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Syllable Structures

A syllable structure is a template for one legal syllable shape — an ordered sequence of slots, each filled by a specific phoneme or any member of a group. Word generation draws syllables from these templates, and they also define what counts as a phonotactically legal word elsewhere in the app.

Templates

Can do

  • Each slot in a template is a phoneme or a group, and can be marked optional — an optional slot has a chance of being skipped each time a syllable is generated.
  • A template needs at least one slot, and a language can have as many templates as you want, each with its own weight controlling how often it gets picked relative to the others during generation.
  • A syllable template with a weight of 0 will not be used for word generation, but will still be considered legal for tthe language.

Limitations

  • A slot has no notion of position — there's no way to say a slot only applies word-initially, word-finally, or in a stressed syllable.
  • The editor doesn't show you a sample word for the template you're building — you have to save it and run the Word Generator to see what it actually produces.

Phonotactic legality

Can do

  • The app can check whether a whole word can be fully broken down into a sequence of your syllable templates — correctly, even when phoneme symbols are ambiguous to split (e.g. distinguishing "t+sa" from "ts+a" when both are valid symbols).
  • This check runs automatically over every entry in the Dictionary, flagging any word that doesn’t fit your current syllable shapes and letting you filter by fit — it isn’t a separate tool on this page, so look for it there.
  • The check is judged against every syllable structure in the language at once, regardless of which ones a given word was actually generated from.

Limitations

  • There's no understanding of what makes a syllable shape phonologically natural — sonority, stress, or otherwise. Legality is exactly what your templates say it is, however unusual.
  • Each syllable is checked (and generated) completely independently of its neighbors — there's no way to express a constraint that spans a whole word, like "at most one syllable may have a coda."