French sentences generator
(2018 BETA version)This generator outputs random french sentences on demand, with special care to grammar and syntax. Its core principle is based on the very method invented long ago by surrealists, "le cadavre exquis" (english for "exquisite corpse"). Extremely strict about grammar, this tool is however as meaningful as the next bag of rocks, and we're soon expected to land in Nonsenseville. Which is the point. Mystic and ominous at times, alternatively truthful or goofy, the sentences can reach a wide range of registers, places, people and actions, in an ever-renewed fun chaos. There are many other sentence generators out there on the web, but few in french, and this one takes pride in being the most generic, rich and diverse of these! Mad linguists, experimental poets, semantics anarchists, or just sillyness enthousiasts, this toy has been made for you!
(click any sentence to copy it to clipboard)
Polls generator
(BETA version)Here you can generate random (french) "opinion polls".
The image is provided by the Google Chart API.
( Accents are omitted on purpose to avoid encryption problems )
How does it work?
What's an "exquisite corpse"?
The "exquisite corpse" is a literary game for a tableful of players, where sentences are formed collectively, each person writing a word without knowing what the others wrote.
Originally, this was a collaborative game with numerous variants (drawings, for example), but the literary version has arguably been the most popular to this day (see Wikipedia for more details). One intent behind this process was to produce sentences that noone had ever thought or imagined, which is technically accurate since no "one" in particular comes up with the whole sentence. Without a unique controling mind, it can go any direction, it can say anything.
The present generator is offering a way to power things up a bit thanks to the combination frenzy computers are capable of. Let's see how.
Generate a structure
Each sentence has a grammatical structure. One of the most common, often heard in everyday life, is "subject verb object". With a fairly more diverse range of actions (verbs, verb types) and complements (objects, places, times, agents, ...), one can quickly conceive a high number of potential structures for a sentence.
So we're at first step! The program generates a structure, which at this point is nothing more than a series of empty boxes, for example :
To have a look at this very step when you generate sentences, unfold the options panel!
Draw words in the dictionnary
"Dictionnary" sounds quite pompous, but it's nothing more than a handful of enriched lists, classed by types. For each box in the structure, the generator will fetch a word at random in the matching list and store it.
Dictionary (raw code) ORIf you've taken a look at the lists in raw code, you might have noticed strange gibberish characters trailing after most of the words ( "aimer#1" ). These are the words metadata, allowing at execution to decide when logic is useless, which is often the case with human languages, all full of arbitrary rules, with of course a lot of exceptions to these. Which genre is this noun? (yes, french language is making things a bit harder here, granted) How should this verb be conjugated? No way to infer that.
Assemble the sentence
So... is it over, then? No. We've got all the words, in order, but one crucial step is still missing, it's a little touch of finishing :
- Determine the time of the sentence (from such elements if any, or else at random)
- Apply the proper conjugation type and time to the verb
- Apply word crunchings and bindings
( "de le" = "du" , "je [word begining with a vowel]" = "j'" and many others ) - Capitalize and ponctuate
More information about this?
Two solutions :
1) Take a look at the source code directly! All is freely accessible, non-obfuscated in the Javascript code of the page for those who find interest in these things ( fonctions ).
2) Ask Romain >>> romain.valeri@laposte.net
