Glossary and Dictionary

This started as a glossary of terms used in the novel The Reborn Princess Caper.  Clicking on any unfamiliar term, anywhere in that novel, will take the reader to its Glossary entry.  Then the back button of his or her browser will take him or her back.

But I've always known I'd need a dictionary of Ŧuliňgrai as well, if only to keep me from using the same stem twice for two different meanings.  Since I was very young I've kept one on paper; the final form this attained was a carefully-made cardboard box with two columns, one for Ŧuliňgrai-English entries and one for English-Ŧuliňgrai entries.  The entries themselves were written on 1" x 2" cards cut from scrap paper.

For the second edition of The Reborn Princess Caper, I felt I had to do more than just upgrade the hand-made glossary to XHTML Strict, one file at a time.  Instead I upgraded my MCP program, written in Perl, whose original purpose was to create an HTML page for each comic strip of a series, with buttons to the previous, next, and home pages (MCP stands for Make Comics Pages).  I'd already upgraded it recently so that it could be used to generate pages for individual pictures of a photo collection, complete with with caption, date, and copyright notice.  Now I added more features so that the program will optionally import a style section instead of piecing one together from DAT files; import a text header if required; import a footer; and, if the input files were text files instead of images, copy them line by line to the output page instead of wrapping them in an image tag.

Next I went through the glossary files and broke them up into dozens of individual entry files, one for each Ŧuliňgrai word or glossary phrase.  Then I ran a small quick program to correct the links in each one to the calendar section, gender section, etc.  Lastly I ran my big program, and lo! the Glossary was complete.  Well, after I worked through it a few times and fixed the bugs.

Eventually I'll have an online two-way dictionary, maintained in a data base to eliminate inconsistencies, with a custom interface including a virtual Ŧuliňgrai keyboard, that will print out a new set of HTML files at a command.  But the writing comes first!

Ŧuliňgrai in English

The representation of Ŧuliňgrai words in an English text involves some difficult choices.  All words can be represented as straight transliterations.  But then all nouns, including proper nouns, will end with the -ai of the nominative case: Zetai, Samai, Halai, Hekai, Alteřai, Volai ...  Most common nouns begin with the e- denoting a count noun: etelai, eborai, ehodai ...  Representing Ŧuliňgrai this way would make everything look the same, and make it even harder for the reader to keep track of all the strange words (my thanks to the Eugene writers' workshop for pointing this out).

Instead I have represented words by their stems, with all prefixes and affixes stripped away.  Proper nouns are generally represented by their pre-Ŧuliňgrai forms, for example, Ĵuhai appears as Ĵuha and Juhai as Juho.  This should increase the variety of the words for the reader.

Alphabetical order

The alphabetical order of Ŧuliňgrai is, of course, completely different from that of English.  A proper two-way dictionary would use English alphabetical order for the English-Ŧuliňgrai section, and Ŧuliňgrai alphabetical order for the Ŧuliňgrai-English section.  But trying to maintain Ŧuliňgrai alphabetical order is very prone to mistakes, and would not help the reader look up words, anyway.

So this combined glossary and dictionary uses English alphabetical order for the reader's convenience.  Because the entries are ordered by the computer, they will never be in the wrong order.  This may sometimes surprise the reader, however, because of the transliteration used to alphabetize the entries.  It only uses English letters, but often it has to use two of them, for instance TH for Ť, TT for Ŧ, etc.  This results in, for example, all words that begin with Ť appearing among English words that begin with TH, and all words that begin with Ŧ showing up between words that begin with TS and words that begin with TU.  This is the least inconvenience possible when using an English-like transliteration for a very un-Englishlike language.

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