Word Etymologies

General Notes

This project was made to familiarize myself with Haskell as a web application language and Vue.js. The goal is to display the 1000 most common words in the English language (based on https://gist.github.com/deekayen/4148741), finding their language(s) of origin (based on https://www.etymonline.com/), get translations from English to those languages using Google Translate.

Problems that arose during project:

1. The list of words used had duplicates and did not include parts of speech so translation was not exact in that regard
2. I am only familiar with German and French, so the Latin translations especially are very reliant on Google search results
3. If I were to redo the lookup/translation process I would use the 1000 most common English nouns as there is less ambiguity of meaning in a word that represents a noun

Other notes:

• Words where the language of origin is marked as English are if it appeared first in Old English, was directly from Proto-Germanic, or was from a regional English language such as Kentish/Saxon.
• Using etymonline.com I assumed that when it says from French, from Latin from Greek that they were loaned by each language in sequence unless it says from both x and y.
• The API shows words from the language they directly came from, and the first example of that word. E.g. 'cotton' comes from French 'coton' which originally comes from Arabic 'qatn' so to speak.

Disclaimer: I am a language hobbyist and do not make any authoritative linguistic claims

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Stack

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Haskell

• Haskell2010
• Framework: Spock
• Build tool: Stack

JS

• Framework: Vue.js

Databases

• Sqlite3

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Running a local instance

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Requirements

• Haskell2010
• Sqlite3

Setup Dev Environment (OS X)

1. Check out latest version of master branch

git pull https://github.com/agannon/word-etymology
cd word-etymology
git checkout master

2. Install Stack

curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh

3. Build app

cd word-etymology
stack ghci
main

main will call Main.hs and compile the app, instantiate the database and run the server on port 8080. When that finishes, exit using Ctrl-C

4. Populate Database In the ghci

contents <- readFile "data/1000_most_common_words.csv"
parsed = parseData contents
importData parsed "api.db"

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Short API Guide

To view api (get only): run main in ghci and go to localhost:8080/api/words/

Currently supported searches are by database primary key: 8080/api/words/1,

and 'LIKE' partial matcher in SQL 8080/api/words?langBranch=%german%

Current key search words are: 'langBranch', 'originLang', 'langPath', and 'branchLang' Which are defined in Main.hs

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How to view completed app

Run main in ghci and go to localhost:8080/home/ Highcharts.js pie chart will be visible with options to display either the origin language or origin language branch, and with options to filter based on origin language/branch and path to English

Below that is a paginated table detailing all the fields retrieved by the api. Sortable in each column except 'Path to English'

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Possible Next Steps

1. Refactor JS out of views/home.html into a Vue single file
2. Refactor Main.hs to move importer functions to another module
3. Update JS sorters to account for diacritics

The app is complete as far as I am concerned but may make improvements