Legend, or The Lexicon Generator Double tap, aims to be a declarative vocabulary generation tool meant for conlanging purposes. What this means is that, unlike a few of the more powerful vocabulary generators currently out there, you don't tell Legend how to create your words, instead, you just tell it what your words ought to look like.
It all began with me creating a language with vowel harmony (mistake #1). Now, I'm lazy (mistake #2) and wanted to use a vocabulary generator (mistake #3) to come up with a load of words at once. So I did some research into the tools at my disposal (ugh, mistake #4). You see, for all of the vocab tools that are out there, they all seem to be limited to at most two out of these three points:
- They are easy to use
- They handle complex structures
- They produce naturalistic-feeling output.
And of course, only two wasn't enough, I wanted all three (#5). So, I told myself: "Hey! I'm a programmer, I can do better than that!" (...). So now I'm stuck developing this for all y'all.
I don't know, I'm not even close to figuring this out. But, it'll probably use some sort of sequential probabilistic collapse, which is a fancy way of saying "it'll will figure things out as it goes".
Last time I tried putting a date on a project, Corona happened. I'm not making that mistake again.
Pretty much anywhere, that's why I chose to develop it in Kotlin. Initially I'll release it only for the Java Virtual Machine, which means that you'll need to have Java installed. But I have plans to release it as a native executable and, pottentially, as a web tool (yay for JavaScript transpiling).