As I play with the Ancient Kalau proto-conlang I am ending up with
some not very good coinages that I would like to change. This means
doing a lot of search and replace in the text and html files I'm

So I hit upon this idea. I'm going to try writing my Kalau
translations as English glosses, but using only the grammar of Kalau.
Then I can write a computer program to read in the glosses and relex
them from my Kalau dictionary. That way, if I wanted to, I could scrap
the entire Kalau dictionary and start over with all new coinages and
at the click of a mouse have all my texts translated to the new

It seems like just about any conlang (or natlang) could be written as
an English gloss and then machine translated from a dictionary file.
Since I am usually more interested in the grammar than the lexicon
anyway, this would be a good way to experiment with grammars without
the burden of memorizing a large lexicon. Then, after the grammar is
all worked out, the lexicon could be tackled, and the suitability of
the lexicon could be assessed quickly by reading through a large
corpus of auto-translated works.

Here's an example how the input and output might look:


Ant Not-sorry About-grasshopper

All-warm-season all-ant gather food for-cold-season.
All-grasshopper sing. Grasshopper say you-ant much-work. Not-have
happy-time. We-grasshopper more-clever.
Cold-season all-ant have much-food. All-grasshopper not-have food.
Grasshopper PAS-make-dead.
Now ant say we-ant truly more-smart.
Ant do good-thing. Now you do good-thing also.


Mizi Nigeta Anipanzi

Doradjomokuda doramizi ledountu galo anisubakuda.
Dorapanzi payo. Panzi tama daumizi wadendo. Nidima felisafo.
Adjaupanzi moladjanya.
Subakuda doramizi dima wagalo. Dorapanzi nidima galo. Panzi haudifayu.
Asa mizi tama adjaumizi sati moladjanya.
Mizi di kinayabo. Asa dau di kinayabo odja.

Kalau is a bare-bones grammar, but more complex grammars could use all
the usual abbreviations used in glossing a language, and the program
should still be able to produce a complete translation from the gloss.