The PrimerPrep program is designed to help you:

• analyze texts in a language to discover the words and letters used in the language, and how frequently they occur
• specify what to analyze, by selecting which words to analyze, how to count them, and how to break them apart (with affixes)
• provide a suggested teaching order, i.e. the order in which these letters might be introduced in a primer, and show you what words from your texts are available in each lesson
• modify the order of letters in the teaching order, and add sight words
• analyze your text for each lesson and mark untaught residue in red, to draw it to your attention.

Initial steps with PrimerPrep (Extracted from the help file)

Note: Sometimes the program takes a little while to start up, or to open a file dialog. This seems to be caused by the graphics engine used. Just be patient. Usually those operations are faster the second time.

At a basic level, the PrimerPrep program is very simple to use. Simply select the Add Text(s) button from the starting screen, select a text file in the language you want to analyze, and click Open. PrimerPrep analyzes the... Read more

Parser and Writer for Syntax

The Parser And Writer for Syntax Starter Kit is affectionately also called PAWS.

As the name of the starter kit indicates, the Parser and Writer for Syntax (PAWS) has two purposes and four outputs:

• The Writer produces a rough draft of a grammar of the syntax of your language, based on the answers to the questions in each section of PAWS. This output file is in XLingPaper xml format. (See https://software.sil.org/xlingpaper/.)  There are three possible formats for the grammar write-up:
  • A practical grammar in English.
  • A practical grammar in Spanish.
  • A comparative grammar (to English).
• The Parser produces all the files needed for using the PC-PATR syntactic parser for parsing and disambiguation within CARLA Studio.

The task of writing a grammar for a language can seem so overwhelming that many give up without even trying. Completing and revising a draft is a much less daunting task, and the PAWS Starter Kit can provide that needed head start.

The PAWS Starter Kit takes advantage of XML technologies to create “actionable” knowledge which can be turned into a draft of... Read more

FLExTrans is a transfer-based machine translation system similar to CARLA that uses Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) as a core component. A source text starts out in the source language’s FLEx project and ends up after the translation process in the target language’s FLEx Project. The basic steps are as follows:

1.Analyze the text in the source FLEx project.

2.Map lexical senses that are in the source text to senses in the target FLEx project (there’s a Sense Linker Tool to help with this).

3.Write transfer rules that convert source words and phrases to target words and phrases.

4.Run the six FLExTrans modules inside of FLExTools and you’re done.

FLExTrans in many ways is not a new piece of software, rather it glues together many great software packages that already exist. FLEx is at the core, but it also uses STAMP for synthesis and an open-source engine called Apertium for the transfer component. Apertium’s engine is very powerful and it's in Apertium’s transfer XML format that rules are written. I’ve templatized the format using the XMLMind XML Editor in a similar way to how XLingPaper does it. In this way you... Read more