against when checking a word against your syllable shapes.
- IPA is a plain display label — a place to note the actual pronunciation for your own reference. It never affects generation or matching.
- Weight biases random selection during word generation: a phoneme with weight 2 is drawn twice as often as one with weight 1, and weight 0 is effectively "never picked at random" (though it can still appear via a rule's output).
- A phoneme with a weight of 0 will not be used for word-generation, but will still be considered legal for the language.
Limitations
- IPA text isn't validated — you can type anything there, or leave it inconsistent with the symbol. Nothing checks it against a real IPA chart.
- A symbol only has to be unique within a language as an exact string. Visually identical symbols that are encoded differently under the hood aren't caught as duplicates.
- Weight never affects whether a word is legal under your syllable shapes — only how likely it is to come up during generation.
- A phoneme can't be deleted while it's still used in a syllable structure or a rule — you have to remove it from those first. Nothing removes it from them automatically for you.
Groups
Can do
- A group is just a name plus a hand-picked set of member phonemes — "Vowels," "Stops," anything you want to call it.
- A phoneme can belong to as many groups as you like at once.
- Groups are usable anywhere a rule or syllable structure wants a slot that matches more than one phoneme.
Limitations
- There's no concept of phonetic features behind a group — no voicing, place, or manner of articulation. A group is exactly the phonemes you put in it, nothing more, nothing inferred. If you want "voiced obstruents," you build that group by hand.
- A group can't be deleted while it's still referenced by a syllable structure or rule, same as a phoneme.
- Emptying a group (removing all its members) doesn't warn you if a syllable structure or rule still depends on it — that surfaces later, at generation time, as a "this group has no members" error instead.