General Theories

Part of Theory Development:

I've spent a lot of time making theories, and it's a lot of fun! But at the end of the day, if you're trying to make something practical, I think its worth considering how your theory embeds your own biases.

When you design a theory, your inherently designing something from your own biases. If you didn't, then we would all be making the same theory, which seems like a waste of time :p

There's nothing wrong with creating a theory just for yourself, but I think its worth thinking about whether it could be useful for other people. This isn't something that's going to interest everyone, but having theories that anybody can pick up and learn is really worthwhile as a community and as a hobby.

So what makes theories "specific" in the first place. How does a theory made for everyone to use differ from one made just for yourself.

A major thing that can get embedded in theories is accent, and the way you think about words in your head in general. Theories often require that you split words in certain ways, which might make sense to the author, but not to all users. You could choose to allow users to split words however they want, whatever makes sense to them. I generally think splitting in theories doesn't come out of personal preference, but rather in trying to fit in quirks of the rest of the theory. In lapwing, some subsequent vowel sounds sometimes need to be use KWR- as a starter. This was done in turn as an attempt to clean up the inconsistent splitting of Plover, which Lapwing is a descendant of.

Another aspect of bias is in completeness. Unless your theory is generated, it will only contain the entries that you have run into. (Most) Entries only get created when you try to write them yourself, and they're not in the dictionary. A general theory might have to be built against a word list or a pronunciation set. This may just be moving the problem, but these words lists can be shared, which means everyone solving this problem can be working together.

The third major thing that gets embedded in theories is briefing. Briefs are personal, they make sense only to a specific person. I think its great to share briefs, and I have nothing against taking a set of briefs that somebody else made and trying to learn them, but it can be especially difficult when those briefs start to have their own little mini theory on top of them. It only makes sense to pull in all the briefs in that theory, where they might conflict.