New tales from the word-face

It has been a long time. But slow (infinitesimally slow, a cross between Zenoic [I doubt if there‘s any point looking for that in a dictionary of all places] and Brownian motion]) progress is being made with The Second  Book. I‘m not trying to replicate the processes I used for WVGTbook. I‘m seeing What‘s Out There (quite a lot, and some of it even works), and what can be done with it.

The software assistance can be great fun, notably predictive text. I have mentioned before the hypersensitivity of my keyboard, and its tendency to latch on to one letter. The predictive text thingy goes out of its way to suggest improvements. My favourite so  far is this:

But, progress: I‘ve found something that converts XLS files to HTML, and after several attempts I think I‘ve got to a stage of usability. Here was the first try:

proofOfConcept.html

Promising

          <digression>

(and by the way interesting – the /w/ phoneme  sometimes, and more or less systematically [when it does]  makes the vowel sound it precedes behave differently: ban can tan ... etc but swan and wan, calm farm marm ... etc but swarm and warm, bap cap tap ... etc but swap [WAP  is exceptional, like some other acronyms],  carp harp tarp ... etc but warp, and so on. But this does not happen invariably: back knack sack ... etc but no change for quack or whack...)

           </digression>

but not  much of a  prognosticator for heavy work. So I moved on to poc2.html.

One of the problems with the first book was the coding of the notes; the indices weren‘t hotlinks to the  notes (which I think would make it more likely that the notes would be read). This was a shame, as I think the notes are ‘the  best bit‘. In my XLS file (using Google Sheets and not Excel) I attached notes to individual words as XLS Comments, hoping that the converter would do something sensible with them (rather than just dropping them into the bit-bucket, as it did – oh well, I‘ll just  have to  keep playing). Here it is without notes:

poc2.html

Anyway, tempus, predictably, has fugitted. I just wanted to  let people know the game was afoot.

b

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Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.