Sentences

randSentence writes a whole statement rather than a name or a handle: a subject, and something said about it. This page is how it decides what may stand where. For the options themselves, see the reference page.

How the verb picks the nouns

What keeps the words of one sentence together is the verb. Every verb states which kinds of noun can do it, and, when it is transitive, which kinds it can be done to. The nouns are then drawn from those alone.

So 여우가 사과를 먹는다 is a sentence the generator can build and 여우가 철학을 먹는다 is not: 먹는다 accepts something edible and nothing else.

No noun carries a tag for this. The twenty-nine themes already say what a word is, so each theme maps to one noun class, the same way in every language:

Class	Themes
creature	animal, myth
person	job, person
plant	plant
edible	food, drink
thing	object, tool, clothing, product, gem, music, toy, furniture
vehicle	vehicle
place	place, nature, space
event	weather, sport, time, sound
idea	concept, emotion, finance, tech, color
body	body

A verb that says creature and person can be done by a lion and by a locksmith, and by nothing else. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why the sentences read as sentences rather than as filled-in templates.

Where a class is too wide, a group narrows it to themes on either side of the verb. eat takes food and drink takes drink, though both are edible; 익는다 is a thing food does and 울린다 a thing music does, though a soup and a song are both edible and thing to the classes. A theme narrowed out of one group is always accepted by another of the same field, so nothing loses its verbs — a song stopped swaying and started ringing.

Below the theme, a noun may carry a trait: a language lists which of its nouns fly, swim or crawl, and a verb asks for one or rules one out. 날아오른다 takes a flier, 헤엄친다 a swimmer, and 달린다 takes anything that neither swims nor crawls — so a sparrow takes off, a mackerel swims, a snake crawls, and a lion, which is listed nowhere, runs. Every language lists its own: the heron flew, der Basilisk kriecht, el sapo nada. The lists name the exceptions and nothing else, and every noun keeps a verb in every field its kind has. One trait takes everything away: a word of a creature theme that is no creature — a spell, a rune, an amulet, 마력 — is lifeless, and a sentence about a myth is about the dragons and the elves, never the charm chooses. Another takes a noun out of the places: a word of the place class that is no place — a wave, a comet, a lightyear — is placeless, so a sentence happens in a forest or on a moon and never in the lightyear. A verb may ask the same of its object: in English sips takes a liquid, chews takes none, and roasts and slices take something raw, so a curry is simmered and a steak is grilled, and nobody chews a syrup.

A place takes the preposition it takes. Every English place frame writes in, and a language may list where that is the wrong word: on the balcony, at the market, under the sky. A place listed nowhere keeps the frame's own.

It is not a promise that every sentence means something. A lion can bake a pudding here, and an ocarina can glitter at dusk. What the classes rule out is the sentence that does not parse as a thought at all.

The shapes each language declares

Every language writes out the shapes its own grammar allows, in its own word order, with the particle or preposition each phrase needs. Korean closes on its verb, English puts it second, and Chinese frames the action before it:

Language	A sentence
Korean	검은 고양이가 숲에서 잠잔다.
Japanese	ハンバーガーが暗礁で冷める。
Chinese	巨乌贼又品尝朱红椰汁。
English	The angler cleans the towel in the ivory balcony.
German	Im Frühling blüht eine Chrysantheme noch.

Two consequences follow.

First, a language declares only what it can write correctly. German has no shape with an object and Russian none with a place, because both would put the noun in a case its own ending has to change for, and the pools hold one form of each word. A request neither can answer falls back to the closest shape they do have, and with no language the ones that can answer are preferred.

Second, a particle belongs to the phrase rather than to the sentence. Korean picks between 가 and 이 by whether the word in front of it closes on a consonant, so 사자가 and 사슴이 come out right without either particle being stored twice. Italian picks between l', lo and il by the sound the noun opens on. German writes its verb second, so a shape that opens on a time puts the subject behind it: Am Morgen schläft ein Wolf.

Length and the shape

minLength and maxLength bound the whole sentence, punctuation included. The shapes that cannot land inside the range are dropped first, and each phrase is then drawn against the room left once the phrases behind it have reserved their shortest.

So a narrow range drops a modifier rather than truncating a word, and a wide one puts modifiers back. sentenceLengthRange reports what a language can produce with no bounds at all.

shape is the same idea in coarser units, counting phrases rather than characters. It is usually what a caller means by a short or a long sentence.

What realism reaches

realism decides where the words come from. At 'invented' the nouns and modifiers are built from the language's own sounds, and the grammar around them does not move: the particles, the articles, the agreement and the shapes are the language's at every level.

So the vocabulary of 수줍은 노오가 안개 파저멜을 챙긴다. is not Korean, while its grammar is.

What a paragraph follows

A result of more than one sentence follows a story, and a story is a list of steps. Each step names what the hero does, or what is true of them, and what has to hold before it: eat needs the hero to be holding something, go needs them awake and leaves them away from home, arrive brings them back. A planner walks the steps against those conditions, keeps the ones the story cannot do without, fills the remaining sentences with the optional ones, and drops a step that would contradict what came before it.

So 여우가 시장으로 갔다. 사과를 샀다. 집에 들어와서 사과를 먹었다. is a story the generator can tell and 여우가 사과를 먹었다. 사과를 샀다. is not: nobody eats what they have not yet got.

Three things follow from a step being a step rather than a sentence. The verb of each sentence is drawn from the field the step names, buy, eat, arrive, so the sentence says what the step says. The nouns a step puts on the page, the thing and the place, are pinned into every step after it. And two neighbouring steps may be written as one sentence, joined the way the language joins two clauses, where the range has room for both.

randSentence describes the stories, and tense on the same page is what a story is told in.

Where a sentence differs from a nickname

randNickname puts words beside each other; a sentence says something about one of them. Three things follow:

• A nickname runs its words together on purpose (멋진사자); a sentence writes the spaces the language writes.
• A nickname has no verb, so it never has to agree with anything. A sentence's predicate does.
• randNickname takes a wordSeparator, because a handle is a string somebody types. A sentence has none — the spacing is the language's.

They share the pools, and nothing else.

See also

• randSentence — every option, written out.
• sentenceLengthRange — the range the bounds default to.
• Nicknames — the other generator built on the same words.