Bauske

(Re)Lojban libraries and tools for phonology, morphology, and computational linguistics

Bauske is a growing laboratory for asking how the language's sounds and word structures work, and what we can make with them. It began with a poetic question: can relationships between sounds offer a richer palette for poetry and song? The aim is reusable Rust tools that make such questions inspectable and testable.

Current proof of concept

The first foundation is phonological:

• An alphabet and diphthong inventory tied to a pinned Relojban grammar snapshot.
• Explicit articulatory features and explainable, configurable segment comparisons.
• Word and consonant-cluster inspection, written nuclei, syllabification, stress, and pronunciation-realization planning, with unresolved cases reported explicitly.
• A CLI, bauske, for exploring these analyses.

Version 0.2.0 adds the bauske umbrella library, exposing the phonology API as bauske::phonology, and renames the CLI from relojban to bauske. Its build helpers install development binaries to a configurable directory, and CI checks the workspace on Linux and macOS. These changes do not alter the linguistic model.

The distance model currently uses categorical articulatory mismatches within consonants or within vowels. It is not a perceptually calibrated similarity measure or a whole-word rhyme score. Morphology and broader computational linguistics are future directions.

Package	Role
bauske	Umbrella library re-exporting phonology, with links to all component crates
bauske-phonology	Inventory, features, comparisons, and prosody
bauske-cli	The bauske executable and its command interface

Try it

Use Rust 1.98.0 or newer. Install the published CLI with:

cargo +1.98.0 install bauske-cli --version 0.2.0 --locked
bauske inventory

For a Rust library, add bauske = "0.2.0" to your dependencies and use bauske::phonology. The umbrella crate README includes an example and links to each component's package and API docs.

From a source checkout:

cargo +1.98.0 test --locked --workspace
cargo +1.98.0 run --locked -p bauske-cli -- inventory
cargo +1.98.0 run --locked -p bauske-cli -- compare p b
cargo +1.98.0 run --locked -p bauske-cli -- prosody klama --kind brivla

Vlajmaji uses this phonological foundation for dictionary searches. The repositories currently build together as sibling checkouts; Bauske also builds on its own.

Where this is going

We want to investigate phonological feature spaces, test sound-similarity models, and develop tools for morphology, poetic structure, and musical text setting. Source claims, modelling choices, and empirical findings will remain distinct as that work grows.

The workspace is on the 0.3.0 development cycle; its APIs remain experimental. The latest published release is 0.2.0.

Development and releases

Run make help for build, test, lint, documentation, and publishing targets. make check runs the core quality gates. The Make helpers require Bash 3.2 or newer and Git; Python is not needed. make test-tools runs the Bash tooling suite with disposable local Git remotes and a Cargo stub, without building Rust or accessing the network.

make build builds and copies bauske to ./bin; make build-release does the same for an optimized build. Set INSTALL_DIR=./local-bin to choose another destination. To copy an existing build, run make install (or make install MODE=release for release artifacts).

make planning sets up .worktrees/planning on the separate planning branch. It fetches an existing branch from origin, or creates and pushes an empty orphan branch if none exists. Later updates are fast-forward only; local planning work is preserved.

Use make publish-dry-run to verify the workspace packages and make publish to upload them to crates.io. The packaged crates include their own READMEs and licenses.

License

Apache License, Version 2.0