Programming games in historical linguistics with Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2010 07:03:28 -0800, Dax Bloom wrote:

> Is there a way to refer to vowels and consonants as a subcategory of
> text? Is there a function to remove all vowels? How should one create
> and order the dictionary file for the rules? How to chain several
> transformations automatically from multiple rules? Finally can anyone
> show me what existing python program or phonological software can do
> this?

Have you looked at NLTK?

http://www.nltk.org/

The questions you are asking are awfully specific for a general 
programming forum like this. You might have better luck asking on a NLTK 
forum, or possibly if you could pose your questions in ways that don't 
assume extensive familiarity in linguistics ("word nucleus"? "codas"?).

Is there a function to remove vowels -- not specifically, but provided 
you can tell us what characters you wish to treat as vowels, and provided 
you are satisfied with a fairly simple search-and-replace, this will do 
it:

# For Python 2.x
def disemvowel(s):
    """Quick and dirty disemvoweller."""
    tbl = string.maketrans('', '')
    return string.translate(s, tbl, "aeiouAEIOU")

If you want a function that can distinguish between Y being used as a 
vowel from Y being used as a consonant, you'll need something much more 
sophisticated -- try the NLTK.



-- 
Steven