"Barely more than minimal effort"
Got annoyed hearing people speaking gibberish in movies and television. It breaks immersion, and is just generally terrible. I understand that not everyone is going to hire a linguist to develop a fully functional conlang... so applying the project philosophy, I set out to make a tool that was just nominally better than randomly flapping one's mouthparts.
A "Conlang" is a constructed language. Some great examples of constructed languages would be Klingon, or Dothraki. These are languages that are artificially developed rather than arising naturally.
In this context, a "Lexicon" is the vocabulary of a language. "Relexing" is a short-cut method for creating a conlang by copying all the components of a parent language, and merely changing the sounds/symbols used to represent the words. Because no changes are made to the grammar or syntax of the language, people who create conlangs often do not consider a relexing to be a valid conlang.
Yes, says so right on the tin.
Probably... however, if you don't have the time or the budget, but also want to have the end result sound better than chaotic oral flesh spasms... False Tongue may be the tool for you!
In encryption, a cipher is a secret or disguised way of writing. It represents the rules by which one piece of text is encrypted.
Not really. It uses principles from encryption (specifically simple transposition ciphers), however, the process is very squishy and not easily reversible (there's no method for decrypting text which has been "encrypted" via False Tongue.
Nope! See: Project Philosophy.
In this context, a Seed is a starting point for random number generation. Technically speaking, none of the "random" numbers used by False Tongue are strictly random. They are pseudo-random numbers generated by an algorithm. The algorithm for generating the seed can accept either numbers or letters/symbols, which it then turns into a number. Any other random numbers needed by the algorithm all grow from this single "seed".
Loanwords are words that themselves come from other languages. The most familiar examples are food names, which often maintain names from when they were popularly introduced to a new culture.
Code switching refers to the common practice of those who speak multiple languages "switching" between them for various reasons. If you've ever tried speaking another language and found yourself uttering "how do you say..." while searching your mental filing cabinets for the phrase you were looking for, that was code switching.
To exclude a piece of text from translation (such as for loanwords or code switching), simply wrap it in [brackets].
Unlike the phoneme cipher, the vocab, pre/post-cipher allows the user to search for whole or partial words using the underscore character. For example, if you would like to replace a whole word, the left side of the input (the bank) should read "_word_". This would allow the cipher to replace only instances of "word" and not things like "sword" or "wordplay". Alternatively, you can use the underscore character to find/replace instances that start/end with a piece of text. For instance, "_word" would replace "word", and "wordplay" but not "sword", while "word_" would replace "word", and "sword", but not "wordplay".
In encryption, the "Plain Text" is the text prior to encryption. This is the original text you would like to translate into your new "false tongue".
In encryption, the "Cipher Text" is the text after encryption. This is the new text after it has been run through the various substitution "ciphers".
Yes! That's the idea. If you own the "Plain text", then the "Cipher Text" is all yours. If you think it'll be useful to anyone else, mention False Tongue in your attributions... or not. In all honesty, if one less piece of entertainment media uses frantic face flailing as their fictional language, then that's all I care about.
The Vocab Cipher is the first cipher applied to the Plain Text.
To find whole words be sure to format them with _Underscores_ at the beginning and end. This allows the cipher to recognize the "word borders" and only replace whole words.
This allows for collapsing certain words into others. Many languages have words that have multiple meanings depending on the context. The Vocab Cipher allows you to accommodate for this.
The Pre-Cipher is the second cipher applied to the Plain Text. This is primarily used collapse the total number of valid consonants and vowels. Some languages lack an "L" sound, for instance, using "R" instead.
Unlike other ciphers, the Pre-Cipher also modifies the Vowel and Consonant Ciphers which in turn modifies the Phoneme Cipher. If the Pre-Cipher would eliminate a vowel, for instance, that vowel will be removed from the Vowel Cipher as well.
Like the Vocab Cipher and Post Cipher, the Pre-Cipher can also search using word borders by using _Underscores_.
The Vowel Cipher is a cipher for vowels... but not really. The Vowel and Consonant Ciphers are used to build the Phoneme Cipher.
The Consonant Cipher is like the Vowel Cipher... except for consonants.
The Phoneme Cipher is the third Cipher applied to the Plain Text. It is built by combining the Consonant and Vowel Ciphers. Unlike the other ciphers, this does not allow for searching by word borders.
The Post Cipher is the final cipher applied to the Plain Text. It functions very similarly to the Pre Cipher and Vocab Cipher.
Like the Vocab Cipher and Pre Cipher, the Post-Cipher can also search using word borders by using _Underscores_.
This is used primarily to handle the rules around what kinds of sounds are allowed. For instance, some languages do not allow the "ng" sound at the beginning of a word, but do allow it in the middle.