Weird Word List: Bowing to Reality

[rolanni]

Edited to Add:  I'm seeing people volunteering (thank you!) and asking questions.  I also see that we may have a list already to work from.  I'm going to be in and out for the rest of the day; I'll try to keep up with the question-answering part and get back to the larger discussion tomorrow morning. So -- not ignoring you if I don't answer right away.  Thanks again!

OK.  It seems to me, from perusing the previous discussions, that we have lots of volunteers for Harvesting, but not so many folks want to Wrangle.  No blame to any of us — you see me saying I got no time to Wrangle Weird Words, right? — it’s a massive job.

Which means that we will need to go, with Great Trepidation on the part of the Luddite Writer, to a software sort.  We had several volunteers for this — if whomever is still interested in playing would shout out again, in response to this message, we can all put our heads together to see how best to split up the books.

I will still need at least one, and preferably three Wranglers, because, let’s face it, that’s a BIG pile o’novels over there, and some — I’m looking at you, Crystal books — are harder going than others.

The Wish List now looks like this:

1.  Automagicians

2.  Wranglers

3.  Cabana boy

The goal, one more time:  A list of Weird Words (including all “foreign” words, be they Liaden, Terran, Delgadan, Vandese, or etc.), and  Names (including ship names, planet names, city names, personal names) for each book.  One book = One list. In the order the words appear.

Someone had asked if I also wanted odd combos, such as “brother-cousin” or “close-kin” or “Silain-luthia”.  Of the examples given, the only pairing I would want would be “Silain-luthia” because Silain has the possibility of becoming I-dare-not-guess and luthia — is an invented word.

Why do I want this?  You guys have been so good about putting up with my fidgeting and fussing over this, you deserve the straight dope.

I want these lists, and in this particular format, for two reasons.

Reason One:  The Liaden Pronunciation Guide Steve and I have been talking about Forever.

Reason Two:   A bunch of Liaden books are going to be produced as audiobooks, RSN.  We have promised — actually, given what happened with poor Mr. Shanks — we have insisted that we will provide pronunciation assistance.  It is Reason Two that produces the deadline.

Worries:  I am particularly concerned that names stay together — Val Con yos’Phelium, Shan yos’Galan and etc.  This is the major need for the Word Wranglers.  I’m not so worried about bizarre English words sneaking into the list, because, if they’re that bizarre, they belong on the list.

. . .I think that’s it.

OK — who’s in?

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

Automagician

[johnhawkinson.livejournal.com]

"Which means that we will need to go, with Great Trepidation on the part of the Luddite Writer, to a software sort. We had several volunteers for this — if whomever is still interested in playing would shout out again."

Again, I'm happy to do this. I can trivially produce a list of non-dictionary words for all books that I have electronic versions of, and the number of books does not appreciably increase my time to do so, which is minutes. (I sent Sharon a list of books that I have handy in text form via email).

It looks like we've added a new requirement, for special words that appear in close proximity to each other, e.g. proper names like Val Con yos'Phelium. That's doable, but a bit trickier. I think I'd just generate the first list of such words and then find all instances where they appear adjacent to each other, and spit them out for manual review.