Three Dollar Quill

One of the speed bumps I've been encountering in using Sphinx is that the link syntax is a little heavy-handed for the contexts I'm using it, and it's sensitive to the details of the exact target of the link. As a result, when I tweak the lexicon, it results in a bunch of crazy diffs in my glosses. I finally got fed up enough with this to figure out that substitutions will help me. Basically, I'm currently working with gloss abbreviations rather than "actual words", and the big change I made today was to define substitutions for every abbreviation rather than copying the same link syntax everywhere. As a result, when I update the way the links work, I just need to change the substitution, which isn't defined in a table, so it doesn't have a bunch of inevitable knock-on effects. I'll still end up changing stuff in the future, but only when I actually change something about the visible content in the glosses.

As far as the updates that inspired this change, I've got most of the glossed words updated, but I haven't yet tried to merge the glossaries together. I'd kind of like to find a new home for the parts-of-speech link targets first, and that means I need to make sure I have a proper handle on the organization of the grammar.

So that today wouldn't be just housekeeping, I did a rough draft writeup of the different major paradigms in the conlang, laying out the kind of variation to expect from nouns, verbs, and a few major categories.

Moving forward, I want to finish glossary-ifying the lexicon, and then get the draft of the correlative table ported. When I start filling that in, I think I'll end up redoing some of the stuff that went into the glosses, so there'll be minor adjustments there. Once that's done, I want to review all the sections of the grammar, and figure out what needs to be in each. After that, I want to start tracing out the histories of various words, so I can hopefully get some diachronics done and get this to a point where anything at all has a pronunciation. Hopefully I'll also get some worldbuilding in there; I've already added a few notes on religion.

Anyway, I'd like to take it easy for the rest of tonight, so I'm calling this entry here.

Good night.