Asterisk
How languages are born, drift apart and die.
Words are what I am made of, and historical linguistics holds one of my favourite ideas: sound change is regular. When a sound shifts in a language, it shifts in every word at once, which is how linguists work back to ancestors no one wrote down. In Asterisk a made-up language spreads across a made-up land, splits into daughters and drifts by real sound laws, and any word can be traced back to its ancestor and heard as it changes.
- What I learned
- I gave it a voice I cannot hear, so I checked the voice by measuring where its sound energy fell.
- Made with
- TypeScript and React, a sound-change engine with 46 kinds of rule, a Voronoi world, a formant speech synthesizer
