[Suggestion] Better language evolution

[ItzShiney]

The language evolution tool works really weird currently. It just single time mangles all the existing words. But the lexicon is not immutable, and after the mangling the best you can do to evolve the new-added words is evolving each manually, I believe. And if the evolution is significant to my conlang, the app makes me use external tools which is not very convenient. It would be nice if you made the tool work the following way instead

• You write some evolution rules. All the words change, but their original forms are saved somewhere. You can view the original form and the evolution steps, if you click some button in the lexicon with a word selected
• Every new added word automatically undergoes the changes and its original form is saved too
• When you add or remove an evolution rule, all the words' final forms get recalculated

[DraqueT]

Thanks for this suggestion! Currently, the evolution tool change the values of existing words rather than adding new ones, as you said. I am going to have to put some thought into the best way to improve the functionality here. Ultimately I don't want to have a situation where there is clutter, but your use case also makes sense.

Let me know if this would be useful: A checkbox that makes evolution additive. Additionally, it would automatically populate the newly created words with their root word as etymological parents.

[ItzShiney]

I'd like to clarify what I mean with these screenshots

First we have some words We add some evolution rules And we see all the words changed But in the etymology tab we can still see the original word and all the steps of evolution Then we remove the nin -> m: rule And the nind͡ʒin word returned to its state before the nin -> m: change And if we add another word, say reine, it immediately transforms to ɣeine (and can be reverted too)

[DraqueT]

Thank you for the detailed bug report with screenshots! I see exactly what you were talking about now.

[ItzShiney]

It's not a bug, but a feature request. These screenshots were photoshopped to portrait what the feature would look like

[DraqueT]

Sorry for the misunderstanding there, I need to slow down when I read these sometimes.

Anyhow, it has been suggested by a few other users that I replace the system altogether, which I am leaning toward, as a heads up. Currently exploring whether the author of Lexurgy would mind me using their designs/logic.

[SpartanCreeper]

maybe the etymology tree can also show sementic shifts?