I was trying to make a computer program to insert creative spelling into a document. I wrote it in PERL on my laptop while riding the train to work.
I named it Ben Johnson in honor of the famousist diary writer ever. But instead of creative spelling, my program seems to give a strong Scottish bias to the speech -- sort of a Trainspotting Translator.
What follows are two sample translations my program made of, respectively, Dirty Harry, and President Obama. After that I have attached the actual Perl script if you are curious.
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"I knoo ohaht yoo'rae dinkin, ponk, did I virae six shots or only vifae? oaell, in ahll dae aexcitaemaent I kind ov vorgot mysaelv - so yoo'rae goin to hahfae to ahsk yoorsaelv ah qoaestion: 'Do I veael locky? oaell, do yoo ponk?' "
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"On onae aend ov dae spaectrom, oae'fae heahrd dae implicahtion daht my cahndidahcy is somaehoo ahn aexaercisae in ahvvirmahtifae ahction; daht it's bahsaed solaely on dae daesirae ov oidae-aeyaed libaerahls to porchahsae rahciahl raeconciliahtion on dae cheahp. On dae odaer aend, oae'fae heahrd my vormaer pahstor, Raefaeraend Jaeraemiahh oright, osae incaendiahry lahngoahgae to aexpraess fieos daht hahfae dae potaentiahl not only to oidaen dae rahciahl difidae, bot fieos daht daenigrahtae bod dae greahtnaess ahnd dae goodnaess ov oor nahtion; daht rightly ovvaend ohitae ahnd blahck ahlikae. "
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PERL SCRIPT (The following lines mostly just tell the program to look for certain letters and swap them out for other letters. For example, "Turn F's into V's and vice versa."):
open RH, shift(@ARGV) || die "Did you enter two file args? $! \n";
open OH, ">>", shift(@ARGV) || die "Did you enter two file args? $! \n";
for(<RH>){
my $line = $_;
chomp($line);
$line=~y/fv/vf/;
$line=~s/w/o/ig;
$line=~s/ph/f/ig;
$line=~s/ing/in/ig;
$line=~s/a([^aeiou])/ah$1/ig;
$line=~s/e([^aeiou])/ae$1/ig;
$line=~s/u/o/ig;
$line=~s/th/d/ig;
print OH "$line \n";
}
print "\n\n";

Wow. Poets may be willing to shell out big money for a program like that. Well, big money for poets.
Posted by: Peter | June 17, 2009 at 11:42 PM
LOL You're killing me Ev- now make it do Greek
Posted by: Denise | June 18, 2009 at 10:23 AM