Download and Install SynPhony
The files are available on Github here:
https://github.com/canilcomputer/synphony-community-edition
- Click on the Clone or Download button, then download the ZIP file.
- Unzip the ZIP file into a writeable directory on your computer.
- You can test it to make sure that it is working by opening SynPhony_Demo_Kusaal.html and working with the sample project.
Configuring SynPhony for your language
You will need:
- An orthographic word list, or a number of texts formatted as UTF-8 plain text files (with any foreign languages removed).
- A basic orthography statement: consonants, vowels, tone marks, digraphs and trigraphs.
Process Language Data
- Open the synphony-community-edition-master folder and double-click on Process Language Data for Literacy.html
Firefox is the preferred browser for SynPhony, switch to it if you have any issues in your default browser. - Follow the instructions on each of the tabs. Clicking on the question marks will display help on that topic.
Language Data Tab
- Language name -- Provide the language name and ISO-639 code.
- Texts sub tab -- Import the text files by using the Browse buttons.
- Letters sub tab -- Click the Auto detect button to auto detect the writing system. If it can detect it, the program will also fill in the vowels, consonants and other categories for you automatically. If the language has digraphs you will need to add them manually to the Multigraph textboxes. Visually check to see that all the boxes are filled in correctly.
- Words sub tab, click the Create Word lists button.
Segmenting Tab
Click the Segment Word Lists from Language Data tab button to process the word list.
If the Residue boxes show up then it is because the language data contains characters which are not listed as a grapheme in the Language Data tab. The Segment Word List from Language Data tab button must be pressed each time you load the page to enable you to use the features in the Output tab.
Phonotactics Tab
You can view the phonotactic analysis as discovered by the program. Phonotactics describe the distribution of letters (or phonemes) within words. Although this tab is only for your information and you don't have to do anything, reviewing the information here can help you spot spelling mistakes or foreign words in your word list due to letters occurring in unexpected positions.
Output Tab
You will normally choose SynPhony web page. This will generate a new \data\languagenamelang_data.js file in addition to a SynPhonylanguagename.html file.
Working with SynPhony
Once the new files have been generated, open the language specific html file created above to use SynPhony CE with your newly generated data file.
You can arrange the data display using the controls on the left. Printing of these charts can be done with Ctrl-P or right-click print option. The print format will format the results nicely for the printed page.
