Setup - The tadpole Sound Change Engine

Installing tadpole

Currently, tadpole is distributed as a commandline application. There are two main ways of getting the tadpole CLI:

Codeberg releases

Find the latest release on the Codeberg releases page. Download the archive for your operating system and unpack it.

Compiling from Source

The instructions here assume a POSIX shell because frankly i have no idea what microsoft is doing. Requires git and a Rust toolchain installed.

Clone the repository:

git clone https://codeberg.org/zhuriel/tadpole.git

Then compile in release mode:

cargo build --release -p tadpole_cli

This produces an executable in target/release/tadpole_cli. Building in release mode is preferred, as complex specifications can run slowly in debug builds.

You can also run tadpole CLI directly from cargo using cargo run instead of cargo build.

Running tadpole

In either case, tadpole CLI is a standalone executable with no further prerequisites. To use it, you first need to set up input files:

Specification: a .tp file containing sound change rules. The rest of this tutorial goes into detail on how to write these.
Input Words: a text file containing one input word per line.

You can also provide input words in other ways, but this tutorial will only cover file input for now.

Once you have the input files prepared, tadpole CLI can be executed with the following command:

tadpole_cli spec.tp --infile inputs.txt --outfile outputs.txt

This will read the specification at spec.tp and apply it to the words listed in inputs.txt, writing the results to outputs.txt.

Alternative Ways of Running tadpole

The lexicon management tool Lexicanter integrates tadpole into its orthography and sound change system and can be an easy way of experimenting with the engine if you aren’t used to command line interfaces.