Fish Piper

My paradigm program has been a work in progress for some time. It’s getting pretty functional now, however, and I’m just about to try and inflict it on some friends so they can do some beta-testing and mistake-spotting for me (if you’d like to join them, speak up).

I’ve got the entire regular verb table entered, and a handful of other paradigms. In short, useful for first-year Hebrew students, and those of us who have forgotten some of the basics.

[UPDATE: Link should now work.] If you would like to try it out, you can download Paradigmatic 0.2.0, and give it a go. Please leave feedback on what works, what doesn’t, what you wish it would do, behaviour that you find baffling, etc.

I’ve got a fairly robust viewer, which will display any paradigms already in the database. It doesn’t auto-populate the lists, which I would eventually like to do (i.e. if you select the עמד paradigm, it will only fill it with the available stems/aspects that have been entered for that root), but it works ok for a 0.2 release, at least. Looks good with the Cardo font (and even better on my system, where I’ve hacked the meteg character so that it displays to the left of a vowel, like it should… rather than in the middle).

The editor will ultimately be something that a standard user shouldn’t ever need to touch, but the entry system will form the basis of a testing branch that is still on the list of things to do. The editor window allows adding and deleting of whole paradigms, and adding/editing of relevant entries.

The entry panel, which slides down on top of the editor window, is totally mouse-driven. I’m not sure how user-friendly it would be to add in keyboard support… let me know if you have strong opinions one way or the other. To change the entry, click on the relevant letter and select a value from the contextual menu (left-click for vowels, right/ctrl-click for consonants, cmd-click for punctuation). Hopefully it’s relatively easy to use.

Known issues:

- Copy/Paste only sort-of-works: it copies a selected entry (from the entry panel) fine, and can paste it into another entry… but subsequent copy operations do not replace this data. Hmmm.

- The editor window paradigm table (in the top left) doesn’t sort properly to start with.

- Hebrew fonts for Mac kinda suck. I’m using Cardo, but it doesn’t cope properly with Meteg characters. New Peninim MT is ok, but lacks accent and meteg characters, so letters that incorporate them bork and revert to the ugly default, which I think is Arial. If you install Cardo on your system, it will mostly look ok, but you might have trouble making out dagesh points in thin characters, or meteg characters on most vowels. Bah.

Things to work on in the near future (amongst others):

- (Optionally) populate paradigm with relevant data when first created, i.e. if Jussive paradigm created, populate it with Wayyiqtol entries minus initial prefix. This will be intelligent, such that if nothing is found from the same root, it will try other roots with similar irregularities, before defaulting back to the standard paradigm

- Testing function - compare a user’s input with a the saved version of the paradigm

- User-specific data - saving user-modifications in an external file, so that any edits will not be overwritten in a future update.

[Thanks to Bathgate for the icon.]