1.2 KiB
org-conlang design
Representing Dictionaries in org-mode
The way I have always been writing dictionaries in org-mode was to write a list of words in a dedicated heading in their language’s dedicated file. But I believe this is not how it should be done. Instead, only one file should act as my database in which I will store as many words as needed.
The location of the dictionary must be presented with
Word links
An issue I was facing when working on the initial drafts of
org-conlang was how to link two words together. The answer:
ol-conlang. Words can be first categorized by language, and then they
can be stored individually. This would make URIs look something like
language/word. This is necessary in case two languages both have a
word spelled the same way, such as English and Mbabaram dog — which
funnily enough both mean the same thing.
To specify to org-mode these are custom links, they need to have a
dedicated prefix, conlang. To make it more cohesive, I decided to
separate the name of the language and the word itself with a colon as
well. Thus, the link towards the English word dog is
[[conlang:english:dog]].