Re:Ask HN: What are you working on?
by Karrot_Kream on Friday January 15, 2021 @03:11PM
(#25795706)
Very cool, thanks for sharing. Are there any plans for an Android app? Regardless, I have a lot of friends interested in linguistics while also being English speakers, and this looks super nifty.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on?
by joelvalleroy on Sunday January 17, 2021 @01:02AM
(#25808559)
I just downloaded it for my Android, it's on Google Play.
It shows word family trees in a visual layout. I made this because I'm really interested in how words relate to one another. For example "magnanimous" can be understood through its relatives "magnificent" and "unanimous"
Working on it has been both a blast and a slog (~6 years on & off). I used DL NLP (thanks fast.ai!) to convert written etymology paragraphs into a database of words and connections. The accuracy is roughly 99%. There are about 1.4M words and 1.3M word-pair-connections across 13k languages. The most interesting thing has been finding Proto-Indo-European roots, like "h₂enh₁", which is a 10k-year-old reconstructed word meaning "breath", that has about 1k modern day descendants ranging from "nose" to "anemone".
I'm just started making some revenue from sales of premium (to removes ads), which I'd like to grow. I'm also thinking of adding more visualizations to show interesting connections.
https://etymologyexplorer.com